Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)

linux.org

144 pointscardamomo256 comments

This is one of those surprisingly useful and obvious things that I'm surprised not to have seen before.

Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper

In my experience, I'm in the minority in pronouncing sudo as soodoo, the majority seem to say pseudo. OTOH I've never heard anyone say fsck as anything other than f-suck

From personal experience at Microsoft the backslash was frequently pronounced "whack" (hence whack whack for unc paths), and the ubiquitous error codes like 0xC0000005 were "c-bazillion-5"

I was a su-dough person until I realise that sudo stands for 'super user do' or 'su do', so I switched to soodoo - it makes a lot more sense that way.

f-suck is a new one for me though. I would say F S C K to someone else, but I call it fusk in my head.

Nitpick: su is “substitute user” (sometimes switch user), it merely defaults to root.

man su:

    su - run a command with substitute user and group ID

As for fsck I moved from F S C K to progressively bind the S and C in a slide of the tongue, which ends up sounding like F-ceek once I’ve eased in the audience with F-(s)ceek(ay) (parentheses get progressively toned down as I speak faster)

That or just “FS check”.

You're correct, of course. I don't know why I remember it as super user.

Because that's its most common use - to impersonate as a privileged user - so su quite naturally becomes super user

Because sudo really was “superuser do” and is unrelated to the UNIX utility “su” (at least by lineage.)

I tend to pronounce fsck as one syllable, like "fisk" without the 'i'.

I've always said F S check in my head but never said or heard it on conversation. I started my computer journey with msdos so I think chkdsk is to blame for me saying 'check'.

I'm for su-dough - to my ear it evokes the martial art Judo which makes some kind of sense considering what it does.

On the other hand Soo Doo sounds like a pig farmer's wife calling the swine in for their slop. To my ear ;)

I'm a su-dougher, because "pseudo" reminds me I can be someone else.

In my head I pronounce fsck "fuck" because that's normally what I say when I realize I have to use it. Around people? fs check or filesystem check.

I have always “heard” F sick in my head for fsck

Yeah, me also.

I’ve always called it “fusck”.

That’s how I hear it in my head, probably from years of reading it as a stand-in for profanity on Slashdot and the like.

Yup put me down for "fusck" as well. I am probably inventing memories here but I think it is because whenever I saw a system announce it needed to fsck I would say "oh fuck" in my head (sometimes out loud).

> pseudo

I'm originally Italian and my English is now quite good. A very, very common mistake among most "mediterranean" and "romance languages" (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian) people when speaking English is to pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.

Another very common mistake in my language group is the "gn", as in signal.

Correct English is sig-nal [0], while my group usually says it with a different "gn" sound [1].

Well, there's much more, of course, but I wanted to share these two just because, anecdotally, I hear the mistake very often.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whOXnmbOJvQ

[1]: https://forvo.com/word/segnale/

> pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.

I'm genuinely lost reading your comment as neither the p nor the i are silent in pissed (/pɪst/). The only weird part is the "ed" pronounced "t" but that's fairly common in English.

I also don't get the part about "ps" in romance languages. There is no special pronunciation rule regarding this group of letters in French. Are you sure it's not specific to Italian?

Edit: I think I now realized you might be talking about the pronunciation of words like pseudo and psyched where the p would indeed be pronunced where it French (and I guess in the same way in Italian).

In Spain we have the Real Academia Española that more or less serves as an authoritative source of correctness. The ps group was marked as deprecated, so you can pronounce s and be happy. The suggestion to also write sicología or setiembre (instead of psicología and september) didn't catch up though.

For gn we have ñ, so we're not tempted to interpret it a la francesa.

I think the ps thing has nothing to do with romance languages. Germans say it the same way. It's just because English is odd here.

For Romanians, we pronounce signal correctly, though. We have "gn" as a sound in Romanian, for example "a răstigni" (to nail to a cross"), we don't change it to "ni".

But we do have the same problem as Italians with "pseudo": the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it?!? :-p

> the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it

Wait, they're skipping it?! Now that you mentioned it I think you're quite right, I don't remember hearing that many "p"s in front of "seudo".

Wait until you hear they don't pronounce the "e", either :-p

Also ex MS and I recall whack. I also heard a story about a server called paddy, so its shares were whack whack paddy whack.

