This is one of those surprisingly useful and obvious things that I'm surprised not to have seen before.
Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper
In my experience, I'm in the minority in pronouncing sudo as soodoo, the majority seem to say pseudo. OTOH I've never heard anyone say fsck as anything other than f-suck
From personal experience at Microsoft the backslash was frequently pronounced "whack" (hence whack whack for unc paths), and the ubiquitous error codes like 0xC0000005 were "c-bazillion-5"
I've always said F S check in my head but never said or heard it on conversation. I started my computer journey with msdos so I think chkdsk is to blame for me saying 'check'.
Yup put me down for "fusck" as well. I am probably inventing memories here but I think it is because whenever I saw a system announce it needed to fsck I would say "oh fuck" in my head (sometimes out loud).
Nitpick: su is “substitute user” (sometimes switch user), it merely defaults to root.
man su:
su - run a command with substitute user and group ID
As for fsck I moved from F S C K to progressively bind the S and C in a slide of the tongue, which ends up sounding like F-ceek once I’ve eased in the audience with F-(s)ceek(ay) (parentheses get progressively toned down as I speak faster)
Also ex MS and I recall whack. I also heard a story about a server called paddy, so its shares were whack whack paddy whack.
Never heard bazillion. But many of us used to memorize a bunch of hexadecimal codes and know the symbolic names based on the visual of the hex digits. After repeat lookups the common ones just stay in your brain without effort. The one you shared looks like STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION.
I know a few people who pronounce fsck with what sounds like a combination of 'suck' and the expletive, which naturally leads to phrases like "it's fsck'ing the drive."
I'm originally Italian and my English is now quite good. A very, very common mistake among most "mediterranean" and "romance languages" (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian) people when speaking English is to pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.
Another very common mistake in my language group is the "gn", as in signal.
Correct English is sig-nal [0], while my group usually says it with a different "gn" sound [1].
Well, there's much more, of course, but I wanted to share these two just because, anecdotally, I hear the mistake very often.
For Romanians, we pronounce signal correctly, though. We have "gn" as a sound in Romanian, for example "a răstigni" (to nail to a cross"), we don't change it to "ni".
But we do have the same problem as Italians with "pseudo": the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it?!? :-p
> pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.
I'm genuinely lost reading your comment as neither the p nor the i are silent in pissed (/pɪst/). The only weird part is the "ed" pronounced "t" but that's fairly common in English.
I also don't get the part about "ps" in romance languages. There is no special pronunciation rule regarding this group of letters in French. Are you sure it's not specific to Italian?
Edit: I think I now realized you might be talking about the pronunciation of words like pseudo and psyched where the p would indeed be pronunced where it French (and I guess in the same way in Italian).
In Spain we have the Real Academia Española that more or less serves as an authoritative source of correctness. The ps group was marked as deprecated, so you can pronounce s and be happy. The suggestion to also write sicología or setiembre (instead of psicología and september) didn't catch up though.
For gn we have ñ, so we're not tempted to interpret it a la francesa.
> English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with the letters τεχ...; and this same Greek word means art as well as technology. Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.
> Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.
From your link though, Leslie Lamport disagrees with Knuth (whom I like to pronounce "nuth" but is actually pronounced "ka-nuth").
I'm Greek and I pronounce LaTeX as "LAY-tek". I just tried pronouncing it "LAY-tech" with a Greek "chi" sound ("λέει-τεχ") and I sounded so silly I almost spat my coffee all over my monitor (only "almost" because I wasn't drinking any coffee). Ain't no way I'm calling it that.
And note that, being Greek, I can actually pronounce "χ" correctly. Most Native English-speaking folks I've heard trying to do the same sound like they're in immediate need of someone administering the Heimleich manoeuver to them.
Btw, I pronounce "Heimlich" with a Greek "χ" also. I bet most native English-speaking folks pronounce it elsewise. Perhaps as "Heimlick".
I do the same. I also say et cetera in my head but E T C to other people, and soo dough in my head but soo do to others.
I wonder how many other people code-switch in this way to try make themselves better understood, when actually we would still understand one another if we just used our internal pronunciation?
I pronounce etc in my head as “ets” as if you’re about to say “et cetera” but stopped short. I read etc. in print the same way and have since I was a kid.
I suspect that split pronunciation between head and mouth is very common. I do the same thing with some words, like giblet, which in my head has a hard g, but when I say it I say it with a soft g.
FWIW, I have always said "F stab" (for over 25 years now). I doubt I have never even heard anyone else say the term at all, though, so I am a glorious outlier ;P.
