I know, and despite me being the first to notice this in just about any scenario, ai didn't put the two together until I saw this. Maybe I should sleep more.
My assumption was that they were using the French word for rooster and that it was intended to be pronounced that way. But maybe that still has the same issue? Is "coq" used to mean "penis" in French?
Coq is "rooster" in French, keeping with INRIA's tradition of naming programming languages after animals, and pronounced approximately "coke". E.g. "coq au vin" (rooster with wine) is a standard French chicken dish consisting of what it sounds like. Coq (the program) is at least partly named after Thierry and Catarina Coquand, who worked on the Calculus of Constructions (the type theory used in Coq), and maybe also CoC (calculus of constructions, as mentioned).
It gets worse: a standard technique for proving correctness of imperative programs is called Hoare Logic, after C.A.R. Hoare, the inventor of Quicksort. And of course there is an implementation of Hoare logic in Coq.
I was asked a while back to give a talk about this stuff at work. It's maybe a relief that it didn't happen, since I dreaded having to say these names in today's environment. My plan was to put the slides up first (with the names and their origins on them), before saying the names out loud.
I don't think "coq" is slang for penis in French, though my French is at best rudimentary. I'm familiar with "verge" ("rod") and a few similar terms being used that way in French, but the English connotation of Coq's name is coincidental, I think.
It's not slang for anything except someone far too proud of himself (yes, 'him'). And it's really not pronounced like 'coke'. It's cock but without the stress on both 'k' sounds, I don't know how to explain any other way than 'soft k'. It's also the name for eggshell, and if you've never had 'oeuf à la coque' with bread you're missing something (mostly an half-cooked egg eaten with a spoon, but what's the point of fully cooking an egg anyway...). Don't know if it factored in.
I'm not sure the pun is incidental, people like cute names with multiple interpretations. One other thing is that the rooster is kind of the national mascot. Here you'll hear someone shout 'cocorico' (rather mockingly) when some frenchman of woman realizes a feat. And there's a lot of self deprecation 'round here about the French being like roosters: feet in shit, and still blaring pride and moral lessons and thinking we're still a world power, to all who'll hear it. Our footballers have a rooster on their jersey I think, and you'll find many people here named Lecoq.
I think the 90s were a different, less PC time and the recent wave of indignation about schoolboys' jokes hadn't reached our shores, and most people here didn't speak that much English, even less the 'bad' words.
Not sure they expected the thing to become so popular then...
"bit" (the english word) is pronounced exactly like "bite" (the french word), \bit\. The funny thing is that we often use "octet" to refer to bytes (which are pronounced /ba?t/ so no problems here) but we have no alternative for bit.
I don't know where you learned French or English for that matter but in my pretty mainstream accents English "bit" and French "bite" are not pronounced very similarly. I can't imagine a competent speaker confusing them.
I'm a native French, and the french wiktionary seems to agree with me https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bitehttps://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bit : Both are pronounced \bit\. You can listen to the pronunciation and it's exactly the same. I remember a few jokes around this in university. I've also found this where a few people suggest pronouncing "bit" exactly like "bite".
I don't really know what else to say other that I'm French, went through university in France and we had this confusion.
Huh interesting. Must just be an accent thing. I have a southern US accent in English and American accent with SW France influences in French. To me they aren't that similar but I do see how they could be. You're the native speaker though so I don't really have a leg to stand on here.
But in French, the word "bit" (as a French word) would be pronounced /bi/, as with dit ? That the French chose to continue to pronounce it in the English fashion suggests that they rather like the joke opportunity :-)
It is misguided to ban all homonyms that offend English speakers. How would you even do it in practice?
1) The last name of the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant is pronounced like "cunt". How do they give a philosophy Kant course in the US?
2) Why do French girls have to say "bit twiddling" but American girls need to be protected from "Coq"?
3) The reason for the rename initiative is apparently a misunderstanding by an Uber driver when hearing the word. I'd humbly suggest not to use the word in a cab, just as you wouldn't say "I'm taking a Kant course in college" in a cab. Context matters.
4) It is not up to Americans to eradicate European words in European projects.
1) The last name of Kant can't be retrospectively changed, plus the field of philosophy is not nearly as English-centric as computer science.
2) The language of computer science is English. A technical word being offensive in English has much more weight than being offensive in another language, because it affects so much more people.
3) Yes, ideally, people would abstain from snickering about the unintended sound of Coq in conversations. Unfortunately, that is just not happening. "harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name." You will not be able to completely eradicate all those awkward situations involving "Coq" by pointing out that "context matters".
4) Coq is very widely used in an English context, seeing as computer science itself is largely English. When (presumably) the majority of users of a project is American, it does make sense to cater to them to some extent.
We should not downplay the absolutely real problems that Coq's current name causes.
Many open source projects started in Europe in the 1990s and had mostly European contributors.
When they became famous, US corporations started monetizing them, buying contributors and slowly dictated everything.
Languages like Python, which started in Europe and have at least 75% non-US contributions, are completely governed in the US. European and Asian opinions are ignored and sometimes derided, all while pretending to foster an "inclusive" environment.
Projects moving to GitHub have caused many contributors to stop. No one cares, because the "right people" use GitHub and the others don't matter.
Perhaps Academia is isolated from these issues to some extent, but make no mistake: In the current climate a renaming is highly political; in my opinion French students should revolt to protect their identity, it is the straw that breaks the Caml's back.
> "A technical word being offensive in English has much more weight than being offensive in another language, because it affects so much more people."
Rather ethnocentric, don't you think? I don't think the rest of the world, which outnumbers the English speaking world, will take kindly to such reasoning.
No one's trying to ban all potentially offensive homophones though, where did you even get that? I don't see any sort of proposal for what that would look like or how it would work.
This is the case of one project changing its name because the reality of using that name causes frustration and embarrassment FOR THEM. It's not even about politics or pressure external to the project. They are just annoyed and want to change it and its theirs so they can. What exactly is your beef here lol.
You haven't seen a trend to ban anything remotely offensive to US citizens in the past few years?
The coq-club archives seem to have vanished, but a Reddit thread suggests that the initial thread title was:
"Why is the Coq logo made to look like a penis? This year, I had a student point out to me the 'flesh-colored logo with what looks like a mushroom top'."
Apart from the fact that the logo looks like a strange chess figure at best, this qualifies as extreme pressure in the current climate. In such discussions only one side speaks up freely in public and maintains that this is the general view of the project.
If 100% of the Coq contributors are genuinely annoyed (i.e. without having had a "little chat" with their university administrations), the situation is different. I doubt that this can be established, as no one has voiced support on discourse at all and the coq-club archives are no longer public.
I can't figure out what this comment is trying to say. Do you disagree that the trend exists? Or that it's not a bad thing? Either way, this strikes me as awfully dismissive. If you just didn't want to engage, why reply at all?
When I posted the first one in this thread, I didn't realize there was some previous discussion about this decision by this project. I read the post, then came in here and saw a comment that had jumped from that post to a conspiracy-ish project to ban all "offensive" words or something. I didn't have the context at the time to hear the dogwhistle so to speak so it seemed purely ridiculous.
Now that it's clear what they are actually worried about, yes it was meant to be dismissive. I'm not convinced this trend is real or that it's a problem if it is.
Welp. I think this is a good move.
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