Never heard bazillion. But many of us used to memorize a bunch of hexadecimal codes and know the symbolic names based on the visual of the hex digits. After repeat lookups the common ones just stay in your brain without effort. The one you shared looks like STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION.

> Knowledge of (including pronunciation) jargon is a classic gatekeeper

Indeed, the best example I can find is LateX. You can tell who's read the first pages of the docs from that.

TIL: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/17509

> English words like ‘technology’ stem from a Greek root beginning with the letters τεχ...; and this same Greek word means art as well as technology. Hence the name TeX, which is an uppercase form of τεχ.

> Insiders pronounce the χ of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist.

From your link though, Leslie Lamport disagrees with Knuth (whom I like to pronounce "nuth" but is actually pronounced "ka-nuth").

I'm Greek and I pronounce LaTeX as "LAY-tek". I just tried pronouncing it "LAY-tech" with a Greek "chi" sound ("λέει-τεχ") and I sounded so silly I almost spat my coffee all over my monitor (only "almost" because I wasn't drinking any coffee). Ain't no way I'm calling it that.

And note that, being Greek, I can actually pronounce "χ" correctly. Most Native English-speaking folks I've heard trying to do the same sound like they're in immediate need of someone administering the Heimleich manoeuver to them.

Btw, I pronounce "Heimlich" with a Greek "χ" also. I bet most native English-speaking folks pronounce it elsewise. Perhaps as "Heimlick".

A Heimlicker, I can confirm.

Thanks. Also: elsewise --> otherwise. Oops.

Likewise, LaTeX isn't pronounced as the rubber derivative, but as "Lah-tecchh" /ˈlɑːtɛx/ (IPA via Wikipedia)

Have you ever heard of people pronouncing it like that?

That is how I pronounce it.

I was asked the correct pronunciation of /etc in an interview once. Diabolical, if you ask me.

"Sorry, you're not a 'culture fit' here."

There's historical precedent:

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

I have only ever worked with people who call it etcetera.

I know a few people who pronounce fsck with what sounds like a combination of 'suck' and the expletive, which naturally leads to phrases like "it's fsck'ing the drive."

I pronounce fsck as f-sick.

MySQL pronunciation can be "My S Q L" or "My Sequel." I think most people in the community probably use the latter, but truthfully most of us don't really care. The "S Q L" vs. "Sequel" split has existed almost as long as SQL itself. The original name for the language was "SEQUEL." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

What’s better is that “My” has nothing to do with possession, and it’s pronounced “Me”: it’s Widenius’ daughters name[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius

Well, as a Swedish speaker I will respectfully disagree with your pronunciation. To my ears the the y is not like the e in me, but I can't think of a good English equivalent.

(in fact, the girls name actually sounds like the greek letter "mu" as it's spelled and pronounced in Swedish)

Where/how might I find a good pronunciation reference that would cover this construct/use?

English equivalents not necessary; I don't mind picking the appropriate tidbit out of a fragment of speech in a video for example.

I could just as easily stare at an IPA pronunciation for a bit too.

I thought finding a source with pronunciation would be easy, but it was surprisingly difficult, and I kinda gave up finding a source appropriate for English speakers.

The name “My” is not unheard of in danish and we also have a word “my”, for very small measures, with the same pronunciation. It should be close enough the the Swedish pronunciation for your purpose.

Here is an entry in a danish dictionary. Click the yellow speaker for pronunciation:

https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=My&tab=for

Thanks very much for taking the time, and for the reference. To my ears that sounds like a subtle cross between classical "e" as in present-tense "read" and "i" as in "pin" or "Linux".

Hrm, now to start saying "MeSQL" and seeing what happens...

The database can also be pronounced MyS-QL ("mys-kul").

It's not right of course.

And "MariaDB" was named after another of his daughters.

If memory serves, he also has a son (whose name I can't remember) after which he named some other piece of software (which I also can't remember).

All of this is almost certainly mentioned in that link you shared although, at the moment, I just can't be bothered to click it.

Max: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB

That guy has to make more kids if he wants to open any new projects...

FWIW, much like a linguistic accent or regional dialect, using "sequel" tends to make you sound more like a Microsoft developer (definitely to people from my generation). This has been merging a bit in the last decade (mostly as the linguistic traditions of subcultures in general have been eroding from Eternal September and an entire generation passing), but it is still notable enough that people bring it up occasionally.