Forgive me, but I don't understand how you can pronounce it as one syllable. I would have to pronounce /shmod/ as either /sh-mod/ or /shm-od/, making it two syllables. I'm happy to be corrected, I just physically can't understand how to pronounce it as one syllable.
I hear ya. It’s not a terribly common consonant cluster. (In fact I think all English words that start with s[c]hm are Yiddish loanwords, but don’t quote me on that.) Try pushing your lips forward before making any sound, and drawing them back+together as you make the sh sound. It’ll come out as a single shm sound.
If you think about a lisping pronunciation of smoke, sounding like "shmoke", this is how I imagine it would sound. One syllable.
I wonder if the grandparent is French, because I would never have considered to pronounce chmod like this. Then again, I say C H mod and C H own, which apparently isn't the standard pronunciation, so what do I know!
Ha! This is great. I would have loved to have had this insight when I worked on Midori, at one point there was an M# keyword shmutable (for shared mutable objects) and one objection was the concern (beyond the obvious objections to silly keywords) that if said as sh'mutable that it sounded very close to shimmutable which would be a critically bad confusion
/ʃm/ is not a legal onset in native English. (Let alone /tʃm/, which is how I pronounce "chmod" - two syllables, /tʃə 'mɔːd/.)
"Schmear" is a Yiddish loanword coming from German, where /ʃm/ is perfectly legal. So it's pronounceable by the human mouth, it's just a little awkward for English speakers.
/sm/ and /ʃr/ are both legal in English, so you might think of it as something like those. Can you pronounce "smear" or "shrine" as one syllable?
(I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)
> (I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)
Oh it sure is in Croatian (and other Slavic languages), "tʃ" is written as "č". We even have slang words like "čmr-lji-ti" [t͡ʃmrʎiti]. "r" (rolling r) can function as a vowel.
Hehe, the point is the "g" or "k" should not be silent if you actually want to pronounce "GNU" or "knee".. but in English they generally are. In other languages the sound produced is a more guttural but fully enunciated word (if I knew more linguistics I'd find the international phonetics for it).
The <k> in “knee” is silent; it is pronounced /n i/, not /k n i/.
The reason this cluster is so difficult for Anglo-Saxon is exactly because English lacks it; it historically had it, which explains the many words that are written as such, for etymological reasons.
Even the actual word “gnu" is pronounced /n u/, not /g n u/, but the “GNU operating system” is typically pronounced /g @ 'n u/, in two syllables, with stress on the second.
I feel like quite a lot of people in the Free Software community somewhat enjoy creating things that seem to deliberately be designed to trip up people who aren't in-the-know. Seems like a terrible way to run an advocacy movement.
Since the /etc pronunciation was first in the list, I initially thought this might be some joke list of crazy pronunciations until I saw the rest. Do people really say "etsy" when referring to /etc?
I've never ever heard anyone say this. Usually I hear the spelled out E-T-C and occasionally "et cetera" but never "etsy"
Are you British? I (American) have been pronouncing it "etsy" for over 20 years. When I hear something different it's usually from someone who is new to unix and just hasn't learned all the jargon yet.
As always, it's just what you're used to. I freely admit that the US date format is weird, and that most imperial units are bonkers, but they're immediately "intuitive" to me just because I grew up with them. I just can't "feel" things like celsius or kilograms.
MySQL pronunciation can be "My S Q L" or "My Sequel." I think most people in the community probably use the latter, but truthfully most of us don't really care. The "S Q L" vs. "Sequel" split has existed almost as long as SQL itself. The original name for the language was "SEQUEL." [1]
FWIW, much like a linguistic accent or regional dialect, using "sequel" tends to make you sound more like a Microsoft developer (definitely to people from my generation). This has been merging a bit in the last decade (mostly as the linguistic traditions of subcultures in general have been eroding from Eternal September and an entire generation passing), but it is still notable enough that people bring it up occasionally.
The MS pronunciation makes sense to me. Microsoft inherited (actually bought) SQL Server from Sybase. At Sybase the pronunciation was 100% "Sequel." I worked there for 7 years and don't ever recall hearing "S Q L."
I pronounced the individual letters until I called Microsoft support one day and the automated prompts said something like "For Microsoft 'Sequel' Server, press 3".
Yes, it's often pronounced that way in my circle of friends, as a way of bashing MySQL, after all, it makes one squeal in terror. Although this started in the late 90s, back when MySQL was pretty awful. These days it's pretty decent.
