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Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

I've always pronounced it as 'care', not because of how the identifier is spelled but because it's the first syllable of the word 'character'.

I don't think there's a consensus between car/char/care, though, even among C's creators. But if there was, I would vote for 'care'.

I always thought SQL was another weird one. When discussing the language itself, you can say 'sequel' or 'ess queue ell' interchangeably, but when referring to a database that has "SQL" in its name, there is a DB-specific one true pronunciation:

* SQL Server: 'sequel server'

* PostgreSQL: 'post gress queue ell'

* SQLite: 'sequel light'

* MySQL: 'my ess queue ell'

There's no complete consensus on any of those- just a preponderance of one, or an officially endorsed pronunciation in a FAQ someplace.

I've also heard 'my squeal' for MySQL, breaking out of the 'sequel'/'ess queue ell' duopoly altogether.

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In my youth, I pronounced SQL as "squall". Quickly changed to "ess queue ell" when starting out professionally...

> because it's the first syllable of the word 'character'.

Except the first syllable of 'character' is neither 'car' nor 'care', unless you have a really weird accent or are intentionally making fun of the English upper class.

PS: I always liked "squirrel" for SQL but sadly that one never got much traction.

Alright, I'll bite. How is 'care' not phonetically the first syllable of 'character'? And if it's not, then what is?

'Care' rhymes with 'bear', 'share', 'fair'; 'car' rhymes with 'bar', 'far', 'mar'. 'Character', to me, is pronounced 'car-ack-ter' with the emphasis on the first syllable. It doesn't sound anything like 'care'.

Conversations like this are hard because accent doesn't transmit through text. I'm Irish.

Ohhhh, that's where the discrepancy is coming from. I didn't know it was pronounced 'car-ack-ter' with an Irish accent. I was thinking in terms of an American accent which is where the confusion came from.

The "listen" button here pronounces the words with an American accent:

https://translate.google.com/#en/ja/character%0Acare

> The "listen" button here pronounces the words with an American accent

I think that feature must be localised -- here it gives me a (female) voice with an English accent, and the two words sound quite different.

Oops, I was afraid of that. I was hoping the .com domain would have an influence on which voices were picked. I can hear the difference by going to https://translate.google.co.uk/ though

Forvo is a great site for this kind of stuff http://forvo.com/search/char/en/

> Conversations like this are hard because accent doesn't transmit through text.

It does if you use IPA.

To my Irish ears, 'car' and 'char' in 'character' sound almost identical. (I pronounce it 'car'.)

The only way I could pronounce it 'care' is if I were from the southern hemisphere.

What's going here is that most Americans have what's known as the marry-merry-Mary merger[1]. Virtually all English speakers outside of North America, as well as some Americans, mostly on the East Coast, pronounce the vowels in these three words differently -- marry is pronounced /mæri/ (/æ/ is the vowel in "cat"), merry is /mɛri/ (/ɛ/ is the vowel in "pet"), and Mary is /meri/ (/e/ is the vowel in "bait"). In those dialects, any vowel can proceed an /r/ that's intervocalic (i.e., both preceded and followed by another vowel), so /r/ acts like any other consonant in that sense.

However, in most American dialects, marry-merry-Mary are all merged and pronounced identically (IPA: /mɛɹi/, though the exact vowel isn't important here, and all three vowels generally sound the same to merged speakers). Furthermore, the first syllable of all these words is usually pronounced the same as the vowel in mare (/mɛɹ/).

So let's put this together. The word "care" is pronounced /kɛr/ in both merged and unmerged dialects (or /kɛː/ if you don't pronounce the /r/ there). In unmerged dialects, the word "character" is pronounced /kærəktər/, so it doesn't make sense that you'd truncate it to /kær/, because /ær/ (or /æː/) at the end of a syllable doesn't occur in any English dialect[2]. In merged dialects, however, "character" is pronounced /kɛrəktər/, so it makes sense to truncate it to /kɛr/, which is a homophone of "care".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

[2]: Except Irish English, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673067.

[3]: I speak a merged dialect, and pronounce "char" as /kɛr/ when I'm reading C code.

That was a surprisingly detailed and well-informed reply. I wish there was some kind of super-upvote for comments like this.

Your post looks interesting and might well be 100% correct but I don't know - nor do I know anyone who knows - what the various little pronunciation guides or whatever they're called mean. It's why people tend to say "car as in carpet".

Try this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...

It's IPA. It's the closest thing we have to an actual way to write down how people pronounce things which has any chance at all of being useful.

This "'foo' as in 'bar'" stuff is worse than useless most of the time, as you've just been shown.

No, "car as in character" is still. Car as in carpet, char as in chart - simple and doesn't require a course in IPA, which may I remind you precisely nobody understands.

> a course in IPA, which may I remind you precisely nobody understands.

Plenty of people understand IPA.

> No, "car as in character" is still.

It's still completely incomprehensible unless you know which vowel sound is meant, which is the whole point of this sub-thread.

I don't know what happened to my post but i meant "car as in character is stupid/ambiguous". But it's perfectly possible to understand "car as in carpet" and it's generally possible to find a similar pronunciation of a sound.

"Plenty of people" is misleading. Plenty as in thousands, millions of people worldwide, possibly, not not plenty as a percentage of the english people world. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of english speakers look at an IPA description of a sound and do anything other than go "what the fuck does that mean?".

Surely if there was consensus, you wouldn't get to vote.

Me good no words. :) At least not right now apparently...

PostgreSQL: "postgres"

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