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Pronunciation Guide for Unix

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Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#31

Post by labster »

alisonatwork wrote: post #24
pyuser583 wrote: post #12

I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”

I care zero, it's still "F stab" to me. And URL is "earl". But despite favoring the short version for those two, I always spell out every letter of SQL, and pronounce etc as "et cetera". None of it is consistent or rational and it doesn't matter because pretty much all of the time people know exactly what you mean. Perhaps I was lucky that one of my first bosses who'd been using UNIX since the 80s pronounced vi like…

Nowadays, vi is pronounced “vim”.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#35

Post by amyjess »

vincent-manis wrote: post #9

I don't want to blame “sharp” for # on Microsoft. Back in the 1970s, it was the standard pronunciation around the University of BC. And in those days, many terminals and other output devices were somewhat low-fidelity, so the difference between the octothorp and the sharp would not have been visible.

Also I'm fairly sure "shebang" is a contraction of "sharp bang".

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#36

Post by scarby2 »

it confuses me that he lists brackets as [] but not for ().

() are brackets [] are square brackets and {} are curly brackets.

certainly if you're from the UK and in maths class grew up being told about: BODMAS - Brackets, Orders Division, Multiplication, Addition Subtraction

I believe PEMDAS is more common in the USA

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#37

Post by kergonath »

alisonatwork wrote: post #25
VTimofeenko wrote: post #19

> ¤ > Sonne So that's what that symbol meant on the good old КУВТ-2. Now my life is complete. Having learned Unix-y stuff in non-English environment, I still pronounce a lot of things in a weird way despite having very little accent otherwise. /etc will always be either "ye-t-k" or "ye-t-tse" and yum will be "yu-oo-m"

It's fun working with people from different countries who have developed their own regional pronunciation. I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H. I like that a lot of common tools don't really have a canonical pronunciation because they have spread in use far beyond the…

> I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H

There is something satisfying in saying “shroot” or “shown”. It never occurred to me that C and H could be pronounced separately, aren’t they an abbreviation for “change” or something like that?

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#38

Post by pyuser583 »

alisonatwork wrote: post #24
pyuser583 wrote: post #12

I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”

I care zero, it's still "F stab" to me. And URL is "earl". But despite favoring the short version for those two, I always spell out every letter of SQL, and pronounce etc as "et cetera". None of it is consistent or rational and it doesn't matter because pretty much all of the time people know exactly what you mean. Perhaps I was lucky that one of my first bosses who'd been using UNIX since the 80s pronounced vi like…

I’m glad they corrected me, because I hadn’t realized the “fs” was short for file system.

I still don’t know what “-tab” is about, but it’s used a lot in /etc. Maybe because the file formats use \t as separators?

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#40

Post by nequo »

scarby2 wrote: post #36

it confuses me that he lists brackets as [] but not for (). () are brackets [] are square brackets and {} are curly brackets. certainly if you're from the UK and in maths class grew up being told about: BODMAS - Brackets, Orders Division, Multiplication, Addition Subtraction I believe PEMDAS is more common in the USA

That's interesting. Wiktionary says that brackets are () in the UK but [] in the US, and that other brackets are called different things to disambiguate them.

Using "brackets" for parentheses certainly sounds odd to me even though I never learned "PEMDAS."

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