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Pronunciation Guide for Unix

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Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 once worked with someone who pronounced SQL files as "squalls". That was the weirdest and most creative pronunciation I've heard.

In the 80's I worked with a guy who had a theory that most people who grew up with SQL in the early days pronounce it "sequel", and the younger generation was more used to saying it as the letters; S-Q-L.

At $PREVIOUSJOB I worked with a guy from Boston who pronounced "query" as "quarry". But he had a lot of bizarre pronunciations, so we just let it go. And not just because Boston, either.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#82

My mind was blown when visiting Sweden in 2002 and finding out they pronounce "www" as "vee vee vee" (not just because the letter name double-v makes much more sense than double-u, but because they were smart enough to shorten it in this case). Since then I've pronounced it in English as "dub dub dub" and found people generally understand it. I hope it catches on.

"vu vu vu" in Italian

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#83
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Some other annoying pronunciations I sometimes hear are "yoom" and "pooty" for Yum and Putty. Yet for some reason they get GRUB right, I haven't figured out why. English isn't a phonetically consistent language (ex, "u" sounds different in "put" and "dug") so I guess it can be confusing t…

> I guess it can be confusing

It it confusing, yes. You can understand it through tough thorough thought though.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#84
post #5

It mentions /etc but doesn’t say how to pronounce it. I have always just spelled it out and gets so confused when people pronounce it

Same. It confused me when I heard people pronouncing it "et-see"; at least it wasn't "etcetera" though lol

Ayee, I say etcetera all the time...

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#85
post #50
post #39

I am glad to see that I have been properly indoctrinated. A little bit disappointed that it doesn't clarify how to pronunciations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription ), I was expecting that we could settle on gif once and for all.

Only godless savages and the sort of people who talk at the theatre pronounce it with a soft G.

Ah yes, the Giraffics Interchange Format. If the hard G is sinful, I will turn to face Jod and walk backwards into hell (with apologies to @dril)

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#86
From the derivation section for !’s pronunciation as “bang”:

Alternatively it could have come from comic books, where the words each character utters are shown in a "balloon" near that character's head. When one character shoots another, it is common to see a balloon pointing at the barrel of the gun to denote that the gun had been fired, not merely aimed. That balloon contained the word "!" -- hence, "!" == "Bang!"

I have read extensively through the history of comics, I make them myself, and I don’t think I have ever seen a depiction of a gun firing whose noise is delineated by a word balloon coming from the gun that simply says “!”. Usually the sound would be shown as a “sound effect”, which is just a large word floating in the air near the gun, not contained in a word balloon. And this word would usually be BANG!. With or without the !; it’s very common for sound effects to be unpunctuated.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#89
post #68
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as someone who lives in the UK I call () parenthesis, [] square brackets and {} curly braces to make it (somewhat) clearer. I pronounce root and route differently for the same reason. But I'm a foreigner so I can take some liberties :)

This also in the US, and as elbow brackets.

[deleted]

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 once worked with someone who pronounced SQL files as "squalls". That was the weirdest and most creative pronunciation I've heard.

At one job I had at all agreed that 'Sequel' was dumb and 'Squirrel' would have been better.
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