Say It in German: USB Cable

posted in: German, German Vocabulary, Informatik | 0

Das USB-Kabel - the USB cable

das USB-Kabel (pl. ) – the USB cable

IPA: [uːʔɛsˈbeːˈkaːbl̩]

This is straightforward, because it looks very much like its English counterpart.

I thought of including this as I was preparing the image for the screen post, because somehow the image of a USB cable also came up in the search.

Wiktionary gives the following definition of USB:

Standardisierte Schnittstelle zum Anschluss peripherer Geräte, wie Drucker, Tastatur, Maus, Massenspeicher usw., an einen Computer.

A standardized interface for connecting peripheral devices such as printers, keyboards, mice, mass storage devices, etc. to a computer.

USB stands for “Universal Serial Bus”, and the shortened form was adopted and also used in German. (Well, the German for Universal Serial Bus is der Universal Serial Bus.)

The topic of word borrowings from one language to another is an interesting one. As English is currently the dominant language in most domains of technology, many new words are coined in English, before being translated and used in other languages. I don’t have any concrete evidence for this, but it seems to be the case here.

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