The MS pronunciation makes sense to me. Microsoft inherited (actually bought) SQL Server from Sybase. At Sybase the pronunciation was 100% "Sequel." I worked there for 7 years and don't ever recall hearing "S Q L."

I pronounced the individual letters until I called Microsoft support one day and the automated prompts said something like "For Microsoft 'Sequel' Server, press 3".

Now I'm genuinely curious what the modern equivalent of education by phone menu might be.

There's just so much information *everywhere* that we just aren't in isolated little universes anymore.

> what the modern equivalent of education by phone menu might be.

Podcasts and video, whether it's official company presentations or not.

I once received a document from an offshore DBA who had written 'seagull' for every instance of 'SQL' because that's what he thought was being said on conference calls.

Personally I cut it down the middle and go with 'squill' but then I always said 'scizzy' instead of 'scuzzy' for SCSI.

A DBA who didn't pick up that it was 'SQL' being said after the first couple times? :(

Probably a DB2 dba.. to them all other platforms may as well have been made by seagulls.

The original intent was for SCSI to be pronounced ‘sexy’, but you can't always get what you want.

I read once that somebody pronounced SQL as 'squeal' which leads to mysql being pronounced as 'my-squeal'.

Rightly or wrongly, I prefer that pronunciation too. It's less cumbersome.

My non-computer-programmer mom once pronounced SQL as "squirrel" which I think is even better.

Yes, it's often pronounced that way in my circle of friends, as a way of bashing MySQL, after all, it makes one squeal in terror. Although this started in the late 90s, back when MySQL was pretty awful. These days it's pretty decent.

> The official way to pronounce “MySQL” is “My Ess Que Ell” (not “my sequel”), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as “my sequel” or in some other localized way.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/what-is-mysql.html

There's an equivalent page in the SqlServer docs somewhere that recommends SequelServer as the idiomatic pronunciation.

I pronounce each of them idiomatically. When saying SQL I tend to say S-Q-L unless I'm around people who tend to say Sequel, in which case I say it that way. Most people I meet in person also tend to say S-Q-L, presumably because that is how it is written.

According to a book I read years ago, some people pronounce it "Squirrel", but I've never personally met one.

The "squirrel" point in your comment was really confusing, it didn't sound like SQL to me at all.

Until I realised that you probably mean the American pronunciation of "squirrel" that sounds something like "skwerl"? I grew up calling the animal a "skwi-rull" :)

Still confused about where the “r” would come from.

I've been in the "sequel" camp, but that changes now. I'm not passing up the opportunity to talk to co-workers about "my squirrel".

For it is furry, and will eat your nuts for breakfast.

> According to a book I read years ago, some people pronounce it "Squirrel", but I've never personally met one.

Interesting. Adding to that, MQTT is pronounced as Mosquitto.

The first time I used MySQL the person showing me referred to it as "my squall" so that is always what I think when I see it read. I generally pronounce it 'my ess-que-ell' myself though.

I found there is this "pride in the correct pronunciation" in the opensource community. It seems to be a signal of a group membership and a creed validator.

Who cares though? Why does "correct pronunciation" matter? Linux is nowadays used by many more non-native English speakers who will pronounce it very differently.

This attempt at correcting others seems like gatekeeping and, to me personally, feels like a very anti-inclusive thing to do.

Tangentially, the fact that some of the pronunciation is so non-intuitive (e.g. /etc -> etsy) should be a bug, not a feature and pride point. Can you imagine if you reported that a workflow is non-intuitive in a piece of SW and the devs told you "we know, cool, right?!"

It is for the same reason that anyone ever nudges anyone else about pronunciation, spelling, or grammar: speed of communication.

If you pronounce "/etc" as "et cetera", then it will add a step in me parsing your speech ("Oh, he means 'etsy'").

Second, now I have an awkward decision to make when speaking back to you. Do I adapt my pronunciation to yours for the length of this conversation? Or do I pronounce it my way, causing the extra step in your translation of my speech, then also causing you to wonder why I am saying it differently, furthermore causing you to consider whether to change your pronunciation to mine, if nothing else to end this extra thought process every time?

Also, if I adapt my pronunciation to yours, I guess now I need to remember to say it your way every time we talk forever, and say it Henry's way when speaking to him, and now I have this whole table in my head of various pronunciations for various individuals.

