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Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Leenucks.

You wouldn't believe it but for many of us non-native english speakers, his pronounciation is obvious and sounding naturally, while the "english'ized" one is funny if not ridiculous.. ;)

That's true, first time I heard it when applying for an internship, I had hard time to understand what the interviewer is talking about. Now I watch more conference videos.

You're right. Once I learned about "Latin vowels" a lot of things fell into place in regards to pronouncing foreign names and places.

This goes far outside of just the Latin-derived languages. We use the Latin alphabet, after all. So if the language can be written with this alphabet somehow (even if the locals don't usually use it), there's a pretty good chance that you should assume they use the Latin vowels, too.

No guarantees, but I've managed to surprise more than a few people by pronouncing things correctly.

The difference is that most languages don't reduce so many vowels to schwas. If you just pronounce the vowels, you'll do much better with non-English words. And assume i = ee, a = ah, etc.

Oh, no wonder no one has heard of it. Oh well, RMS has it harder "I made Ga neeew plus lin ex?"

SLASH LINUX. SLASH. -rms

RMS at the party might have been a sight more interesting than Linus...

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