Chapter 8. International Style
Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in
American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though
the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from
English (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the
local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to
travelling hackers.
There are some references herein to ‘Commonwealth hackish’.
These are intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in
the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia,
India, etc. — though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage).
There is also an entry on Commonwealth Hackish
reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from
U.S. hackish.
Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they
often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical
conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that
are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are reported
here.
On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and
vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian hackers
often use the nonexistent verbs ‘scrollare’ (to scroll) and
‘deletare’ (to delete) rather than native Italian
scorrere and
cancellare. Similarly, the English verb
‘to hack’ has been seen conjugated in Swedish. In German, many
Unix terms in English are casually declined as if they were German verbs --
thus: mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept; fork/forken/geforkt; core
dump/core-dumpen, gecoredumpt. And Spanish-speaking hackers use
‘linkear’ (to link), ‘debugear’ (to debug), and
‘lockear’ (to lock).
European hackers report that this happens partly because the English
terms make finer distinctions than are available in their native vocabularies,
and partly because deliberate language-crossing makes for amusing
wordplay.
A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are
parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to
English-speakers.
