Being French, I still find these names way better (as in clearer and more understandable for a foreigner) than the English ones. Why is ":" called a "colon"? That makes no sense!
Although, confusingly, I believe the English semicolon functions more similarly to the punctuation associated with a Greek/Latin colon.
I'd like to add that it is wrong to think about commas, semi-colons, etc. in terms of duration of a pause in the speech. These signs articulate written sentences' syntax, and it sometimes relate to pauses when read aloud, but it is not a bijection. When analysing recordings, J. Drillon (Traité de la ponctuation française) showed that the correlation is really weak.