Blackworm Dud Highlights Virus Naming Mess

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is running a story that looks at the total mess that the anti-virus companies made in naming the latest overhyped virus threat. According to the article, 'Blackworm' or the 'Kama Sutra worm' was the first major test of a new U.S.-government funded initiative to introduce some sanity into the virus-naming business. From the article: 'For most of [the antivirus vendors], this is like Esperanto: You can speak it if you want to, but everyone else is going to carry on babbling in their own native tongue, so it doesn't really matter.'"

Comments

Re:Why not assign every virus an ID number?

[just_another_sean]

Funny? Mod parent *Insightful*!

Re:Hej!

[Krach42]

Actually, it wasn't "spoken like a true native". The post below is absolutely correct, he forgot the accusative -n ending, and Esperanto should be capitalized (proper name). Better phrasings are also offered, but the minimal correction is, indeed, "Hej! Mi povas paroli Esperanton, you insensitive clod!".

Actually, I should have responded to this saying that I needed the accusative ending, or make it an adverb, I just didn't feel a need to, since it was just a joke.

I personally learned "Mi povas paroli esperante." (without capitalization, because it's no longer a proper noun, but an adverb.)

Capitalization rules are iffy at best in Esperanto anyways, as the various derivative languages use vastly different rules. English uses it for all proper nouns and derivatives, German only uses it for all nouns but not their other part-of-speech derivatives, and romance languages generally (as far as my understanding goes) capitalize proper nouns only while nouns, but not their other part-of-speech derivatives.

Either way, I concede that my grammar was wrong, but my capitalization is a trivial, and generally irrelavent point to complain about in an international auxillary language.