Meaningful short names

I take the opposite view.

"ln" isn't "link". It's ln. My brain has particular concepts bound onto the command 'ln', which are not the same as the concepts for 'link' in general use.

"grep" comes for Global search, for a Regular Expression, and Print it. Grep doesn't 'find'. It PRINTS occurrences of a regular expression (not just a string), and continues globally rather than stopping at the first occurrence.

Another advantage is precision. "I did ln -s" is more precise than "I linked the file". "I grepped the file" is more precise about what I did than "I found the file" or "I searched the file".

Re-using English words directly - which already have rather broad and fuzzy semantics - in a domain that is a) more precisely defined than English b) not always consistent with the English meaning and c) international is not a good idea imho.

Heck, even ln/cp/grep etc are already ambiguous enough as it is! Depending on platform, UNIX commands may involve subtly different semantics (e.g. due to things like HFS+ filesystem data fork vs ext3 vs ZFS copy-on-write). Or different grammar. Quick example: cp dirname -rf works in linux, but not in BSD since you need to place options first in BSD.

Having picked up bits of some foreign languages, I've also found that my brain learns the correct meanings of words most easily when they are similar but not the same as English.

When the words are the same in two languages, my brain keeps its binding to the English meaning, and I tend to not to remember the subtleties of using it in the foreign sense.

When the words are completely different, I sometimes struggle to remember the new word. [I sometimes cheat and pretend I'm learning a new word of English. Somehow, that helps]

When the word is very similar but subtly different (for example, Geomatikk in Norwegian vs Geomatics in English, it's a) easy to remember the word and b) easy to remember any subtle differences in meaning.

So I believe the unix way is the right way.