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On 18/08/2011 11.02, Philippe Lhoste wrote:
On 17/08/2011 12:20, Lee Hickey wrote:And one minor point - you might want to reconsider the name. When I, as a native English speaker, read it, I read it as offal. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offal)I think it is hard to come with a name that hasn't a negative sense in one language or the other... :-)
Very true! :-)
For example, to remain on this vein, if you name your software Trip, I might complain it sounds too much like French's "tripes", which means guts (also in the culinary sense). Perhaps one should make a phonetic dictionary of negative (short) words (crap, hell, etc.) in most major languages... But given the number of argot synonyms of such words, it would be a big work! ^_^'
Probably a battle lost in advance. First it would be an hell in itself to define what is a "major language" (number of people speaking it in the world? in the developer community? in a specific scientific field? political "relevance"? - ugh! - a cultural thorny issue and a real can of worms! :-)
BTW, it may even be a feat technically (from a linguistic POV, I mean). For example, there are very common words in English which, *when spoken*, sound similar to very "unpolite" words in Italian ("cool" and "cats" are two of them).
I wonder how many English words mean something ugly in languages with a different origin (i.e. non-indoeuropean), say, Chinese, Japanese or Corean!
cheers. -- Lorenzo