{"id":629,"date":"2010-05-11T18:04:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T22:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/?p=629"},"modified":"2010-05-11T19:21:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T23:21:04","slug":"its-all-greek-to-me-companies-that-should-never-do-business-in-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/its-all-greek-to-me-companies-that-should-never-do-business-in-greece\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s all Greek to me: Companies that should never do business in Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"

English is the number one language used in International commerce, regardless of the actual number of native speakers: The number of Chinese Mandarin speakers surpasses that of native speakers of English around the world – a staggering 845 million versus 345 million for English.<\/p>\n

Several dozen other languages are spoken worldwide, one of which is Greek.<\/p>\n

Despite its important role in introducing literature, philosophy, science and arts to the so-called Western Civilization, Greek is only spoken by roughly 14 million people worldwide; most of them in Greece, Cyprus and the Greek diaspora around the world.<\/p>\n

The use of a non-Latin alphabet by the Greeks has proven to be a challenge throughout the proliferation of computers and the Internet. Although the ISO 639-1 standard now describes the particulars of the Greek language so that Greeks can utilize every major operating system, such as Windows, Linux or OS X the fact remains that quite often Greeks online resort to the use of ‘greeklish’ for communicating with eachother.<\/p>\n

Essentially, typing Greek words with their phonetic corresponding combination – or even visual substitute – is the definition of ‘greeklish’. For example, a simple Greek word such as “\u0391\u03b8\u03ae\u03bd\u03b1” for “Athens” can be written as “Athina” in greeklish. Due to the Latin alphabet lacking the letter theta, a visual substitution is often used: the number “8” – closely resembling a Greek theta – would render “A8ina” as a valid greeklish word.<\/p>\n

Things get even more complex due to the lack of a standard for the greeklish use; for example, if we were to utilize visual substitution versus phonetic, “\u0391\u03b8\u03ae\u03bd\u03b1” could easily be written as “A8nva” – using “n” as a Greek eta and “v” as the letter ni (Note: the name of the letter “N” or “ni” is inexplicably scribed as “nu” by the English lexicons<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Confused yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This introduction about how Greeks type words is related to a whole separate issue: when written in greeklish, certain Greek words match other words written in English which have a whole different meaning.<\/p>\n

And that’s where the fun begins.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The shorthand of “Muni” for “municipal” is a commonly used word in English. It’s also guaranteed to bring a chuckle to a Greek speaker, simply because it means “pussy” – and not of the feline kind.<\/p>\n

In a similar manner, references to “colos” for “co-location services” are bound to be negatively received by a Greek speaker: the word means “ass” – the very one you’re sitting on right now. The same word can be written with a “K” as “kolos” – I am certain that the company behind Kolos.com<\/a> – a bookstore from Ukraine – would never want to open a department in downtown Athens, Greece.<\/p>\n

Finally, I remember walking around Wal-Mart, only to find a fine specimen of failed marketing research. The Kavli brand<\/a> includes some really tasty crackers but I doubt they’d be bringing them to Greece, where the word is a crude reference to “cock” – not of the rooster kind, mind you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English is the number one language used in International commerce, regardless of the actual number of native speakers: The number of Chinese Mandarin speakers surpasses that of native speakers of English around the world – a staggering 845 million versus 345 million for English. 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