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

The Pronunciation of Django

thoughtstreams.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#21

Post by mikhael »

jtauber wrote: post #8
mikhael wrote: post #7

Is this a deliberately confusing explanation? "... this falsehood perpetuated on the big screen in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained where the eponymous character spells his name, adding 'the D is silent'." ... "The D is not silent, it's very much pronounced." ... "... Tarantino's film teaches the correct pronunciation ... it is incorrect to say 'the D is silent'." ... "But in French, /dʒ/ can be written 'dj' beca…

/dʒ/ doesn't have to be be written "dj" (it isn't in English, for example). It just is written that way in French because "j" alone is just /ʒ/ (as you quote above). When you ask "why not just say...", well that is pretty much what I say in the first sentence of the third card.

I find this even more confusing.

#1: You preface that sentence with "But in French" so why mention English? Can /dʒ/ actually be written some other way than "dj" in French? From your post, it seems like the answer is no.

#2: The first paragraph of the third card neither mentions nor implies (to the non-linguists among us, at least) anything about English "j" having a hint of "d". This is something I'd never realized before, and only discovered it by saying "James" aloud a few times after this post; and I'm still not 100% sure that it's right, based on the post.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#22

Post by jtauber »

ksaraghan wrote: post #13

As a linguistics student, I don't like this argument. Orthographic in English represents the affricate /dʒ/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English. by itself (generally) represents /dʒ/, so the doesn't contribute any additional phonetic content to the word, so you could, in fact, call it a "silent" . French has a phoneme /ʒ/, written , but, lacking the affricate /dʒ/, has to represent that sound as a sequence o…

We're talking about a web framework named after a Belgian with a Romani nickname whose creator (the web framework's) desires that the web framework be pronounced the same as its namesake. If it were truly Anglicized, you would expect it to be spelled "Jango".

So how can we best analyze why it is spelled and yet pronounced /dʒ-/?

Either it's because:

1. is silent and is /dʒ/; or 2. is pronounced /d/ and is pronounced /ʒ/

2 seems by far the more perspicuous analysis to me given the absence of other examples of a silent . And it's certainly the correct analysis in the case of the guitarist.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#23

Post by fusiongyro »

jdlshore wrote: post #3
jdunck wrote: post #2

This is in reference to Tarantino's recently-released movie "Django Unchained": http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/06/django-unchained-traile... Only Django devs are likely to care about this, as air-traffic controllers howling at the inanity of the Top Gun fly-by (or, closer to home, every 3D representation of hacking in movies ever).

It's not silent in French. In English, it is. It's pronounced the same way as the J in James, which happens to be my name. To paraphrase Ron Jeffries, the D in my name is silent... and invisible.

In French 'j' carries /ʒ/ and the digraph 'dj' carries /d͡ʒ/. In English, 'j' carries /d͡ʒ/ and there's no consistent orthographic convention for just /ʒ/ ('si', 'zh', 'j', and 'z' all do the job in different contexts, and probably others as well). There isn't really a /d/ as such in /d͡ʒ/.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#24

Post by _delirium »

eel wrote: post #16

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/. Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's asse…

More careful IPA emphasizes this by not transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be treated as one".

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#25

Post by jtauber »

sirclueless wrote: post #14

This is a pretty ridiculous claim in my mind. You start with the premise that the "Dj" in Django sounds like the "J" in James or Jason or jangle or nearly every other English word with this pronunciation. Now, based on linguistic history and French pronunciation norms, you claim it is more appropriate to conclude that all of these other words have implied "D's" than to conclude that Django has a silent "D". You might…

If you're trying to explain why /dʒɑ̃ɡo/ is spelled , it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> and /ʒ/ -> than to posit the comes from nowhere and is just silent.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#27

Post by _delirium »

jtauber wrote: post #12
graue wrote: post #11

Now that's a confusing explanation! Most Python programmers I've met have pronounced it "duh-jango", and I thought this article was going to defend that pronunciation. But it actually says that pronunciation is wrong, and the D is, from an English speaker's perspective, silent. But because J is pronounced differently in French, saying that the D is silent is, although it leads English speakers to pronounce the name c…

The reason "Django" is pronounced /​dʒɑ̃ɡo/ or /dʒæŋɡəʊ/ is not because the "D" is silent and the "j" is pronounced /dʒ/ but rather because the "D" is pronounced /d/ and the "j" is pronounced /ʒ/. Explaining how to pronounce it by saying "the D is silent" might be helpful but it's technically incorrect. It may seem like pedantry to many but I thought people with an interest in linguistics might find it helpful.

That's not a precisely correct explanation either, though, because English 'j', pronounced /d͡ʒ/, is a single consonant sound (a voiced palato-alveolar affricate), not a sequence of two consonants. Though it's true that it's what English speakers would produce if you asked them to pronounce /d/ + /ʒ/ in sequence, because they always collapse into the single consonant. Not sure if that's also true in French.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#28

Post by jtauber »

eel wrote: post #16

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/. Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's asse…

I honestly don't think people who say "the D is silent" are making a distinction between the true affricate and /dʒ/.

Saying "the D is silent" is missing the most sensible explanation for why the name "Django" is spelled that way: namely that the would normally be pronounced /ʒ/ in French (not sure about Romani).

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#29

Post by jtauber »

_delirium wrote: post #24
eel wrote: post #16

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/. Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's asse…

More careful IPA emphasizes this by not transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be tre…

Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the in the name "Django".

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#30

Post by thomasjoulin »

sirclueless wrote: post #14

This is a pretty ridiculous claim in my mind. You start with the premise that the "Dj" in Django sounds like the "J" in James or Jason or jangle or nearly every other English word with this pronunciation. Now, based on linguistic history and French pronunciation norms, you claim it is more appropriate to conclude that all of these other words have implied "D's" than to conclude that Django has a silent "D". You might…

From a french speaker point of view, it doesn't makes sense indeed.

It's interesting to note that in the french trailer, Django says "Django – Avec un D" (Django, with a D). Also the trailer is much more graphic than the (censored?) U.S. one

Post reply on HN