On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 17:07:54 -0400, Scott Zahn wrote:

> This reminds me of something I was thinking about a while ago.  How do
> non-english speaking people learn to remember unix commands?  Most unix
> commands are abbreviated english words.  So if someone knows no english at
> all, how do they learn unix commands?  Rote memorization?  That seems like
> it would be extra difficult.  Sorry if this post is way off topic, it's
> just something that I've wondered about for a long time, but don't have
> any non-english speaking unix friends to ask.  Could someone on this list
> tell me?

I'd like to turn this question around.  I'm old enough to remember
programming languages that used Russian keywords &c (including
assemblers), but, fortunately, young enough to only actually have used
one such language (and thanks $deity it was *not* Russian COBOL).
Still I have a bunch of Russian books from 80s and 70s that describe a
number of homegrown languages and I have to say it's a pain for me to
read such a code.  B/c English is not my native language I don't have
any emotional reaction to abbreviations of English words like "insn",
"cntx", "rm" or "dcl".  And them being in a different script (latin
vs. cyrillic) also helps to treat them as just mnemonics.  OTOH, their
Russian counterparts always made me squirm b/c of the sheer ugliness
of their abbreviated^Wmutilated forms.  I wonder how you guys can bear
reading pages and pages of such a distortion of your native tongue.

Yes, this is *waaay* off-topic for this list ;).

SY, Uwe
-- 
uwe@ptc.spbu.ru                         |       Zu Grunde kommen
http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/            |       Ist zu Grunde gehen