tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Nov 18 14:21:52 2002
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Re: QeD De'wI' ngermey
> Cool, but in this case, even, the German appears to be idiomatic
> application of existing words as well. I've a feeling this will show
> through in most cases; the idioms created for computer science will be
> relatively consistently translated into local words, but which describe
> the same thing. You don't call a stack a stack, you call it a Stapel --
> but Stapel is German for "stack", no?
Right.
> It's an interesting thing; the idioms that are developed because of things
> like software engineering theory aren't like most idiomatic phrases that
> we've seen. The fact that we've extended the word "stack", for instance,
> doesn't result from our use of an unrelated word for alternate use (like
> our idiomatic use of "cool" to refer to things that are interesting,
> completely altering the meaning of the original). Do people in Germany
> use the German translation of the word "cool" to describe interesting
> things? I'm betting they don't -- which makes the idiomatic use of words
> for comp sci theory even more interesting, because the direct translations
> appear to have been used...
Right again. The German word for 'cool' is 'kühl', but we also use the
English word 'cool' in the sense you discribed, for refering to interesting
things, we don't use 'kühl'.
Greetz, QantoH