Well, as a Swedish speaker I will respectfully disagree with your pronunciation. To my ears the the y is not like the e in me, but I can't think of a good English equivalent.
(in fact, the girls name actually sounds like the greek letter "mu" as it's spelled and pronounced in Swedish)
I thought finding a source with pronunciation would be easy, but it was surprisingly difficult, and I kinda gave up finding a source appropriate for English speakers.
The name “My” is not unheard of in danish and we also have a word “my”, for very small measures, with the same pronunciation. It should be close enough the the Swedish pronunciation for your purpose.
Here is an entry in a danish dictionary. Click the yellow speaker for pronunciation:
Thanks very much for taking the time, and for the reference. To my ears that sounds like a subtle cross between classical "e" as in present-tense "read" and "i" as in "pin" or "Linux".
Hrm, now to start saying "MeSQL" and seeing what happens...
I once received a document from an offshore DBA who had written 'seagull' for every instance of 'SQL' because that's what he thought was being said on conference calls.
Personally I cut it down the middle and go with 'squill' but then I always said 'scizzy' instead of 'scuzzy' for SCSI.
The first time I used MySQL the person showing me referred to it as "my squall" so that is always what I think when I see it read. I generally pronounce it 'my ess-que-ell' myself though.
> The official way to pronounce “MySQL” is “My Ess Que Ell” (not “my sequel”), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as “my sequel” or in some other localized way.
There's an equivalent page in the SqlServer docs somewhere that recommends SequelServer as the idiomatic pronunciation.
I pronounce each of them idiomatically. When saying SQL I tend to say S-Q-L unless I'm around people who tend to say Sequel, in which case I say it that way. Most people I meet in person also tend to say S-Q-L, presumably because that is how it is written.
According to a book I read years ago, some people pronounce it "Squirrel", but I've never personally met one.
The "squirrel" point in your comment was really confusing, it didn't sound like SQL to me at all.
Until I realised that you probably mean the American pronunciation of "squirrel" that sounds something like "skwerl"? I grew up calling the animal a "skwi-rull" :)
I recently wondered about the best way to pronounce commands of the `[...]ctl` family, which seem to get omitted from most of these lists I come across. I personally now use "cuttle", but am curious what others say (for example, Kubernetes [1] is one notable exception, search "cube control").
> But I also capitalize command names like Ls so I'm probably out on my own here.
Only in written correspondence I assume? Macs are the only system that would let you do that in actual use AFAIK (and if you want to break out of that habit I've got an OS to sell you ;)
How did you get into this habit though? Are you an old Lisper by chance?
I've always pronounced ctl as control, personally.
You're going to end up spelling it if someone doesn't know what you're talking about anyway, might as well say the unabbreviated version so at least it has some semantic meaning.
I always find these interesting. Like the different pronunciations of `char`*. All these strange words that we only read or type 99% of the time but still come up with some kind of pronunciation in our heads.
* I've heard "char" like "charbroiled", "care", "car" and some people always just say "character"
On a somewhat related note, I'd been internally pronouncing `reflog` in `git reflog` as REE-FLOG for the longest time. It wasn't until I finally needed to use it that REF-LOG made a lot more sense!
- sh: shuh like le as in le monde (not “ess ayche”)
- tcl: tickle
One of the hardest for me though is on a different topic to pronunciation. What name would you give to a variable that keeps track of the current working directory? What name did bash use for this variable?
Answers (for me):
- pwd: is “print working directory”
- $PWD: is “pcurrent working directory”, the P is silent.
For me, two of those would be `shebang` (#!) and `S H` (ess eich). It's nice to coalesce around pronunciations, but we should also accept that people will choose different dialects.
I was thinking more about the bind dns server when I made the comment, but yeah. Just thinking that verbally referring to the “bine” folder might cause confusion in certain contexts, where “bin” pronunciation avoids it entirely.
"Joe said "cat proc cpuinfo". Scott wasn't getting it so Joe said "no.. no, type cat slash proc slash cpuinfo" and eventually got on the keyboard himself."
This part really resonated with me. I always find it hard to tell commands to people. Anyway I never reach for their keyboard. I try to take the blame myself for not spelling out the command correcty, this way they don't feel mistaken and take a defensive stance.
I think this is also about the level of knowledge about what you are doing... if Scott didn't know about /proc/cpuinfo, it is more likely he wouldn't know to put the slashes.
I found there is this "pride in the correct pronunciation" in the opensource community. It seems to be a signal of a group membership and a creed validator.
