[Haskell-cafe] German names for kinds and sorts

Yaakov Nemoy loupgaroublond at gmail.com
Mon Nov 14 00:37:52 CET 2011


I think you hit on something there in between the humorous rant.
German has a propensity to choose latin words and germanize them with
spelling and prononciation changes. Even if English speaking
Haskellers pick 'kind' to refer to just that, Phylus in German might
be a better translation. Now Dutch and other Germanic languages might
have more issues, since they like to translate these things into
native words where possible. Anyone know the Icelandic translation for
Type and Kind?

-Yaakov

(Disclaimer, not a native German, Dutch or Icelandic speaker.)

2011/11/13 Jerzy Karczmarczuk <jerzy.karczmarczuk at unicaen.fr>:
> First of all, my German is Worse than Cakes of my Grandmother...
>
> But I spent a big part of my life in France, and I witness a similar bedlam
> for years, especially because of the fact that English is a particular
> version of Norman French spoiled by the consumption of hot potatoes, and the
> modern, scientific French is English distorted by the abuse of the low
> quality wine, unable to dissolve the cholesterol  of the local cheese.
>
> Seriously, the French queue is tail in English (or vice-versa), and the
> English queue is file in French which in English means fichier in French.
> And you want to propagate the disease with terms like "Art", etc.?? If
> "kind" is "espèce", then "species" is what? (And avoid to translate "payer
> en espèces"...)
>
> Russians are good because of their linguistical désinvolture (no good
> English translation), they just adapted foreign words with the utmost
> cavalière attitude (as the English say, French don't). But Polish invented
> their own terminology, which means that when you publish a scientific book
> in Poland, you quarrel with the reviewers for weeks, believe me!
>
>
> So, even more seriously, I propose to use more often Latin and Greek.
>
> Genus, genera, for  ... ehm... je n'en sais rien, perhaps kind? ("Genesis"
> comes from it).
> Oh, no... This exists already in English, and is "genre" in French. Gattung
> in German pour varier.
>
> There have been attempts to use the word "phylum", phyla. Anybody knows what
> happened to it?
> (Help! In French it is "embranchement", which is horrible).
>
> Well, in biology we have "règne" (kingdom) (oder Reich, warum nicht?).
> Regnum.
>
> Sort?? Wonderful! This is a sort of word, whose semantic family cannot be
> really sorted. Especially with "sortir" in French. BTW, "to sort" in English
> is "trier" in French; "tri", "trie", "tree". Try everything...
>
> ==
>
> When some years ago we asked our students to write some reports in English,
> I thought I would spend some months in the Arkham Asylum, with Mr. E. Nygma,
> and others...
>
> Best regards.
>
> Jerzy Karczmarczuk
> Caen, Normandy, France
> (William the Conqueror started this mess here...).
>
>
>
>
>
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