Re: Removed forward slash?

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> écrit:

> > P.S. - By the way, the French readers on this list might be amused
> > to know that `forward slash' is sometimes translated by `cotice' and
> > `backslash' by `contre-cotice'

> Eh.  Unfortunately, Croatian doesn't have a single name for slash and
> backslash.  The words, when not simply borrowed from English, as Croatian
> hackers often do, are normally translated as the Croatian equivalent
> of "slanted line (dash)" and "reverse slanted line (dash)".  That's
> two and three words for slash and backslash, respectively.  :-(

Before `cotice' and `contre-cotice', I used to hear `barre oblique' or
`barre oblique renversée', which is so long to pronounce that _even_
I do not hesitate to say `slash' and `backslash'.  It is not a very good
thing to use words like `cotice' when nobody knows what they are, using
them will look somewhat pedant for quite a while.

But such things pass.  I remember when `logiciel' and `matériel' were
introduced to translate `software' and `hardware', how pedant they were
sounding.  The closest opponents were `mentaille' and `quincaille',
appearing equally debatable at the time, but which would look utterly
ridiculous nowadays.  What is pedant or not depends on moving fashion.

MIME, PGP, Unicode, ISO 8601, and a lot of other things, have similar
histories.  Pedant one day, rather normal the other.  Things take time...

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard