Re: Computers (was Re: Stress marking)
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, October 23, 2000, 13:32 |
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En réponse à "Carlos Eugenio Thompson (EDC)" <EDCCET@...>:
>
> In French they derived the word from adifferent verb: to order
> (_ordener_?) which gave _ordenateur_(sp?) claqued in Peninsular Spanish
> as _ordenador_ < _ordenar_.
>
In fact, the story is a little more complicated. "Ordinateur" indeed comes from
"ordonner": to put in order (not "to order so to do sthg", they are homonyms),
but it was originally an adjective, extremely rarely used, and qualifying God as
"putting in order the world". It was so rarely used that the people who chose
this word considered it unlikely that religious people would react on that.
Indeed they were right! :)
Christophe.