Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
by robocat on Sunday March 31, 2019 @11:20PM
(#19540176)
Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French?
Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages:
Re:The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked
by gonzus on Monday April 01, 2019 @05:57AM
(#19541818)
To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)
> From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”).
> In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter).
The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”.
Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur:
https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...