Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynewtb | Hacker News Reader

That name is unfortunate because most of the world has no clue how to pronounce or spell it.

Huh? Is the pronunciation given at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sequoia#English incorrect? It's exactly what I'd expect of a word spelled "sequoia", and I'm frequently baffled by the inconsistencies in pronunciation that plague English otherwise ("ough").

Although vowel centering makes it difficult to distinguish the pronunciation from that of a hypothetical "siquoye" or similar, a quick look at the list of translations indicates that most languages use equivalent vowels, unless they have an etymologically completely unrelated word.

As far as names go, that one seems to be of the easier kind.

I've always pronounced it "sə-koy-ə" as opposed to "sə-kwoy-ə".

That might be a Britishism; Wiktionary does call that out as the UK pronunciation. I also only know it as "səˈkɔɪ.ə".

How is that different from any other name? Actually Sequoia is an English noun and as such I expect it to be more familiar than many other names. Even better the same word exists in many other Latin script languages. I know that there are a many more languages in the World but none of them is as widespread as English.

> I know that there are a many more languages in the World but none of them is as widespread as English.

You will be surprised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-10-most-spoken-langua...

If you count by L1 speakers, English is only third. If you count by number of people with working proficiency of the language, English has somewhere between 1 and 2 billion speakers, which is probably more than the number of Mandarin speakers. Second language stats are really sketchy, but English is unique for being a language which is among the top native languages and having many more non-native speakers than native speakers.

As you can see, I respect you more: I spend some of my time to provide links for you as proofs. But nevermind, it's offtopic anyway. And it's not so important for me to argue about :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

thx

L1 speakers are relatively easy to gauge, since national censuses would provide sufficiently accurate statistics. Accounting for L2 speakers is very difficult, since there's often little-to-no census-level statistics on the matter, and the definition of proficiency for estimates is difficult to ascertain. Order-of-magnitude estimates are roughly the only level you can do.

On that matter, there are some languages which are clearly much more common (over twice as common) as second languages than native languages. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are obvious candidates for this: English is a common secondary language, well, everywhere; French is common second language in Africa; Swahili in East Africa, and Malay in Malaysia/Indonesia.

And still erkl did it and you were too lazy.

Sequoia is a Latin word. The pronunciation in English, Spanish, and Portuguese (and probably others) is almost identical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_(genus)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com