| > If non-English languages are also considered, are there any where naming things is easier? Have to keep in mind that a "good" name maintains a balance between descriptiveness and brevity. As a native English speaker with a relatively very weak understanding of Chinese, I find Chinese names to be generally understandable and English names to be completely opaque. This is most pronounced when dealing with technical topics: For example, because I know essentially no Latin or Greek, a name like "Bilirubin" means absolutely nothing to me. Whereas the Chinese word, 膽紅素 (膽 - gall bladder, 紅 - red, 素 - essence), is actually something I can break down and have any idea at all what it is. Japanese is also generally better than English in this regard in my experience, but unfortunately it often borrows words from other languages. In this case, ビリルビン (birirubin), so it can be even more opaque than English. In the case of "functor", I also find the Chinese (函子) more obvious than the Japanese (関手) or English. |
If not too much to ask, can you please explain how those non-latin characters form the meaning for the word "functor"? In my native tongue (Turkish), we borrow the word "functor" without applying a translation to it, thus it becomes one of those things you simply memorize and move on.
Do these Chinese and Japanese words form a meaning similar to something like "function-izer" or "function+abler" or something else?