Comment by jagger11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagger11 | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm trying to get them to say "czypy"

You can try to interest "Rada Języka Polskiego" (Polish Language Council) into this topic. Just because we all know, every Polish speaker will follow their advice diligently :).

In early 90's, after the COCOM embargo on import of computers into former then Eastern Block had been lifted, there were initiatives to translate English-sounding word into something more native to Polish language.

An example of a word that badly needed such translation was 'interface', for which a proposed translation was 'międzymordzie' (literally: a thing between two faces) which sounded hilariously bad in Polish. There was another proposal to name 'computer mouse' as something even better, but I've forgotten the name since.

Fortunately, nobody followed, and 'computer mouse' is simply 'mysz' (mouse). I hear, that French had longer lasting successes with their translations.

> I hear, that French had longer lasting successes with their translations.

Kind of. Generally, ‶old″ words are consistently translated. For instance, we have souris for mouse (which is exactly the direct translation, because it conveys the same idea), ordinateur (which could be translated as ‶sorter/processor″) for computer, informatique (science of the information) for computer science, disquette (small disk) for floppy disk, logiciel for software, and so on.

However, newer ones (i.e. past ~1985) didn't catch so much, mostly because the official translation were awful and/or came years too late. For instance, CD-ROM is supposes to be cédérom, i.e. the straight phonetic transliteration – losing all meaning in the process; tablet is supposed to be ardoise numérique (digital slate) – evokes school, came years too late and was too long in comparison to the colloquial tablette; fouineur (snooper) for hacker (no comment...); cybermonnaie (cyber-money) for cryptocurrency – losing half of the semantic, and so on.

I heard the mouse was supposed to be called "manipulator stołokulotoczny" (manipulator with a ball rolling on the table - due to the way old style mice were designed).

The two Polish sentences every respectful Pole knows:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

And:

Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami.

I sure youtube will find you proper pronunciations.

Some called the mouse "gryzon" which means rodent, but that was very early days of computers in Poland - say 1990.

"gryzoń"

"Rodent" is occasionally used to reference the mouse in English hacker slang, as well. Example:

http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

I often say rodent when I am trying to encourage my younger colleagues to use the command line.

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