And then what happens if I am in conversation with you and Henry at the same time? Do I say things your way, his way, or my way? And what do you do? And what does Henry do?

---

Or we could just stop, agree upon a common pronunciation, and move forward at the normal speed of conversation.

---

To clarify, the tone never should be condescending. This is a small matter. Therefore the tone should be light.

The pronunciation that is deemed "correct" is usually the one of the majority. So it is just an attempt to get everyone on the same page. It strikes me more as "inclusive" than "anti-inclusive". If I were "anti-inclusive", then I would silently let you say it your way, smile inside, and then talk behind your back to Henry about what a newb you are.

I just want to point out that pronouncing etc as etsy isn't universal by any means - in fact I suspect it's a very American pronunciation. If you pronounced it 'etsy' in a sentence here in the UK, people wouldn't understand what you're talking about.

Agreed. Nobody I work with has ever called it Etsy. Etsy is a shop where you buy handcrafted things online.

Agree. Most English people at least would be nonplussed if you said "etsy etsy" rather than "etcetra etcetra" to indicate something that goes on and on.

American here and I say “et cetera” when I mean “et cetera”, but /etc is “etsy”.

That makes a little more sense. /etc is e-t-c for me, but I may be in the minority there.

Most UK English speakers would be confused if you used 'nonplussed' to mean confused...

Human languages are hugely inefficient!

Do you mean AmE speakers? Because 'confused' is (roughly) what it means to me, a BrE speaker, but your comment made me curious and indeed Wiktionary gives def 2 (proscribed, US, informal) as 'unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed' instead.

Only the directory is pronounced etsy. The rest of the time we say et cetera.

I don't even know how widespread etsy is for the directory. I hardly ever hear anyone pronounce anything, since most communication among programmers is written.

> Or we could just stop, agree upon a common pronunciation, and move forward at the normal speed of conversation.

We can. That's largely fine.

But it is also worth recognizing that a root cause of this problem is the community's desire to use shortened names for everything. C/UNIX (and later Linux) has this convention and it leads to way more of these shibboleths than other ecosystems.

> awkward decision

I would say unless it's someone extremely junior just use whatever they use. Communication is already difficult enough. "use customer's language", show some empathy

Is that pronounced "noob" or "new-bee"

It takes some getting used to this idea, but I try to remember that when someone mispronounces an uncommon word or jargon term, it means that they're getting all their information through textual means - which probably means they don't have people close to them with the same interests or intellectual curiosity. That usually means, especially if it's a younger person, that they are smart and probably lonely.

With you until the last sentence. But yes, it does imply that they're resourceful enough to learn what they know with limited personal mentorship. It's worth gently guiding them towards the canonical pronunciation, but definitely don't be surprised if they show you up on how to use that thing they're mispronouncing.

> That usually means, especially if it's a younger person, that they are smart and probably lonely.

What a weird asssumption to make. Projecting?

Just basing on people I knew who were like that.

> they're getting all their information through textual means

When I was very young, I had a friend who pronounced "modem" as "mod-DEEM" because he knew that the word is a portmanteau of "MOdulator-DEModulator".

His first exposure to "modem" was in print (computer magazines or BBSes), and it was some years before he heard the word spoken.

Many years later (but still many years ago!), I was pulled into a disagreement among a fledgling group of web designers: Is "GIF" pronounced with a hard G or a soft G ("jif")?

I realized that I'd never spoken the word aloud, and chose the hard G, because the word is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format.

Needless to say, I did not resolve that argument with my appeal to originalism. In the intervening years, I've spoken the word countless times, and settled on the soft G because it flows better in speech. As far as I know, the correctness debate is still ongoing today.

This was certainly true when I got started with Un*x in the late 90s.

I actually can't believe anyone says "etsy." If they ever do, I'm gonna be confused momentarily. And I'm not gonna follow suit, I'm gonna say E T C. If I ever get a friend.

PS I also say "libe." As if shortening the word library.

Honestly, this is about the most consistent of the batch in my experience. Many of them vary, but I've never heard anyone beyond the cd/ls level of tutorial Linux say "e t c".

I'd like to think I'm well above 'cd/ls level of tutorial Linux', but I've never said 'etsy', though I recall having a colleague who did and he did have to explain.

