OT: was Re: Ruby and Python related in Cyrillic ;-)

On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 11:53 AM, Phil Tomson wrote:

> ...
> Don't worry, no offense taken... my joke was rather obscure and 
> probably
> didn't translate well...

It was OK, I heard worse ;-)

> .....
> Interesting, so you pretty much have to know English to know how to say
> them.  Well, I suppose you pretty much have to know English to program 
> in
> them as well...

In Russian schools students are taught  English, German or French, 
sometimes Spanish, since early years. So people in general are aware of 
Latin pronunciation and differences from Cyrillic. As for programming, 
usually knowing English to some extend is a must. However in many cases 
it is limited to knowing the meaning of common words, not necessarily 
how to pronounce them.

I still think that it is more of a drawback for a programming language 
to have similarity with one's native language. In case it has (like 
with English), it is more difficult, in my opinion, to achieve 
necessary abstraction level for algorithmic exercises. I remember 
looking at a COBOL program (COBOL is the only language I know that have 
Russian implementation with all keywords translated). In the very least 
it was perceived as funny and awkward. Even now when I know English 
pretty well (I hope), I never think of keywords (like for, while, if, 
do, etc.) literally, rather as mathematical notations. And it helps a 
lot (again, IMHO).

>
> So if you see 'Python' in a Russian document wouldn't your first
> inclination (if Russian is your native language) be to pronounce it
> something like 'Roo' as the first syllable?  Like as a native English

I would rather say "Pee". You spot non-cyrillic characters at once and 
usually switch to latin pronunciation right away (it depends greatly on 
the context). However, for me even now it takes some effort (split of a 
second usually) to pronounce 'y' in Python as [ai], it is more natural 
to make it sound like 'ee'. That's maybe because Python (as snake) 
spells 韈in Russian (Peet'on).

> speaker my first inclination at seeing: Pycc would be to pronounce it 
> as
> 'piess' whereas in Russian it would be pronounced 'roos'.
>
> I took a semester of Russian at community college and one of the first
> things you have to get is that some letters that look familiar to you
> (they exist in the English alphabet) have been 'overloaded' with 
> different
> phonemes (P->R, y->oo, B->V, etc.) I suspect the same happens for 
> Russians
> learning English.

Somehow, I got through this part easily. You usually switch to a 
different set of rules, and that's it. Sometimes I experience quite the 
opposite: I see a stand-alone Russian word (like PEKA -- river, or 
BETKA -- branch), but try to interpret it as English and wondering what 
the hack it means ;-)

Gennady.