linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

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Message-ID: <CAFr9PXnr0R71_o_0-Xmw0tcN9UUTMu1ahgp3ig5kE0LG=6N5WA@mail.gmail.com>
Date:   Mon, 6 Jul 2020 12:13:21 +0900
From:   Daniel Palmer <daniel@...f.com>
To:     Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>
Cc:     Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        torvalds@...ux-foundation.org, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>, Chris Mason <clm@...clm>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        ksummit-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org,
        tech-board-discuss@...ts.linuxfoundation.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

Hi Willy,

On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 at 13:55, Willy Tarreau <w@....eu> wrote:

> I'm personally thinking that for a non-native speaker it's already
> difficult to find the best term to describe something,

I'm a nobody in the kernel world but this point made me think.

I'm a native English speaker but I don't live in an English speaking
place and my experience is that a lot of technology terms have been
directly imported from English into the local language almost as-is.

In my case master/slave have been directly transliterated into
Japanese as masuta and sureebu and exists like that in technical
documentation for example:
https://www.analog.com/jp/analog-dialogue/articles/introduction-to-spi-interface.html#

I can imagine that by changing terminology that has been in use for so
long that it's been imported into other languages directly or is
common enough that non-native speakers know what it means might have
exactly the opposite result by excluding people that aren't native
English speakers and can't decode synonyms that are obvious to a
native speaker.

Cheers,

Daniel