"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet#TheWeb#WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics

Reminds me of the localization efforts on Mozilla's Firefox OS several years ago.

"Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven."

https://archive.is/2025.01.09-014218/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#technology #language #linguistics #translation #localization

Schools do not teach #linguistics. I got out of school knowing about the theory of relativity, genetic recombination and chemical structure. All I was ever taught about language is that there are lots of irregular verbs in French and you have to learn the conjugations by heart because it is important to speak proper.

Which could be seen as anti-linguistics at its peak. /5

So just for clarification, #linguistics is the science of language. And like any other science, it builds models of its object of study by gathering observations, building theories and evaluating such theories. Depending on the strand of linguistics involved, models can be expressed in various ways, including formal logic and mathematical representations. /3