Seeing a programming language in your native language after working with English ones, you discover that it looks and sounds pretty ridiculous. My belief is that the native language is ingrained on a low level in the brain, so it's decoded ‘in the hardware’ and directly invokes meanings and associations, whereas a second language goes through at least some level of conscious processing. The very same way, I'm physica…
Programming uses the same words as regular English, but it is a completely different linguistic register, so there is never any conflict. It’s like working in any field with its own jargon — you use the meaning that is relevant to the context. In linguistics this is called the Relevance theory of meaning and interpretion, which explains why we do this contextual interpretation easily and mostly without thinking about…
Let us be clear that this is US English and not British, but I agree with your sentiment: that the keywords are more a linguistic jargon than anything.
Although the main topic here is about other languages, there are also nuances within the two main streams of English that it's also a little wierd sometimes.
For me, I spell color with a U: ie. colour, but when coding, it's always been the US variant. I've typed this word so much that when I need to type it in my variant, that colour just looks wrong, even though it's the correct spelling in (my area).
Occasionally, when skimming British code, I've come across colour variables and it looks wrong. Similarly, I've looked at French code and there are similar strange things that leak out. The same for Russian and Japanese code I've encountered, eg:
> function (char p)...*
The purist in me really wants to state: "everyone should type US English", but the more accepting part of me concedes that maybe keywords should be internationalised (/internationalized) too. Maybe a preprocessor system would suffice (eg somecode.c.jp -> somecode.c), but as you state: it doesn't seem right because of the 'jargon' nature of it.
The good news is that machine code and punch cards have no language, so maybe we could revert to using that and then we can neatly skip over this issue entirely ;-)
