…
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 ПИТОН 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.
···
On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 11:53 AM, Phil Tomson wrote:
