Falsehoods programmers believe about languages

[threeme2189@sh.itjust.works]

Arabic doesn't have a word for "yes".

(Yes) in Arabic is نعم pronounced as (Na'am) or ( Na ع m) & this is the word which most people use in all Arab countries . The Arabic dialect word for (Yes) is ايوة or ايوا pronounced as (Aywa)and also used by all Arabs.

[addie@feddit.uk]

Scottish Gaelic doesn't have 'yes' or 'no' - you answer with the positive or negative form of the verb used in the question.

http://www.gaidhliggachlatha.com/blog-mios-na-gaidhlig/how-to-say-yes-and-no-in-scottish-gaelic

[Guest]

@2xsaiko @TehPers there's other examples too. E.g. Thai has no spaces between words but spaces between phrases/sentences. However the spaces between phrases involve style choices similar to comma in English and many other Latin script writing systems. Also, Thai may have spaces around abbreviations special characters.

I'm quite familiar with Thai so that's close at hand but I guess it's the same in a lot of other writing systems based on Brahmic scripts.

[hddsx@lemmy.ca]

Jesus. I mistyped that horrendously to make a point about !0

I read my comment just now waking up and went wtf

[bizdelnick@lemmy.ml]

There are perfect guidelines on preparing translatable strings in the GNU gettext documentation.

[nostradavid@programming.dev]

Until you use exit codes, which flips the logic.

[vivendi@lemmy.zip]

Persian is a perfectly neutral language. Some westerners apparently struggle with understanding how we speak out language. We also don't have an equivalent to "The"

[laggykar@programming.dev]

It's not even that, there are multiple languages spoken in the same region. Webpages should just use the language the browser tells it to use.

[Guest]

Can they answer “not no”?

[schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de]

I think Latin doesn't really have words for yes and no.

[schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de]

yup I too remember getting YouTube ads in Hungarian when I was there as a tourist - despite not understanding Hungarian at all and watching videos only in other languages, they really ought to know that

[schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de]

There are languages that don't have the concept of "punctuation" at all.

[Guest]

Another European example is Finnish which has yes but not no.

No in Finnish is ei, similar to Estonian ei or Swedish nej.

[kissaki@programming.dev]

I hate when apps use my number formatting setting to determine display language - despite Windows having a display language as well. Even Qt does (did?) that.

[peoplebeproblems@midwest.social]

I had assumed the author didn't limit his statements to web browsers. If it's an application on a user's box, they should be using the language the OS provides.

In the case of less complex hardware, IoT or embedded devices with localization support, you would likely have another strategy if it doesn't have a setup process. For something without internet or GPS, you can't do this obviously. For something without a GUI, it's unlikely to have localization support without direct design consideration for it's destination.

[kissaki@programming.dev]

"splitting on end-of-sentence punctuation" would not split on 8.9 though!?

[sortekanin@feddit.dk]

Not sure about that one but the following one:

In each language, the words for yes and no never change, regardless of which question they are answering.

This is true in Danish actually. Example:

Kan du lide is? (Do you like ice cream?)
Ja
Kan du ikke lide is? (Do you not like ice cream?)
Jo

So in Danish we have "ja" which means "yes" but "jo" is used instead when answering a negative question, so as to confirm what the negative question asked. This is kind of annoying in English cause if you ask "Do you not like ice cream?" then if you say "yes" does that mean "yes I like ice cream" or does it mean "yes I do not like ice cream"? That's what "jo" disambiguates.

[Guest]

@cgtjsiwy sorry, was a bit simplistic there. Finish is instead an example of a language where while there _is_ a word for "logical" no that's not the usual way to answer yes/no questions.

If we're being pedantic this means it's not similar to Swedish "nej" for most uses of the latter.

[locuester@lemmy.zip]

• There is always only one correct way to spell anything.

“gray" and "grey" are both correct spellings of the color between black and white.

[pumastolemybluff@lemmy.world]

The article is not about programming languages 🫠