I said “Freznul” for Fresnel in front of a lighting designer. He said “ah! So you’ve been reading!”
I remember that now when someone pronounces something as it’s spelled. They’ve likely been studying by actually reading something, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
One of our friends has a great one - they (husband and wife) both say "Carry-catcher". For example: "Man, that portrait looks more like a carry-catcher!"
Huh... TIL I've been pronouncing it wrong. Either the Fresnel equations never came up while I was studying physics or my professor(s) also mispronounced it lol
The article mentions GNU, and it took me a long time until I found out that English speakers pronounce it "noo", "new" or similar. My native language routinely has four consonants in a row, sometimes more, and gn is a perfectly common consonant sequence so it never occurred to me that the GNU project could be pronounced as anything but gnu. Turns out English speakers intuitively drop the initial g, or often have to insert a pretty obvious vowel guh-noo style.
It's not entirely dropped, it's a glottal 'g' that manifests mostly as a slight pause instead of a sound, although you can often see the larynx movement.
It's because the animal is called a gnu and a lot of us heard of the animal way before we ever heard of GNU. Sometimes, part of me thinks GNU is pronounced like that because someone wanted to be an asshole.
That's why I (despite being an English speaker) have always pronounced it "g-new," not caring what was correct. Pronouncing it like the animal seems designed to cause unnecessary confusion. Reminds me of the MST3K skit where Mike told the bots he was a big fan of Noh Japanese theater.
> Linus (Torvalds)
technically "LEE-nuhs" in those European languages while "LYE-nihs" in English, but he actually doesn't care what you say
It's hard not to forgive people to pronounce your name wrong, when they've never met you or anyone that pronounces it correctly. They've only read it on the screen and they still say your name as best they can.
>It might also be a Nordic thing. In my experience we go out of our way to allow for English pronunciations of our names.
Do you also (and correctly, I might add) decry the errors of the Anglosphere as Mr. Wirth did[0][1]?
Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his
name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into
(Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name,
but Americans call him by value.
For the longest time I would pronounce $FOO as "string foo" in my head and occasionally out loud, because that's how my dad said it when talking about BASIC code in the 70s & 80s.
Then I heard a younger co-worker do it while we were talking about sh code and felt bad for unintentionally infecting him with a nonsense habit.
I always said "vee-aye" for vi, but I just say "vim" like it looks like it should be said. If it actually stood for "VI Improved" it should be "viim" (pronounced veem?).
Yeah, thanks for not actually settling a damn thing with that description. The guy who created it says it with a soft G, so that's a reasonable authority to me. Anyone else, it's just their opinion.
I just… can’t. It’s lay-teks to me. I have to deal with non-technical people and having every conversation about a LaTeX feature turn into a “well, actually” discussion of Ancient Greek sounds like hell for all of us.
Well, first of all LaTeX is derived from TeX. And the X isn't an x but the Greek letter X whose pronunciation seems to depend on Greek epoch and also geographic preferences. The final say would have Donald Knuth. I think he said it's like the Ch in (Happy) Chanukka ...
And again, a case where the creator could have done everyone a favor and not given it an obscure name that only an academic (and probably not many of those) would be able to pronounce correctly.
That’s one controversy that shouldn’t be. Quoth Knuth (The TeXbook, chapter 1, “The name of the game”):
> 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 like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.
Readit News
I remember that now when someone pronounces something as it’s spelled. They’ve likely been studying by actually reading something, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
(caricature)
It's hard not to forgive people to pronounce your name wrong, when they've never met you or anyone that pronounces it correctly. They've only read it on the screen and they still say your name as best they can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg
Do you also (and correctly, I might add) decry the errors of the Anglosphere as Mr. Wirth did[0][1]?
[0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_5/...[1] No, this is nothing new. Then again, perhaps someone will see it for the first time and be one of today's "lucky 10,000"[2]
[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/
Then I heard a younger co-worker do it while we were talking about sh code and felt bad for unintentionally infecting him with a nonsense habit.
I also loved they pointed out pronouncing `regex` as "rejects" was wrong.
> 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 like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.
That's the Mad Magazine Knuth speaking: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-enduring-art-of-computer-p...