Re: RFC: Renaming 3B to Tezenki

On Jan 12, 2007, at 2:32 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>:
>
>> Paul Bennett skrev:
>>> Does it have any possibly unfortunate meanings or
>>> similarities?
>>
>> Not that I know of. But then how much need you care about
>> such things? The Swedish word for 'edge' is /kant/ but we
>> use it happily anyway! I'd care only about associations in
>> the lang itself.
>
> It took me a while to figure out why sounding like a famous
> Prussian philosopher
> would be a bad thing.
I'm not 100% sure I know either - does it have to do with the English
vulgarity /kVnt/? If so, would people whose first language is not
English perceive /kant/ and /kVnt/ to sound the same?

I remember there was a *nix text editor called kant, whose name was
changed to kate, apparently because to some people it sounded like /
kVnt/. I asked who it was that thought they sounded similar, but
never did find out the answer. It seemed silly to me to confuse the
two -- I guess it hadn't actually occurred to me at the time that a
lot of non-L1 English speakers would pronounce /a/ and /V/ the same.

I still think it was a cool name, though :/

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