[Kyrio]

I had absolutely no doubt that this was satire when I was reading it; for heaven's sake, the site is called bitoduc, their proposal for pipeline based on the French word for an oil pipeline (oléoduc), which definitely wouldn't be used by anyone here given how much it sounds like you're talking about a duke's genitals. But the site also lists genuine and common translations, and it seems most people in this comment section are criticizing it for containing weird, unused ones. I think it's the point; it's mocking the French language purists (often from Quebec, actually) who come up with funny-sounding, unidiomatic translations for English terms that people have already adopted.

On a side note, I love that we came up with our own word for computer ("ordinateur"), from a suggestion by an IBM employee's former humanities teacher, and I wish we could still do that instead of using English words or some weird transliteration of them. But it's a different time now, one when communication is instantaneous, computer science is discussed on the Web rather than in universities, and words become commonplace far before anyone can introduce a recommended translation. English is concise and prone to imagery, which means new concepts can often get accurate one-word descriptions which are more likely to stick than a three-word French equivalent.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> English is concise and prone to imagery, which means new concepts can often get accurate one-word descriptions which are more likely to stick than a three-word French equivalent.

English is English. Not everyobody is a native English speaker. For example, I'm a Greek speaker and very sorry that I've spoken mostly English in the last 15 years of my life while studying, living and working in the UK. I miss Greek. I like English, I speak it fluently (as I speak French fluently and Italian er, not fluently) but my language is Greek and there will never be a language that is mine, other than Greek.

So I want to speak about my work and about my studies and my interests in Greek to my Greek friends and my Greek family, when I go back home for the holidays etc. I hate it that everyone asks me what I do (I study for a PhD) and I have to struggle to translate the things I study from English to Greek, when there are no real Greek terms for what I'm trying to say and when all the translations feel wooden and artificial on my tongue.

While the list in the article is (mostly, apparently) a joke, while translating English terms of trade and science to other languages often yields ridiculous results, it is a slap in the face to be told that "English is a better language for this kind of thing than your languages". My language is mine, dammit. When I speak it, it sounds better than yours. But maybe English sounds better than Greek when you speak it? Well, I wouldn't take either observation as evidence that one language is better than the other- not for describing new concepts concisely, not for anything. That's just a misunderstanding of how human languages work.

And anyway, this bit: "English is concise and prone to imagery" is the hubris of someone who was never, as a child, subjected to the horror of reading Balzac. You want imagery? Try Le Rouge et Le Noir.

Or maybe don't try it. I'm not a fan. But don't say such extremely tone deaf things with such self-assurance, please.

Edit: Or do say them. I'm not trying to tell you what to say. I'm just protesting. Because this is the internets.

[p0nce]

Actually one of the origins of bitoduc.fr was reading a self-satisfying text about how genious the word "ordinateur" was, and how thankful we french should be that the term was invented.

That word comes from "ordiner", something the monks do. A computer is fundamentally more about calculus (computare) than sorting or order (ordinare).

That's about when the Bitoduc foundation was launched. bitoduc.fr is not satire, it was built to avoid another "ordinateur"; we believe in bottom-up word creation.

[BrandoElFollito]

Ordiner is what a bishop does. Actually, in a Larousse from the 50's, ordinateur was another waybto call a bishop (the one who ordinates).

Story time. During the 80's I was part of a jury for a competition in French for young foreigners. Their mother tongue cold not be French, and neither could the language of the country.

The theme of the dissertation was more or less "how are computers ("ordinateurs") changing contemporary life"

A Polish girl had an old dictionary where ordinateur = bishop.

She wrote a masterpiece on current religion affairs and got an extra price for the tough balancing on the "politics vd life vs religion" rope.

[mumblemumble]

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur gives a decent account of the etymology.

Given that we're talking about something IBM did in 1955, I can accept putting things in order as being the function that the word focuses on, rather than calculation.

[abrowne]

“Ordinateur” is so much better than “computer”! As Wiktionary puts it

> From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”).

> In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret […] who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur#Etymology

[aspyct]

Funny you should say that. I speak French, and always thought Computer was better than Ordinateur (and yes, it's ordinatEur, it's not a dinosaur :D )

[abrowne]

Thanks for catching my typo. Fixed now.

I guess the grass is always greener? And I come from a humanities background, so the information-organizing and communication uses of computer interest me the most. I can see someone from a more math-focused background preferring "computer" instead.

[mumblemumble]

Though sadly, the only Canadian term in common usage that I genuinely wish would spread to the rest of the word, "balado", only shows up here as a misspelling of the full version, "baladodiffusion", which nobody ever actually uses.

"Podcast" is a great term in English, but it sounds more like a clumsy, drunken orgy of consonants to me when dropped into the middle of a French sentence.

[jgalar]

We have very different experiences; I hear baladodiffusion (or balado) very often in Montreal.

[aarroyoc]

Spanish also has "ordenador", which is the most common way to refer to a computer in Spain (I think in Hispanic America, "computador"/"computadora" is used more often but in Spain it feels like something old).

[bitwize]

One legend surrounding the name of the Coq programming language is that there was another theorem prover called Bit -- a word that, in French, sounds a lot like bitte. So the French researchers behind Coq, in ironic tribute, named their theorem prover with a French word that soumds like an English word for the human anatomy part that bitte describes.

[B5C8ECB24DB47D1]

It's actually spelled bite ;)