How do you like your coffee?

[William Ryan]

Alina Israeli's mention of professional parlance reminds me that when I 
was occasionally involved in two-way technical interpreting in the late 
60s-early 90s (in the later years mostly in nuclear power station 
information exchanges) I found that Russian scientists frequently used 
Russianized English words rather than the term recommended in the 
various Russian technical dictionaries, which were often really 
explanations rather than terms. Komp'iuter was certainly one of them, 
and you can see why when you look at the (Russian) English-Russian 
technical dictionaries of the time, most of which gave 
schetno-reshaiushchee ustroistvo as the first translation (I think EVM 
became standardized later). I can still remember the difficulty of 
trying to handle a discussion on safety mechanisms in the absence of a 
term in Russian for 'fail-safe' - by the end of the discussion the 
Russians were using the English word out of sheer necessity. Nowadays 
you can find feil-seif used on the internet (as noun and adjective, 
mostly indeclinable, and possibly as a quasi-verb), but as far as I know 
it is not registered in any dictionary.
Incidentally, the 1980 Sovetskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar' does list 
the word komp'iuter, but states it is used mostly in science fiction and 
English -language scientific literature.

Will Ryan


Alina Israeli wrote:
> Krossovki entered the language in the early 80's, there were only kedy 
> before that.
> Komp'uter sort of existed in professional parlance, but in the old 
> Russian tradition to use native word we used EVM — 
> elektronno-vyhislitel'naja mashina, they were enormous those days, the 
> size of a room. In the US they could be viewed at Boston museum, 
> that's the kind of machines I studied on and worked on in the 60's 
> (high school) and 70's.
>
> So only when smaller machines appeared did the word komp'uter 
> seriously entered into the language.
>
> Obratnyj slovar' russkogo jazyka 1974 which also lists what 
> dictionaries mention such-and-such word does not have either 
> komp'juter or predictably krossovki.
>
> Alina

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