Who cares though? Why does "correct pronunciation" matter? Linux is nowadays used by many more non-native English speakers who will pronounce it very differently.
This attempt at correcting others seems like gatekeeping and, to me personally, feels like a very anti-inclusive thing to do.
Tangentially, the fact that some of the pronunciation is so non-intuitive (e.g. /etc -> etsy) should be a bug, not a feature and pride point. Can you imagine if you reported that a workflow is non-intuitive in a piece of SW and the devs told you "we know, cool, right?!"
Jeez, how did you get from correct pronunciation to anti-inclusive?!
Most people just want to know what you are talking about when you say libe or cat slash prots slash mem in fo or worse.
Nothing is more infuriating when people start using wrong words in a 10h telco instead of agreed upon vocabulary, which includes the correct pronunciation! Scratch correct. It's the agreed upon pronunciation we all ought to use when working together.
What is or isn't intuitive depends highly on context and background. Good luck finding something that's intuitive for everyone. People have tried and failed with artificial languages.
That's why people try to agree upon terms and their pronunciation first. Most languages are unintuitive and it's worse with tech jargon. So, when you work in tech business, or even in some tech club you cannot just walk in and talk like a child and expect everyone to treat you like an adult.
Exactly. It's just another thing to learn, and usually something you easily pick up through immersion. Jargon files (like The Jargon File [1]) are pretty amusing and can help illustrate where some of the quirkier conventions originated, but you can get by without them.
Ah, I was thinking about that, thanks for the link!
I was quite inspired by the Jargon File, back 15 years ago. But now it is wildly outdated. Flame wars are now called shitstorms and they are held on Twitter. Hackers are not really outcasts anymore, and there is a general acceptance of "hacker culture". Although hackers are now synonymous with foreign state agents rather than criminals.
Because what you call "in-group" is just a bunch of professionals that are working hard on making thier lives easier. One of the results of this collective effort is a consensus (more or sometimes less established, depending on the term) on the pronounciation. It usually doesn't make sense to disturb this for every single person that has a different "intuition" about how words should be pronounced.
> Why does this "agreed-upon pronunciation" take precedence over the "agreed-upon pronunciation" of English?
Excellent question. I don't know. People just assume that precedence as axiomatic (they just agree upon it), because it seems to work... well, easier with? More efficient? That's a subject for a study, I guess.
Of course by the in-group. People invent their own languages just to keep other peoples out of their culture or subculture. Since centuries. Another subject for a study. Knock yourself out, do the research and write a paper.
> Nothing is more infuriating when people start using wrong words in a 10h telco instead of agreed upon vocabulary
Totally agree. This is also why doctors say 'pancreatic islets' rather than 'pink wibbly bit'.
Using precise technical language does create a barrier to entry but this is a side-effect of the primary purpose of precise technical language: to allow practitioners to communicate accurately and unambiguously.
It takes some getting used to this idea, but I try to remember that when someone mispronounces an uncommon word or jargon term, it means that they're getting all their information through textual means - which probably means they don't have people close to them with the same interests or intellectual curiosity. That usually means, especially if it's a younger person, that they are smart and probably lonely.
I make the same assumption, but I consider it the highest of honors to be one of these people. It means you spend your free time learning by way of your own curiosity in spite of everything else. This is nothing short of noble, in my view.
With you until the last sentence. But yes, it does imply that they're resourceful enough to learn what they know with limited personal mentorship. It's worth gently guiding them towards the canonical pronunciation, but definitely don't be surprised if they show you up on how to use that thing they're mispronouncing.
> they're getting all their information through textual means
When I was very young, I had a friend who pronounced "modem" as "mod-DEEM" because he knew that the word is a portmanteau of "MOdulator-DEModulator".
His first exposure to "modem" was in print (computer magazines or BBSes), and it was some years before he heard the word spoken.
Many years later (but still many years ago!), I was pulled into a disagreement among a fledgling group of web designers: Is "GIF" pronounced with a hard G or a soft G ("jif")?
I realized that I'd never spoken the word aloud, and chose the hard G, because the word is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format.
Needless to say, I did not resolve that argument with my appeal to originalism. In the intervening years, I've spoken the word countless times, and settled on the soft G because it flows better in speech. As far as I know, the correctness debate is still ongoing today.
I actually can't believe anyone says "etsy." If they ever do, I'm gonna be confused momentarily. And I'm not gonna follow suit, I'm gonna say E T C. If I ever get a friend.
PS I also say "libe." As if shortening the word library.
Honestly, this is about the most consistent of the batch in my experience. Many of them vary, but I've never heard anyone beyond the cd/ls level of tutorial Linux say "e t c".
I'd like to think I'm well above 'cd/ls level of tutorial Linux', but I've never said 'etsy', though I recall having a colleague who did and he did have to explain.
I wouldn't spell it out as 'e t c' though, I pronounce '/etc/' the same as 'etc.'/'&c.' (that is, with a reluctantly soft 'c' in 'cetera', since despite knowing better it's not worth getting into every time you say it!)
I’ve always said etsy, but I was exposed to that pronunciation first in the Windows world as in Windows-wack-system32-wack-drivers-wack-etsy to find the hosts file. While I used VAX systems around the same time, I never cared about /etc until using linux distros. I just assumed that efficient two-syllable pronunciation was the logical choice.
It is for the same reason that anyone ever nudges anyone else about pronunciation, spelling, or grammar: speed of communication.
If you pronounce "/etc" as "et cetera", then it will add a step in me parsing your speech ("Oh, he means 'etsy'").
Second, now I have an awkward decision to make when speaking back to you. Do I adapt my pronunciation to yours for the length of this conversation? Or do I pronounce it my way, causing the extra step in your translation of my speech, then also causing you to wonder why I am saying it differently, furthermore causing you to consider whether to change your pronunciation to mine, if nothing else to end this extra thought process every time?
Also, if I adapt my pronunciation to yours, I guess now I need to remember to say it your way every time we talk forever, and say it Henry's way when speaking to him, and now I have this whole table in my head of various pronunciations for various individuals.
And then what happens if I am in conversation with you and Henry at the same time? Do I say things your way, his way, or my way? And what do you do? And what does Henry do?
---
Or we could just stop, agree upon a common pronunciation, and move forward at the normal speed of conversation.
---
To clarify, the tone never should be condescending. This is a small matter. Therefore the tone should be light.
The pronunciation that is deemed "correct" is usually the one of the majority. So it is just an attempt to get everyone on the same page. It strikes me more as "inclusive" than "anti-inclusive". If I were "anti-inclusive", then I would silently let you say it your way, smile inside, and then talk behind your back to Henry about what a newb you are.
I just want to point out that pronouncing etc as etsy isn't universal by any means - in fact I suspect it's a very American pronunciation. If you pronounced it 'etsy' in a sentence here in the UK, people wouldn't understand what you're talking about.
Agree. Most English people at least would be nonplussed if you said "etsy etsy" rather than "etcetra etcetra" to indicate something that goes on and on.
Do you mean AmE speakers? Because 'confused' is (roughly) what it means to me, a BrE speaker, but your comment made me curious and indeed Wiktionary gives def 2 (proscribed, US, informal) as 'unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed' instead.
Only the directory is pronounced etsy. The rest of the time we say et cetera.
I don't even know how widespread etsy is for the directory. I hardly ever hear anyone pronounce anything, since most communication among programmers is written.
> Or we could just stop, agree upon a common pronunciation, and move forward at the normal speed of conversation.
We can. That's largely fine.
But it is also worth recognizing that a root cause of this problem is the community's desire to use shortened names for everything. C/UNIX (and later Linux) has this convention and it leads to way more of these shibboleths than other ecosystems.
I would say unless it's someone extremely junior just use whatever they use. Communication is already difficult enough. "use customer's language", show some empathy
I've been using *NIXes for 15 years. I'm probably going to use them for at least 15 more. I'm never going to pronounce etc as etsy. It just sounds silly. e-t-c forever!
While I've heard people pronounce it that way, given that "var" is short for "variable" or "varying" (as in capable of changing), I've primarily heard people pronounce it as the first syllable of "variable": vair.
(I have also, rarely, heard people pronounce "variable" as though the first syllable rhymes with "far".)
Isn’t there a US/UK difference? It seems to me that English people pronounce this closer to (though not exactly) a as in “jar” than to e as in “very”, though I think I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum.
To my (admittedly non-native) ears, an open and long sound is strange in such a word, and the closed a sounds better. Same with i versus ai in bin or lib.
265 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadKnowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper
In my experience, I'm in the minority in pronouncing sudo as soodoo, the majority seem to say pseudo. OTOH I've never heard anyone say fsck as anything other than f-suck
From personal experience at Microsoft the backslash was frequently pronounced "whack" (hence whack whack for unc paths), and the ubiquitous error codes like 0xC0000005 were "c-bazillion-5"
f-suck is a new one for me though. I would say F S C K to someone else, but I call it fusk in my head.
On the other hand Soo Doo sounds like a pig farmer's wife calling the swine in for their slop. To my ear ;)
man su:
As for fsck I moved from F S C K to progressively bind the S and C in a slide of the tongue, which ends up sounding like F-ceek once I’ve eased in the audience with F-(s)ceek(ay) (parentheses get progressively toned down as I speak faster)That or just “FS check”.
Never heard bazillion. But many of us used to memorize a bunch of hexadecimal codes and know the symbolic names based on the visual of the hex digits. After repeat lookups the common ones just stay in your brain without effort. The one you shared looks like STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
I'm originally Italian and my English is now quite good. A very, very common mistake among most "mediterranean" and "romance languages" (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian) people when speaking English is to pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.
Another very common mistake in my language group is the "gn", as in signal.
Correct English is sig-nal [0], while my group usually says it with a different "gn" sound [1].
Well, there's much more, of course, but I wanted to share these two just because, anecdotally, I hear the mistake very often.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whOXnmbOJvQ
[1]: https://forvo.com/word/segnale/
But we do have the same problem as Italians with "pseudo": the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it?!? :-p
Wait, they're skipping it?! Now that you mentioned it I think you're quite right, I don't remember hearing that many "p"s in front of "seudo".
I'm genuinely lost reading your comment as neither the p nor the i are silent in pissed (/pɪst/). The only weird part is the "ed" pronounced "t" but that's fairly common in English.
I also don't get the part about "ps" in romance languages. There is no special pronunciation rule regarding this group of letters in French. Are you sure it's not specific to Italian?
Edit: I think I now realized you might be talking about the pronunciation of words like pseudo and psyched where the p would indeed be pronunced where it French (and I guess in the same way in Italian).
For gn we have ñ, so we're not tempted to interpret it a la francesa.
Indeed, the best example I can find is LateX. You can tell who's read the first pages of the docs from that.
> English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with the letters τεχ...; and this same Greek word means art as well as technology. Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.
> Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.
I'm Greek and I pronounce LaTeX as "LAY-tek". I just tried pronouncing it "LAY-tech" with a Greek "chi" sound ("λέει-τεχ") and I sounded so silly I almost spat my coffee all over my monitor (only "almost" because I wasn't drinking any coffee). Ain't no way I'm calling it that.
And note that, being Greek, I can actually pronounce "χ" correctly. Most Native English-speaking folks I've heard trying to do the same sound like they're in immediate need of someone administering the Heimleich manoeuver to them.
Btw, I pronounce "Heimlich" with a Greek "χ" also. I bet most native English-speaking folks pronounce it elsewise. Perhaps as "Heimlick".
I wonder how many other people code-switch in this way to try make themselves better understood, when actually we would still understand one another if we just used our internal pronunciation?
I suspect that split pronunciation between head and mouth is very common. I do the same thing with some words, like giblet, which in my head has a hard g, but when I say it I say it with a soft g.
I guess that’s the sort of nonsense one should expect from a person who wrongly abhors the great and beautiful emacs.
ducks
This is easy to do for many?
In my experience, Anglo-Saxons can seldom pronounce “GNU” in one syllable, but they can this?
Onset: shm. Nucleus: o. Coda: d. One syllable.
The trick is one continuous motion of pursing your lips, closing and then opening your mouth as you roll the constants together.
I wonder if the grandparent is French, because I would never have considered to pronounce chmod like this. Then again, I say C H mod and C H own, which apparently isn't the standard pronunciation, so what do I know!
I think what I’ve learned today is that no one pronounces any of these words even remotely the same!
...and while we’re at it, let’s do “char.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics#English_phonotact...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Phonotactics
/ʃm/ is not a legal onset in native English. (Let alone /tʃm/, which is how I pronounce "chmod" - two syllables, /tʃə 'mɔːd/.)
"Schmear" is a Yiddish loanword coming from German, where /ʃm/ is perfectly legal. So it's pronounceable by the human mouth, it's just a little awkward for English speakers.
/sm/ and /ʃr/ are both legal in English, so you might think of it as something like those. Can you pronounce "smear" or "shrine" as one syllable?
(I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)
Oh it sure is in Croatian (and other Slavic languages), "tʃ" is written as "č". We even have slang words like "čmr-lji-ti" [t͡ʃmrʎiti]. "r" (rolling r) can function as a vowel.
The Dutch word “striktst” is of course also pronounced exactly how it's spelled, and in one syllable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Phonotactics
On-topic, I pronounce chmod as one syllable with "sh", like schmuck.
