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Pronunciation Guide for Unix

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Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#91

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. 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?

They are indeed an abbreviation for "change". change {root,own(er),mod(e),gr(ou)p}...

I am one of those who say "c-h-..." as well. For some reason I find it less awkward to say than "shroot."

Perhaps the first thing I think of with "ch" is the hard C or K, like "character." That sound wouldn't work in those cases. 'Kroot', 'kown', eh... no, so "C-H-..." it is.

On that note the page mentions"char" at the top, lists "care" and I more frequently hear others use "char" as in to burn. In my groups I think I'm the only one that pronounces it as first syllable of the actual word.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#92
post #31

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…

Nowadays, vi is pronounced “vim”.

The latest pronunciation is "n'vim". Cf "n'wah".

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#93

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

Reminds me of the brain fart I had one day looking at a ps output that had line wrapped and wondering what the heck the "c lock" process was. I felt foolish about ten seconds later.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#94
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

From my kids' school maths I know this rather as BIDMAS - with the 'I' standing for indices (i.e. powers), which makes more sense, no? For my own part, I don't remember any fancy acronyms being rolled out to help us remember this stuff when I were a lad. Kids today grumble grumble etc.

IIRC it was changed in the curriculum at some point, since we had both BODMAS and later BIDMAS. I imagine it was done for the reason you gave, it does make more sense

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#95

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.

I do the same. It has always annoyed me that we have a 3 syllable name for the letter W.

Always jangles the nerves hearing people saying

Gee esss dou·ble U 111 2222 333 444 5 for Gun shot wound 111 2222 33333

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#96

My favorite troll prank is when people say ‘vi’, I correct them and say it’s pronounced ’six’. I’ve been milking that one for years. Perhaps I’m a Roman numerologist at heart.

"vi is pronounced six, it rhymes with emacs" where you pronounce it "emix".

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#97
post #71

> - Hyphen: minus (sign), dash, dak , option, flag, negative (sign), worm, bithorpe Instead of dak , I've heard this and tend to use it as tac instead, which apparently originates from flag separators in the Navy [0], so there is some logic behind it. [0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191807/pronuncia...

You have solved a mystery that has plagued me for years, thank you!

tac took off at a former company of mine and I really like it. The hard t and k sound make it a much a better word than dash if you're describing a set of command line options.

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#99
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…

When I'm thinking "change ownership" I pronounce it ch-oh-n with a long O, but when I just read it in context I can't help but pronounce it like "clown".

Lately I've been listening to Linux-related podcasts and it always takes me a couple of seconds to figure out what they're talking about when they say stuff like "slash et-see". (Which is fantastic, because it recalls "&c", et+c.)

Re: Pronunciation Guide for Unix

#100

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’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?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tabulate
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