I wouldn't spell it out as 'e t c' though, I pronounce '/etc/' the same as 'etc.'/'&c.' (that is, with a reluctantly soft 'c' in 'cetera', since despite knowing better it's not worth getting into every time you say it!)

I’ve always said etsy, but I was exposed to that pronunciation first in the Windows world as in Windows-wack-system32-wack-drivers-wack-etsy to find the hosts file. While I used VAX systems around the same time, I never cared about /etc until using linux distros. I just assumed that efficient two-syllable pronunciation was the logical choice.

I say "libe", but "libb six tee fore", which is really too inconsistent.

I've been using *NIXes for 15 years. I'm probably going to use them for at least 15 more. I'm never going to pronounce etc as etsy. It just sounds silly. e-t-c forever!

Jeez, how did you get from correct pronunciation to anti-inclusive?!

Most people just want to know what you are talking about when you say libe or cat slash prots slash mem in fo or worse.

Nothing is more infuriating when people start using wrong words in a 10h telco instead of agreed upon vocabulary, which includes the correct pronunciation! Scratch correct. It's the agreed upon pronunciation we all ought to use when working together.

> Nothing is more infuriating when people start using wrong words in a 10h telco instead of agreed upon vocabulary

Totally agree. This is also why doctors say 'pancreatic islets' rather than 'pink wibbly bit'.

Using precise technical language does create a barrier to entry but this is a side-effect of the primary purpose of precise technical language: to allow practitioners to communicate accurately and unambiguously.

Interesting example, since doctors notoriously mispronounce stuff all the time. Especially names.

> It's the agreed upon pronunciation we all ought to use when working together.

Agreed upon by whom? By the in-group? Why does this "agreed-upon pronunciation" take precedence over the "agreed-upon pronunciation" of English?

Because what you call "in-group" is just a bunch of professionals that are working hard on making thier lives easier. One of the results of this collective effort is a consensus (more or sometimes less established, depending on the term) on the pronounciation. It usually doesn't make sense to disturb this for every single person that has a different "intuition" about how words should be pronounced.

> Why does this "agreed-upon pronunciation" take precedence over the "agreed-upon pronunciation" of English?

Excellent question. I don't know. People just assume that precedence as axiomatic (they just agree upon it), because it seems to work... well, easier with? More efficient? That's a subject for a study, I guess.

Of course by the in-group. People invent their own languages just to keep other peoples out of their culture or subculture. Since centuries. Another subject for a study. Knock yourself out, do the research and write a paper.

Can you not understand that the complaint is about the “correct” pronunciation being unintuitive?

What is or isn't intuitive depends highly on context and background. Good luck finding something that's intuitive for everyone. People have tried and failed with artificial languages.

That's why people try to agree upon terms and their pronunciation first. Most languages are unintuitive and it's worse with tech jargon. So, when you work in tech business, or even in some tech club you cannot just walk in and talk like a child and expect everyone to treat you like an adult.

Exactly. It's just another thing to learn, and usually something you easily pick up through immersion. Jargon files (like The Jargon File [1]) are pretty amusing and can help illustrate where some of the quirkier conventions originated, but you can get by without them.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

Ah, I was thinking about that, thanks for the link! I was quite inspired by the Jargon File, back 15 years ago. But now it is wildly outdated. Flame wars are now called shitstorms and they are held on Twitter. Hackers are not really outcasts anymore, and there is a general acceptance of "hacker culture". Although hackers are now synonymous with foreign state agents rather than criminals.

Because it implies you are invested in the particular technology enough to care about minutiae.

Personally I just like using it as banal objection to win arguments.

Agreed. Most of the pronunciation - and the original meaning behind these non-words - is incredibly opaque and unintuitive

On a somewhat related note, I'd been internally pronouncing `reflog` in `git reflog` as REE-FLOG for the longest time. It wasn't until I finally needed to use it that REF-LOG made a lot more sense!

Reflog, for when the person hasn’t been beaten enough already.

I still involuntarily vocalize it that way everytime I see it.

Never heard fsck spelled out. It’s always been /fisk/.

I guess that’s the sort of nonsense one should expect from a person who wrongly abhors the great and beautiful emacs.

ducks

I'm guessing you mean /fɪsk/ -- almost all -isk words (whisk, disk, risk) are pronounced with /-ɪsk/.

Indeed - I got lazy with the characters there.