/tS/ is quite a different story due to it being an affricative.
That's ... weird. It's pretty similar to "knee", but with an "oo" sound. Are you saying people pronounce "ge-noo"?
The reason this cluster is so difficult for Anglo-Saxon is exactly because English lacks it; it historically had it, which explains the many words that are written as such, for etymological reasons.
Even the actual word “gnu" is pronounced /n u/, not /g n u/, but the “GNU operating system” is typically pronounced /g @ 'n u/, in two syllables, with stress on the second.
It’s just pronounced ‘new’ isn’t it? How many syllabus can you fit in that?
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.html
I've never ever heard anyone say this. Usually I hear the spelled out E-T-C and occasionally "et cetera" but never "etsy"
Nice to meet you. I've been saying that for 5 years now. Since etc is _et caetera_ I read it as _et c..._ hence the pronunciation.
Weirdly I've always assumed the opposite of you, "etsy" being someone new (and very weird) and "et cetera" being correct.
Yes, British.
I can't accept the US date format as sane and I'm not sure about this etsy thing either. :P
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History
There's just so much information *everywhere* that we just aren't in isolated little universes anymore.
Podcasts and video, whether it's official company presentations or not.
Rightly or wrongly, I prefer that pronunciation too. It's less cumbersome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
(in fact, the girls name actually sounds like the greek letter "mu" as it's spelled and pronounced in Swedish)
It's not right of course.
English equivalents not necessary; I don't mind picking the appropriate tidbit out of a fragment of speech in a video for example.
I could just as easily stare at an IPA pronunciation for a bit too.
The name “My” is not unheard of in danish and we also have a word “my”, for very small measures, with the same pronunciation. It should be close enough the the Swedish pronunciation for your purpose.
Here is an entry in a danish dictionary. Click the yellow speaker for pronunciation:
https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=My&tab=for
Hrm, now to start saying "MeSQL" and seeing what happens...
If memory serves, he also has a son (whose name I can't remember) after which he named some other piece of software (which I also can't remember).
All of this is almost certainly mentioned in that link you shared although, at the moment, I just can't be bothered to click it.
Personally I cut it down the middle and go with 'squill' but then I always said 'scizzy' instead of 'scuzzy' for SCSI.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/what-is-mysql.html
There's an equivalent page in the SqlServer docs somewhere that recommends SequelServer as the idiomatic pronunciation.
I pronounce each of them idiomatically. When saying SQL I tend to say S-Q-L unless I'm around people who tend to say Sequel, in which case I say it that way. Most people I meet in person also tend to say S-Q-L, presumably because that is how it is written.
According to a book I read years ago, some people pronounce it "Squirrel", but I've never personally met one.
Interesting. Adding to that, MQTT is pronounced as Mosquitto.
Until I realised that you probably mean the American pronunciation of "squirrel" that sounds something like "skwerl"? I grew up calling the animal a "skwi-rull" :)
[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGEL...
But I also capitalize command names like Ls so I'm probably out on my own here.
Only in written correspondence I assume? Macs are the only system that would let you do that in actual use AFAIK (and if you want to break out of that habit I've got an OS to sell you ;)
How did you get into this habit though? Are you an old Lisper by chance?
I am not an old Lisper, but I am becoming a young-ish one.
You're going to end up spelling it if someone doesn't know what you're talking about anyway, might as well say the unabbreviated version so at least it has some semantic meaning.
* I've heard "char" like "charbroiled", "care", "car" and some people always just say "character"
- “#!”: hash bang (not “shub-ang”)
- sh: shuh like le as in le monde (not “ess ayche”)
- tcl: tickle
One of the hardest for me though is on a different topic to pronunciation. What name would you give to a variable that keeps track of the current working directory? What name did bash use for this variable?
Answers (for me):
- pwd: is “print working directory”
- $PWD: is “pcurrent working directory”, the P is silent.
And, it’s always a shebang line :)
It's short for binary. And a 'bin' is where you put your rubbish, not your hard work.
However, I will continue saying "bin" because old habits die hard and "bine" just sounds wrong to my brain for no good reason :)
--
edit: A quick search turned up the `bind` command to bind a name to a socket. That makes sense.
Who cares though? Why does "correct pronunciation" matter? Linux is nowadays used by many more non-native English speakers who will pronounce it very differently.
This attempt at correcting others seems like gatekeeping and, to me personally, feels like a very anti-inclusive thing to do.
