I don't know if the "Sequel" pronunciation is a recent thing (relatively speaking to the age of the language itself) but it's only been the latter half of my career that I've heard people favouring that over "S-Q-L". In fact "Sequel" really threw me at first.
I remember failing a telephone interview once because I didn't know what `chmod 777` did. However I've always known it as "chi-mod" and the interviewer phrased the question as "What is C-H-M-O-D 7-7-7" so I started thinking it was an ISO / ANSI type standard I hadn't heard of and didn't make the connection it was a UNIX command. I remember being rather pissed off about that considering, at that time, I'd had > 10 years of UNIX systems administration so was intimately familiar with `chmod`.
* I've always assumed the conventional way to pronounce `chmod` was something like "ch-mod" (i.e., "chŭ-mod", with a short u). Is that less common than I think?
* `char` (like the C-style character variable type) is an interesting example. I've always read it as - and usually heard it as - "car". But there are groups where "char" (like the word meaning "burn") is more common. Strangely no one seems to say "care", which would be the corresponding part of the root word "character", right?
* "JSON" is another curious one. I've always just read that as "Jason" (like the name) but others seem to emphatically drop the missing "A", saying it more like "j-SON".
* For that matter, I've always read `fsck` like "f-seek", but apparently the creators intended it as "fisk".
Is there some kind of ethnographic study on this topic? Surely there are identifiable communities of these, but I've never been able to discern the broader pattern. I'm guessing it was once relatively regional, but it's probably more broadly distributed (and maybe domain/community-based) in the post-YouTube/podcast era.
Also, NGINX is pronounced "engine X".
It absolutely is, but my first interpretation of that word was more like "n-jinks".
I mean, I understand that it's meant as "n-gin-x", but glommed together that still seems like an unnatural way to pronounce that word to me.
For what it's worth I am a native English speaker (and I assume nginx creator Igor Sysoev isn't), but maybe that's just me.