Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colanderman 1286 days ago
It's a mistranscription of the Esperanto word forĝejo, meaning "forge" (i.e. the place where forging happens).

But diacritic marks aren't optional in Esperanto, they change pronunciation and meaning. "Forgejo", which is pronounced with a hard "g" (IPA /g/), is a nonsense word which means something like "distant gay".

The correct transcription without diacritics would be "forghejo".

1 comments

Name is only inspired by esperanto, but no literal transcription.
I missed that they called this out specifically on the announcement page; I appreciate they acknowledge the source. Wonder why they didn't then go for the .io domain possibility with "Forgeio".
There's a controversy with regards to the .io TLD. Especially on the Fediverse people using this TLD are often reminded of this and discouraged to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy