Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I once saw a YouTube video in which the vlogger consistently mispronounced the title of the game Heretic as though it rhymed with "magnetic". And he did this with at least one other word ("requiem")! Hearing him mis-accent these words was like nails on chalkboard. It's like where have you been, that you're reading these words for the first time, just now?

View on HN

To be fair, when you gain most of your vocabulary by reading, you have to guess at pronunciation most of the time. I read voluminously as a kid but still mispronounce words which I feel very comfortable with!

I've caught myself doing this with more obscure (to me) words—ones that I only encountered in text and not in spoken conversation. Debian was one ("DEE-bee-an"). I was talking to a friend one day about it when I first started using Linux ("LIE-niks"!), and he was amused by my innocence :)

> And he did this with at least one other word ("requiem")!

Did he pronounce it "rek-WHY-em"? That would drive me insane.

One thing I've noticed is that if there is a word I only encounter in its written form, I only sight read it and don't pronounce it internally (I remember doing it with "Hermione" the first I read the Harry Potter series). It's almost like there's just a brief silence in my inner monologue. I can see how that might lead to odd pronunciations the first time I actually think about it.

One odd thing I've noticed about myself: when I read the word Linux silently, what I hear in my head is often "LIE-niks", but when I say it out loud it's always "LINN-iks".

And it's not like I'm on the verge of mispronouncing it and have to correct myself; it naturally comes out the right way. Just not when I read it silently.

I used to pronounce Debian and Linux exactly those ways,

He pronounced it re-KWEE-em.

He might have been reading those words like that for years... I know I mispronounce many words, I just don't know which ones :-)

He may have read the words hundreds of times, just not heard them (pronounced by someone who knows their common pronunciation).

I have absolutely no idea in which way "Heretic" wouldn't rhyme with "magnetic". I mean, mag-net-ik and he-ret-ik rhyme to my ears :)

I think that they meant the syllable that the accent is on. HARE-ə-tic vs. hare-ET-ic.

I would put the emphasis on the second syllable, like for magnetic. Is this incorrect? I'm a non native speaker.

A light emphasis on the first syllable would be correct. It shifts to the second syllable in a word like "heretical" (he-RET-i-cal). Webster's dictionary and Wiktionary seem to agree. Oxford would be authoritative for English itself, but I don't have access to that.

As a native US English speaker, it sounds far more natural to put the emphasis on the first syllable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com