Weird. I've never heard anyone NOT spell out fsck.

f-sick over here.

I’m 31 years old and have been using Linux most of my life. A few of my friends and people at work do too, but this is the first time I’ve heard /etc pronounced as etsy. It’s always been “etcetera” for me. This led me to look up the history of that directory: “ But people encountered a situation to keep some files which can be a config file or a data file or a socket file or some other files. So they implemented a folder to keep all these files in it and they named it as /etc(As said earlier etcetera). As time passed the meaning of this folder has changed but not the name “etc”. Now /etc folder means a central location for all your configuration files are located and this can be treated as nerve centre of your Linux/Unix machine.” (from https://www.linuxnix.com/linux-directory-structure-explained... )

If that’s truly the case, I’m curious how it got from “etcetera” to “etsy”

I pronounce it "etsy". "et cetera" was never an option for me because I learned that it's short for "editable text configuration". (Also "et cetera" just doesn't make much sense. If anything, /usr is "et cetera".)

"editable text configuration" has to be a backronym, right? Not that it really matters, of course.

"Etsy" has the value of brevity when speaking, but I can't bring myself to feel natural saying it. None of the other options sound great either.

I've never heard anyone pronounce /etc as "etsy" or fstab as "F stab"...

On the other hand, I've pronounced /etc as "etsy" ("slash etsy", usually) for, I dunno, 25 years or more.

NFI where I first heard it pronounced like that, though.

Neither had I, until yesterday. Weird timing for this post to pop up.

I have always called it either 'slash eee-tee-cee' or 'slash etcetera' however yesterday I was watching a video of Andreas working on SerenityOS and he was implementing /etc/shadow and referred to it as 'et-see' which made me think I've never heard it pronounced like that before (or if I have I have long forgotten it).

I kinda like it though.

I've heard "f stab" a few times, although it's always been somewhat tongue in cheek. I've not heard it as a genuine misunderstanding of the canonical pronunciation.

I always thought the correct way was "attic" or "et cetera", but a few years ago I learned it is etsy.

Strange. I've been calling /etc "etsy" for 25 years.

Speaking of silly pronunciations, you silly native English speakers :-p

Character/karacter but char/char? What is wrong with your language? :-(

> What is wrong with your language?

It's an insane amalgamation of other languages with occasional attempts at consistency that actually make it worse. Imagine a library written in C+asm, then with parts grafted on written in idiomatic Pascal, then the whole mess ported to Java without changing any naming or structure. Every other method has a different namingConvention, if_notHybrid, to say nothing of other style aspects or the parts that still aren't really object-aware. English is old/middle english (naturally mutated over time) with chunks of French and German grafted on, bits of latin and ancient Greek tacked on...

>> It's an insane amalgamation of other languages with occasional attempts at consistency that actually make it worse.

Oh, so it's a bit like R, then?

Well, that's an explanation, but it's not really excuse.

Other languages have had reforms and there is no natural language that I know of that doesn't have major influences from at least 3 or 4 different languages.

English has had it's share of attempted reforms. This attempt shows examples of perfectly fine reforms when you think about it. The proposed spelling is most certainly fine once you're used to it or if it's all you've ever known.

But I have to laf at the thaut of spelling words like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

I know people (native English speakers also) who pronounce the data type "char" as "care" for this reason. I still go with "char" as in burning.

It's a rich tapestry of confusion.

What can I say, we're a var-ied bunch

I always say 'bin' as 'bine' in relation to the folder. This is a hill I will die on.

It's short for binary. And a 'bin' is where you put your rubbish, not your hard work.

This kind of flipped a switch in my brain, that makes a lot more sense than the "trash bin" pronunciation.

However, I will continue saying "bin" because old habits die hard and "bine" just sounds wrong to my brain for no good reason :)

It sounds dangerously like “bind”, so that might introduce some confusion in a circle that is accustomed to “bin”.

I'm mostly a casual linux user, so honestly asking, why is sounding like "bind" dangerous?

edit: A quick search turned up the `bind` command to bind a name to a socket. That makes sense.

I was thinking more about the bind dns server when I made the comment, but yeah. Just thinking that verbally referring to the “bine” folder might cause confusion in certain contexts, where “bin” pronunciation avoids it entirely.

Also BIND is the Berkeley internet name daemon aka DNS server.

