Digenis.org

Not so long ago I wrote about the English internet acronym IMHO (in my humble opinion) sneaking into Russian computer jargon. Of course, in any field connected with technology it’s not at all surprising that we would see borrowings and calques from English. What was interesting is how the acronymn took a slightly different meaning from the English original and even developed a fully-declinable noun variant.

A few things in the last two weeks have brought Russian techno- jargon back to my mind, the first of which was an amusing limmerick posted over at LanguageHat (but which apparently came to him via Avva, and before that from Akuaku):

???????, ??? ? ??? ?? ?????
?????????? ????????? ???????.
??? ???????, ???????!
????, ?????, ???????!
???? ????? ? ????? ???????.

Noetica, a frequent commenter at LH offered the following English translation (also from LH’s post):

They made in the Urals, it’s said,
A PC that’s wooden, instead.
With no nails, just an axe,
And with cheap hardware hacks -
Like the mouse, which they caught in the shed.

She captured the idea well and the limmerick maintains its rhyme.

Anyway, what most interests me here is the use of ???? in reference to the computer’s hard drive. The word ???? usually means ’screw’, but, as LanguageHat points out, apparently the slang meaning came from the Winchester hard drive technology developed by IBM in 1973. Very interesting.

Also this week, in a conversation with my friend Andrei about connecting mobiles to PC’s to transfer files, I learned that Russians also use the word ????? (firewood) as slang for drivers. Then I noticed that Igor, on his LiveJournal, used ???? (soap) to refer to an e-mail he recieved. These two obviously come from the phonetic similarity between the pronunciation of the English and Russian words. I can’t think any more of this type of techno-slang off the top of my head. Anyone else know of some?

In a different category of internet word borrowing is the word ????????, which I overheard a few times last year at Moscow International University in reference to web browsers. Basically, it’s a calque from the verb ???????, which means ‘to roam, wander, or ramble’. Most people just say ??????? though, a transliteration of the English word.

If you want to learn some more Russian computer jargon, you can head over to the ????-????????? ???????? ???????.