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Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

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Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#41
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

I pronounce chmod and chown same as you do. Although sometimes I'll pronounce chown as one syllable... not sure the when or the why..

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#42
post #25

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"). [1] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGEL...

I mostly hear the "cuttle" variant, but with the t/d ambiguity of a lot of american pronunciation it sounds more like "cuddle" to me, and I like that

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#46
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

White-bread American Midwesterner. :-) Not sure where I picked this pronunciation up. 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.”

As in chard, but maybe we should all say it as in chardonnay

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#47
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say f-stab in my head, but F S tab to others.

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.

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#48
post #26
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t. There’s no vowel sound between sh and m. Think schmear. Onset: shm. Nucleus: o. Coda: d. One syllable.

Y'all would probably enjoy Wikipedia's discussions of English phonotactics: 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 p…

> (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.

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#49
post #9
post #2

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 pronounce…

I was a su-dough person until I realise that sudo stands for 'super user do' or 'su do', so I switched to soodoo - it makes a lot more sense that way. 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.

I'm for su-dough - to my ear it evokes the martial art Judo which makes some kind of sense considering what it does.

On the other hand Soo Doo sounds like a pig farmer's wife calling the swine in for their slop. To my ear ;)

Re: Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

#50
post #9
post #2

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 pronounce…

I was a su-dough person until I realise that sudo stands for 'super user do' or 'su do', so I switched to soodoo - it makes a lot more sense that way. 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.

I’ve always called it “fusck”.
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