Do you also pronounce char as in character or as in charcoal?

I pronounce it as "car". Don't know where that came from.

I think this pronunciation sounds right because it comes from "character", which doesn't have the "ch" sound.

'Car' has a different (longer) 'a' to that in 'character', though, is I think the point above.

I meant to agree with the point above, I pronounce it ‘car’ as well. For some reason ‘care’ doesn’t sound right either.

Do you also call /lib 'libe'? Or are you okay with 'lib' as it's not conflicting with other meanings?

I’m the only gray-beard hacker I know that pronounces it ‘libe’. But bin is bin. Not sure why, really.

Except if it's a parts bin maybe. ;)

It's an odd coincidence that shortening "binaries" to "bin" makes sense in this way, but you're right, /bin is a literally a bin to put your binaries.

I recently wondered about the best way to pronounce commands of the `[...]ctl` family, which seem to get omitted from most of these lists I come across. I personally now use "cuttle", but am curious what others say (for example, Kubernetes [1] is one notable exception, search "cube control").

[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGEL...

I've always pronounced ctl as control, personally.

You're going to end up spelling it if someone doesn't know what you're talking about anyway, might as well say the unabbreviated version so at least it has some semantic meaning.

I say "C T L" as in "system C T L".

But I also capitalize command names like Ls so I'm probably out on my own here.

> But I also capitalize command names like Ls so I'm probably out on my own here.

Only in written correspondence I assume? Macs are the only system that would let you do that in actual use AFAIK (and if you want to break out of that habit I've got an OS to sell you ;)

How did you get into this habit though? Are you an old Lisper by chance?

Oops, that was unclear. I meant "capitalize the first letter of" and "in written correspondence".

I am not an old Lisper, but I am becoming a young-ish one.

I mostly hear the "cuttle" variant, but with the t/d ambiguity of a lot of american pronunciation it sounds more like "cuddle" to me, and I like that

I use "cuttle", but someone I know calls it kubec-tal (Q-beck-tal), which is the weirdest of all the variants.

ioctl - iOctal

oh god /etc as ‘etsy’? no way. never heard it called that, don’t want to (british)

FWIW, it's very common in my company. That said, I think if you came to interview with me and you'd say "e t c," that'd be totally fine. If you said "et cetera," I'd be confused for a bit, but personally, I wouldn't care.

Same with curl. Is it "curl" or "c URL"? Who cares...

Probably an Americanism? I'm American and I've been calling it 'etsy' since the late 90s. I hear 'E T C' and 'et cetera' on occasion, but the speaker is usually someone new to unix.

100% agree (also British). Been working with Kubernetes full time for 2 years now and I still hate 'etsyd'

I've probably never had to say it aloud, and haven't come across that before, internally I've read 'et cetera d' for sure.

That said, 'etsy-dee' is somehow better to me than 'etsy', since it's like 'et C.D.' which makes some sort of sense.

(You could of course make the same argument for 'etsy', it's just that nobody reads 'etc.' as 'et see', it's always 'et cetera'.)

I've heard multiple pronunciations of "kubernetes"

Koo-burr-net-ease

koo-burr-neet-ease

Cube-burr-neet-ease

UK also. I've always heard it called "etch" or "etcetera" but never etsy.

I’ve never heard anyone say “F stab” for fstab.

It's a file system table, isn't that what it stands for? F S tab reflects that, F stab is super misleading.

In my head it goes like "It keeps tab of your filesystems"

FWIW, I have always said "F stab" (for over 25 years now). I doubt I have never even heard anyone else say the term at all, though, so I am a glorious outlier ;P.

It has always been F S tab.

I say f-stab in my head, but F S tab to others.

I do the same. I also say et cetera in my head but E T C to other people, and soo dough in my head but soo do to others.

I wonder how many other people code-switch in this way to try make themselves better understood, when actually we would still understand one another if we just used our internal pronunciation?

I pronounce etc in my head as “ets” as if you’re about to say “et cetera” but stopped short. I read etc. in print the same way and have since I was a kid.

I suspect that split pronunciation between head and mouth is very common. I do the same thing with some words, like giblet, which in my head has a hard g, but when I say it I say it with a soft g.

I once got into a big office conflict regarding "var." (rhymes with "far" vs rhymes with "air") I do at least feel vindicated now.

