Well. It's actually the opposite. Because English is (presumably) your first language, you prefer the non-abbreviated "filesystem" over "fs". From the perspective of someone who doesn't "think in English", the two have pretty much the same inherent value, i.e. they are arbitrary identifiers.

From the perspective of this English-speaking software developer, I recognize filesystem, and I also know what fs means. Furthermore, the first time I hear "fs", I imagine that I was able to guess from the context it was used in that fs means filesystem.

From the perspective of a developer who knows English but whose native tongue is not English, filesystem is understandable, because the component words, file and system, either are known or are looked up in a translation dictionary. "fs", on the other hand, is incomprehensible without supporting documentation.

A mental mapping translates these identifiers into the entities they represent. Since the extra letters in the longer identifier do not add any semantic value to non-English speakers, they are merely clutter and do not contribute to readability.

You're missing the point -- the extra letters *do* add semantic value to those who speak English, but not as a first language.

Your observation that "stdio" is a _word_ in non-English programmer cultures, and not an abbreviation of "standard input/output", is very much in line with the above.

Stdio was *not* a word to them, it was just a jumble of random characters. The whole concept of "standard" had been lost! Dave