[pbhjpbhj]

Thanks for your informative response.

Actually, I think that just knowing English well one can see the same effect as knowing a few other languages - the etymologies of words being dispersed amongst Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Germanic and French origins (as a first pass, of course there's influence from many, many languages) makes it easy to see how many words can develop for the same thing, each having a subtle twist of meaning. Like the use in English of beef/cow for cooked meat vs. the animal.

The only words I know for a computer are computer (English derived from a name for a person who calculates values), ordinateur (French, origin is Latin to do with organising/ordering; close to English "ordinator"), cyfrifadur (sp? Welsh, origin is account-er; similar derivation as English), and rechner (German, a cognate with English "reckoner") ... but in these cases I think everyone normally uses just "computer" or a transliteration of it like in Kswahili ("kompyuta", don't quote me on that spelling!).

[sampo]

Well in addition to Finnish "tietokone" (data machine, or information machine), there is at least Swedish (also Norwegian) "datamaskin" (data machine), nowadays usually shortened to "datorn", and Turkish "bilgisayar" (information counter).

So form of "computer" seems to be the choice in a large number of languages, though.