Technical Japanese

Although technical terminology in general has a relatively high concentration of words adapted from English, the number of programming and computer technology words is especially high. Starting with the basics:

プログラミング – ぷろぐらみんぐ – programming
プログラミング言語 – ぷろぐらみんぐげんご – programming language

I will be focused on Java, because I happen to have a book on it.

The first thing everyone knows about Java, and on the first line of the wikipedia article is:

オブジェクト指向プログラミング言語 – おぶじぇくとしこうぶろぐらみんぐげんご – object oriented programming language

This had a new word for me:

指向 – しこう – point (to)

Interestingly, the top wikipedia reference was:

性的指向 – せいてきしこう – sexual orientation

So it appears it may be be commonly used for the English “orientation”.

The next result is

指向性 – しこうせい – directivity

used as in;

指向性マイク – しこうせいまいく – directional microphone

As usual, within the first sentence, I am somewhere completely different.

Reading materials:
Wikipedia –
Java – http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java
Programming Languages – http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/プログラミング言語