5 Feb
2020
5 Feb
'20
3:05 a.m.
On Wed, 5 Feb 2020, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Being British/Australian, I say "ee-dee" and "vee-eye", as they are
not really English words. Similarly, I say "ee-max" etc.
> Wikipedia
writes that `ed' would be pronounced ``ee-dee'' (like
> ``vee-eye''), is that what you english speakers do?
Certainly not. When one sees a command name that duplicates a
frequently-used diminituve of a common name, the brain is going to
select that preferentially. Naming your Unix command "mike" and
expecting people to pronounce it
"em-eye-kay-ee" is hopeless.
In that case I would pronounce it as "myke".
In English, thanks to the Great Vowel Shift and other
developments that
differentiated vowel pronunciation from the continent a few hundred
years ago, trailing "I"s tend to be pronounced long (as in
"eye")--but
they also tend to be rare. They occur in proper names like Lodi,
California and Bondi, Australia (which Americans sometimes mis-pronounce
anyway, perhaps influenced by Spanish). A word that looks borrowed from
Latin, Greek, or Spanish will often get back its "-ee" sound for a
trailing "i", but the two-letter command names beloved of the Unix
pioneers offer no etymological hints.
You should hear Americans pronounce the Australian cities of Brisbane
and Melbourne. Also, Wagga Wagga totally throws them (it's pronounced
simly as "Wogguh" here).
I had to teach myself Unix in the early days and so I
wound up with some
idiolectal variants that people consider amusing or objectionable:
OK...
chroot: cheroot (like the cigar)
chown: rhymes with "clown"
chmod: rhymes with "god" or "scrod" (a kind of fish), and resists
the
introduction of a vowel into the leading consonant cluster as
much as possible--it's an ugly one!
OK so far...
creat: Crete (hic Rhodus, hic salta!)
cree-AT.
fuser: fuser (like the component of a laser
printer--not "eff-user"; eff
that)
eff-user, so take that :-)
groff: Groff (like the surname, not
"jee-roff")
jee-roff.
troff: trough (but nroff I pronounce the accepted way)
tee-roff. And, err, how would you pronounce "nroff"?
(And did people really say
"dee-eye-tee-roff" for "ditroff"?)
Likely "dee-eye-troff".
There are a couple of others that I started out
pronouncing in a
nonstandard way, but once I started attending conferences, I
assimilated:
Linux: originally "lye-nucks", now "linn-ucks"
Lee-nux.
Debian: originally "Dee-bee-un", now
"Deb-ee-un"
du-BEE-un.
-- Dave