Tangentially, the fact that some of the pronunciation is so non-intuitive (e.g. /etc -> etsy) should be a bug, not a feature and pride point. Can you imagine if you reported that a workflow is non-intuitive in a piece of SW and the devs told you "we know, cool, right?!"
Most people just want to know what you are talking about when you say libe or cat slash prots slash mem in fo or worse.
Nothing is more infuriating when people start using wrong words in a 10h telco instead of agreed upon vocabulary, which includes the correct pronunciation! Scratch correct. It's the agreed upon pronunciation we all ought to use when working together.
[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
Agreed upon by whom? By the in-group? Why does this "agreed-upon pronunciation" take precedence over the "agreed-upon pronunciation" of English?
Excellent question. I don't know. People just assume that precedence as axiomatic (they just agree upon it), because it seems to work... well, easier with? More efficient? That's a subject for a study, I guess.
Of course by the in-group. People invent their own languages just to keep other peoples out of their culture or subculture. Since centuries. Another subject for a study. Knock yourself out, do the research and write a paper.
Totally agree. This is also why doctors say 'pancreatic islets' rather than 'pink wibbly bit'.
Using precise technical language does create a barrier to entry but this is a side-effect of the primary purpose of precise technical language: to allow practitioners to communicate accurately and unambiguously.
What a weird asssumption to make. Projecting?
When I was very young, I had a friend who pronounced "modem" as "mod-DEEM" because he knew that the word is a portmanteau of "MOdulator-DEModulator".
His first exposure to "modem" was in print (computer magazines or BBSes), and it was some years before he heard the word spoken.
Many years later (but still many years ago!), I was pulled into a disagreement among a fledgling group of web designers: Is "GIF" pronounced with a hard G or a soft G ("jif")?
I realized that I'd never spoken the word aloud, and chose the hard G, because the word is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format.
Needless to say, I did not resolve that argument with my appeal to originalism. In the intervening years, I've spoken the word countless times, and settled on the soft G because it flows better in speech. As far as I know, the correctness debate is still ongoing today.
PS I also say "libe." As if shortening the word library.
I wouldn't spell it out as 'e t c' though, I pronounce '/etc/' the same as 'etc.'/'&c.' (that is, with a reluctantly soft 'c' in 'cetera', since despite knowing better it's not worth getting into every time you say it!)
If you pronounce "/etc" as "et cetera", then it will add a step in me parsing your speech ("Oh, he means 'etsy'").
Second, now I have an awkward decision to make when speaking back to you. Do I adapt my pronunciation to yours for the length of this conversation? Or do I pronounce it my way, causing the extra step in your translation of my speech, then also causing you to wonder why I am saying it differently, furthermore causing you to consider whether to change your pronunciation to mine, if nothing else to end this extra thought process every time?
Also, if I adapt my pronunciation to yours, I guess now I need to remember to say it your way every time we talk forever, and say it Henry's way when speaking to him, and now I have this whole table in my head of various pronunciations for various individuals.
And then what happens if I am in conversation with you and Henry at the same time? Do I say things your way, his way, or my way? And what do you do? And what does Henry do?
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Or we could just stop, agree upon a common pronunciation, and move forward at the normal speed of conversation.
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To clarify, the tone never should be condescending. This is a small matter. Therefore the tone should be light.
The pronunciation that is deemed "correct" is usually the one of the majority. So it is just an attempt to get everyone on the same page. It strikes me more as "inclusive" than "anti-inclusive". If I were "anti-inclusive", then I would silently let you say it your way, smile inside, and then talk behind your back to Henry about what a newb you are.
Human languages are hugely inefficient!
I don't even know how widespread etsy is for the directory. I hardly ever hear anyone pronounce anything, since most communication among programmers is written.
We can. That's largely fine.
But it is also worth recognizing that a root cause of this problem is the community's desire to use shortened names for everything. C/UNIX (and later Linux) has this convention and it leads to way more of these shibboleths than other ecosystems.
I would say unless it's someone extremely junior just use whatever they use. Communication is already difficult enough. "use customer's language", show some empathy
Personally I just like using it as banal objection to win arguments.
While I've heard people pronounce it that way, given that "var" is short for "variable" or "varying" (as in capable of changing), I've primarily heard people pronounce it as the first syllable of "variable": vair.
(I have also, rarely, heard people pronounce "variable" as though the first syllable rhymes with "far".)
To my (admittedly non-native) ears, an open and long sound is strange in such a word, and the closed a sounds better. Same with i versus ai in bin or lib.