Re: Natural language of monks.

Probably would have been an easy guess from my nick.. but in order not to keep you in suspence, I can talk Russian/Ukrainian and pretty much understand any other Slavic language (Polish, Belorus, etc). I much prefer conversing in English however.

Despite of the fact that my first language is Russian, I had a feel for English since the early days of my attachement to computers. The way I learned English is by reading a lot of technical articles and books written in, well, English :). Frankly, I find it exceedingly hard to discuss matters related to computers/software in my native language ;/. Many of the terms, albeit borrowed from English, are unintuitive and sound foreign/weird to me.

_____________________
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Comment on Re: Natural language of monks.

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Re^2: Natural language of monks. (ugly computer talk in foreign languages) by Aristotle (Chancellor) on May 13, 2003 at 13:49 UTC
I know that feeling. Talking about computers in German or English is no problem, but then they’re both Latin-derived/influenced languages with a lot of very similar vocabulary. Greek is another beast altogether, and talking about computers in Greek feels extremly odd as you end up using an English term for about every other noun. It gets even worse for verbs because they can’t be inflected, so one resorts to using “make” and the English verb’s infinitive – therefore sentences end up with constructs sounding roughly like “make click the mouse on the button” or “make copy the file to the other disk” (italics for English terms used verbatim). Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]

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Re^2: Natural language of monks. (ugly computer talk in foreign languages)
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on May 13, 2003 at 13:49 UTC

I know that feeling. Talking about computers in German or English is no problem, but then they’re both Latin-derived/influenced languages with a lot of very similar vocabulary. Greek is another beast altogether, and talking about computers in Greek feels extremly odd as you end up using an English term for about every other noun. It gets even worse for verbs because they can’t be inflected, so one resorts to using “make” and the English verb’s infinitive – therefore sentences end up with constructs sounding roughly like “make click the mouse on the button” or “make copy the file to the other disk” (italics for English terms used verbatim).

Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]