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Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Interesting observation, a language that hasn't evolved (due to lack of demand) to include scientific terms. Speaking zero Welsh I wonder if the choice for "density functional theory" was specifically chosen to sound "Welsh" instead of going for Anglicisation.

Take Romanian, the word for "cheese" goes all the way back to Dacians, but there was no "density functional theory" until rather recently so that was borrowed as "densitate functionala teoretica". Except for declination, basically the foreign words... which might actually be French: "la théorie fonctionnelle de la densité".

I wonder about the computer-related terms in Welsh: copied ad-litteram or adapted? Like English: "software", French-adapted: "douce-article". English: "mouse", French: "souris". Well.. funk me, the French actually say "la souris d'ordinateur"! :)

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> density functional theory

The origin of all three words is Latin: density from densitas, functional from functiō, theory from theōria.

Both Romanian and French are Romance languages, i.e. their origin is Latin, and English (a Germanic language) also has strong Latin and French influences, mostly borrowed words like these.

There's a bunch of similar cases, from memory. Hebrew was rekindled in 1940-1950s as a national language for Israel after centuries of mostly being a religious language - needed new words.

Czech, similarly, regained popularity in the nationalist movement of 19th century and invented a bunch of words for concepts introduced in the meantime. To a native Polish speaker, it still sounds very anachronistic.

Navajo code speakers of WWII needed terms for "battleship" and "dive bomber" etc and came up with delightful concepts like "fire canoe" etc.

> “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion”

Each of those three words was already a Welsh word - clearly Welsh already has words meaning “density”, “function”, and “theory” - so it seems the innovation is combining them in a new sense rather than making up new words as such.

Indeed, and in a typically Welsh order, which puts the noun "damcaniaeth" (= "theory") first, followed by the adjectives.

I think the innovation is in finding the appropriate Welsh words to represent the concepts involved. I'd imagine that would be easy in many cases, but there may be other scenarios where several words could be used to mean the same concept, and the work is in choosing the most appropriate.

I mean, it happens in software jargon too: most of us have had to name objects <XYZ>Manager/Handler/Executor/Service/etc.

(it's "[density functional] theory" so it would be théorie de la fonctionnelle de la densité, "theory of the density functional", not "functional theory of density")

There's a line in a Bill Bryson book about watching Welsh TV, and noticing they used the english term "dirty weekend", as (allegedly?) the Welsh don't have the concept

Always important to note that Bill Bryson has no actual training in linguistics, he’s a journalist that has just turned his hand to whatever subject would pay. His book about language The Mother Tongue has a factual error or misunderstanding on nearly every single page.

What's a dirty weekend?

A couple staying away at a hotel. If they already have kids, the kids are definitely not going.

It’s a semi common term in the UK and would be used casually among friends and close workmates to indicate a short break with just you and your partner.

Ah that explains it, neither heard it in the US or Canada, but I'm not too well versed in British English.

> "douce-article"

Never seen that, I'm only aware of "logiciel" for software.

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