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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

I have an off-topic rant: I know it's "RISC FIVE" and not "RISC VEE" but as long as companies use letters to represent numbers it's my opinion they forfeit the right to complain that people aren't saying it right. Apple finally gave up and changed Mac OS "ex" to macOS; everyone else should follow suit.

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interestingly enough, the “v” in risc-v also means “v” as in vector [1]

> and so we named it RISC-V. As one of our goals in defining RISC-V was to support research in data-parallel architectures, the Roman numeral ‘V’ also conveniently served as an acronymic pun for “Vector.”

[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p...

———-

so maybe in a way “vee” isn’t so inappropriate after all ^_^

The roman numbers were not really used for RISC 3 and 4, (SOAR and SPUR), only for RISC I and RISC II whose development overlapped.

But then went on to call the iPhone 20 "iPhone X". And then switched back to Arabic numerals with the iPhone 11.

Not to mention the "Plus" vs "Max" and all the other naming convention mismatches.

Anyway, I agree with you.

iPhone XR is the worst. The "X" is a number, the "R" is a letter. I just can't see it as anything but "ex-are".

pretty sure the only people that call it ten-are are apple store employees

and that's only because tim cook will haunt their dreams if they don't

Some people persist in calling "GIF", "jif", so whaddayagonnado?

I pronounce it with the hard "g", and I'd happily ignore the few people that pronounce it with the soft "g", except that the guy who invented the format intended it to be pronounced "jiff".

Yes. Being old, I remember. Well, considering that the "G" stood for "Graphics" and that "Graphics", in my native American English has a hard-g, I'm just going to declare the author of the format to be a troglodyte and go on from there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - many of us tech-types are troglodytes and misanthropes and lack a classical education)

I insist on the pronunciation "jayfeg" for JPEG, for the same reason.

Do you also pronounce 'giraffe' and 'giant' with a hard "g"?

Thers's an idea - revise the expansion of the acronym to say Giraffics Interchange Format. Make it an ISO standard and donate proceeds of sales of the paper version to protecting the giraffes. Problem solved.

jrafics interchange format is exactly how you say it long. Why is this even a discussion?

“joint potographic experts group”

Do you pronounce "gift" with a soft 'g'?

No, but "gift" is a borrowing from Old Norse. "GIF", as far as I know, is not an Old Norse lexical item.

It's still a very common English word that's spelled very similarly. One can hardly be surprised if people guessing at the pronunciation of "GIF" select a hard 'g'.

Sure. So English has some words which start with "gi-" which have hard 'g's ('gift', 'give', 'girl', 'giggle') and some which have soft 'g's ('giant', 'giraffe', 'gibber', 'ginger'), so both pronunciations are actually reasonable in English for the orthographic form 'GIF'.

I'm glad we agree.

I always say "risk-vee", and everybody knows what I mean.

I also say "macosix" and "windos" (and used to say "solarix") as generic alternatives to commercial trademarks.

Marketing departments can only propose pronunciation, they cannot dictate it, and they have no right or power to prevent inventing synonyms for the trademarks they control. They also have no authority over verbs, so e.g. "googling" is a generic term right out of the gate.

There won't be a RISC-VI, so it doesn't matter that it means "5" to some people.

I'm not sure it would be less confusing to name the ISA 'RISC' instead of 'RISC-V'. The 'R' in 'ARM' stands for 'RISC'.

RISC is a generic term for ISAs with few instructions (in comparison to CISC ISAs).

Increment the letter V by three positions and call it RISC-Y.

Done: https://github.com/pulp-platform/riscv

"RISC-5"

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