Re:Bitoduc: A French dictionnary for CS related words
by BrandoElFollito on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:21AM
(#23986955)
Ordiner is what a bishop does. Actually, in a Larousse from the 50's, ordinateur was another waybto call a bishop (the one who ordinates).
Story time. During the 80's I was part of a jury for a competition in French for young foreigners. Their mother tongue cold not be French, and neither could the language of the country.
The theme of the dissertation was more or less "how are computers ("ordinateurs") changing contemporary life"
A Polish girl had an old dictionary where ordinateur = bishop.
She wrote a masterpiece on current religion affairs and got an extra price for the tough balancing on the "politics vd life vs religion" rope.
Re:Bitoduc: A French dictionnary for CS related words
by mumblemumble on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @10:43AM
(#23987184)
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur gives a decent account of the etymology.
Given that we're talking about something IBM did in 1955, I can accept putting things in order as being the function that the word focuses on, rather than calculation.
That word comes from "ordiner", something the monks do. A computer is fundamentally more about calculus (computare) than sorting or order (ordinare).
That's about when the Bitoduc foundation was launched. bitoduc.fr is not satire, it was built to avoid another "ordinateur"; we believe in bottom-up word creation.