Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

linux.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 266 posts

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

#201

Post by narag »

brmgb wrote: post #190
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pseudo 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…

> 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…

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.

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

#202

Post by UncleMeat »

combatentropy wrote: post #88
BossingAround wrote: post #73

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 an…

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,…

> 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.

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

#204

Post by antonyh »

Common perhaps but Etsy would be confusing in the modern era. Etsy is a web site.

I learned C with VI over twenty years ago, and was taught to call it ‘vie’ rhymes with ‘by’. Always wanted to call it ‘six’.

As for Emacs rhymes with ‘junk’, GTFO. Either this is a joke or a very unexpected pronunciation that I can’t fathom. I say ‘eee-mac-sss’.

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

#205

Post by ajdude »

I’m 31 years old and have been using Linux most of my life. A few of my friends and people at work do too, but this is the first time I’ve heard /etc pronounced as etsy. It’s always been “etcetera” for me. This led me to look up the history of that directory: “ But people encountered a situation to keep some files which can be a config file or a data file or a socket file or some other files. So they implemented a folder to keep all these files in it and they named it as /etc(As said earlier etcetera). As time passed the meaning of this folder has changed but not the name “etc”. Now /etc folder means a central location for all your configuration files are located and this can be treated as nerve centre of your Linux/Unix machine.” (from https://www.linuxnix.com/linux-directory-structure-explained... )

If that’s truly the case, I’m curious how it got from “etcetera” to “etsy”

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

#206

Post by skwirl »

antonyh wrote: post #204

Common perhaps but Etsy would be confusing in the modern era. Etsy is a web site. I learned C with VI over twenty years ago, and was taught to call it ‘vie’ rhymes with ‘by’. Always wanted to call it ‘six’. As for Emacs rhymes with ‘junk’, GTFO. Either this is a joke or a very unexpected pronunciation that I can’t fathom. I say ‘eee-mac-sss’.

It is most obviously a joke.

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

#207

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

exikyut wrote: post #166
brobinson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Now I'm genuinely curious what the modern equivalent of education by phone menu might be. There's just so much information *everywhere* that we just aren't in isolated little universes anymore.

> what the modern equivalent of education by phone menu might be.

Podcasts and video, whether it's official company presentations or not.

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

#209

Post by Xophmeister »

The first (and, so far, only) time I heard someone use “etsy”, I misheard it as “ansi” and looked a bit confused as I’d never heard of /ansi before. I usually pronounce it as “et cet”. Needless to say, the path didn’t exist, which heightened my embarrassment!

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

#210

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

politelemon wrote: post #142
lordnacho wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper Indeed, the best example I can find is LateX. You can tell who's read the first pages of the docs from that.

TIL: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/17509 > 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…

Likewise, LaTeX isn't pronounced as the rubber derivative, but as "Lah-tecchh" /ˈlɑːtɛx/ (IPA via Wikipedia)
Post reply on HN