[TUHS] pronouncing *nix formulas (was: screen editors)

At 2020-02-04T09:40:18+0100, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote: 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 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. 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: 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! creat: Crete (hic Rhodus, hic salta!) fuser: fuser (like the component of a laser printer--not "eff-user"; eff that) groff: Groff (like the surname, not "jee-roff") troff: trough (but nroff I pronounce the accepted way) (And did people really say "dee-eye-tee-roff" for "ditroff"?) 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" Debian: originally "Dee-bee-un", now "Deb-ee-un" I've heard many other newcomers make the same inferences I did in these last two cases. I would editorialize on the fetishization of terseness in textual interface design[1], but I have to locate my APL typeball. Regards, Branden [1] A terseness that is hurled away with great enthusiasm by the maintainers of many libraries written in C, who, facing an unanticipated need, pile yet another damn parameter onto their hapless function calls. Six, seven parameters? Keep 'em coming. Consistency of ordering between commonly-used arguments in the same library? Hell no! Structs and pointers to structs are only for getting yourself into trouble with. Remember: always mistrust your compiler and copy a struct element by element, and only use structure pointers for dangling reference mischief, never to simplify your function calls. Always prematurely optimize except when spilling registers between stack frames on IA-32. But be sure and -fomit-frame-pointer so your mess is even harder to clean up! Every register is precious except the ones you wasted on your yard-long parameter list. Guess I got an editorial in after all.