I think it's polite to introduce a path with a leading "slash". As in "cat slash etsy hosts" rather than "cat etsy hosts". It helps the listener to switch modes.

I knew one old-timer who pronounced TTY as "titty" and didn't mean it as a joke. It was clearly how he was taught to say the word. Perhaps that's a good argument for not blindly sticking to traditions.

Linus pronouncing Linux: https://youtu.be/5IfHm6R5le0

I always find these interesting. Like the different pronunciations of `char`*. All these strange words that we only read or type 99% of the time but still come up with some kind of pronunciation in our heads.

* I've heard "char" like "charbroiled", "care", "car" and some people always just say "character"

I've heard techies saying char with ch in "chair". I was terrified.

I work with someone that says "wha" for WAR file instead of war (What is it good for!). Drives me nuts.

Move out of Boston, then.

I used to pronounce "warez" as "juarez" instead of "wares".

I still pronounce it that way!

Confirmation from the main man himself for the pronunciation of Linux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU

That’s actually a disconfirmation. He doesn’t pronounce the second syllable as a short “i”, but as a short “u”. The problem is that a short “u” sound is almost nonexistent in English, so native English speakers will pronounce it differently.

Edit: Actually the closest in English is probably “linnooks” — “lin” as in “linen” and “nooks” as in “nooks and crannies”.

If you spend more than a day fighting with dracut and initrd, you'll start pronouncing it "any turd" as you'll want any turd that works that can get the system to boot.

"Joe said "cat proc cpuinfo". Scott wasn't getting it so Joe said "no.. no, type cat slash proc slash cpuinfo" and eventually got on the keyboard himself." This part really resonated with me. I always find it hard to tell commands to people. Anyway I never reach for their keyboard. I try to take the blame myself for not spelling out the command correcty, this way they don't feel mistaken and take a defensive stance.

I think this is also about the level of knowledge about what you are doing... if Scott didn't know about /proc/cpuinfo, it is more likely he wouldn't know to put the slashes.

> chmod: as one syllable.. rhymes with 'nod'

This is easy to do for many?

In my experience, Anglo-Saxons can seldom pronounce “GNU” in one syllable, but they can this?

I have no idea how to pronounce this as one syllable, it's always been che-mod to me. Chown is one syllable though, I agree there.

I refuse to break my tongue and just say change-mod. But I have heard other variations. Chown on the other seems straight forward as one syllable.

Cho-oon is one syllable? No way :)

I, personally, pronounce this as /ʧəʊn/ in one syllable [onset=ʧ, nucleus=əʊ, coda=n]

> Anglo-Saxons can seldom pronounce “GNU” in one syllable

That's ... weird. It's pretty similar to "knee", but with an "oo" sound. Are you saying people pronounce "ge-noo"?

Hehe, the point is the "g" or "k" should not be silent if you actually want to pronounce "GNU" or "knee".. but in English they generally are. In other languages the sound produced is a more guttural but fully enunciated word (if I knew more linguistics I'd find the international phonetics for it).

The <k> in “knee” is silent; it is pronounced /n i/, not /k n i/.

The reason this cluster is so difficult for Anglo-Saxon is exactly because English lacks it; it historically had it, which explains the many words that are written as such, for etymological reasons.

Even the actual word “gnu" is pronounced /n u/, not /g n u/, but the “GNU operating system” is typically pronounced /g @ 'n u/, in two syllables, with stress on the second.

> In my experience, Anglo-Saxons can seldom pronounce “GNU” in one syllable

It’s just pronounced ‘new’ isn’t it? How many syllabus can you fit in that?

It's supposed to be pronounced with a hard G [1].

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.html

I feel like quite a lot of people in the Free Software community somewhat enjoy creating things that seem to deliberately be designed to trip up people who aren't in-the-know. Seems like a terrible way to run an advocacy movement.

Yup. It’s /shmod/!

Oh, I thought it was /tS m O d/.

/tS/ is quite a different story due to it being an affricative.

That's... two syllables.

It isn’t. There’s no vowel sound between sh and m. Think schmear.

Onset: shm. Nucleus: o. Coda: d. One syllable.

Y'all would probably enjoy Wikipedia's discussions of English phonotactics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics#English_phonotact...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Phonotactics

/ʃm/ is not a legal onset in native English. (Let alone /tʃm/, which is how I pronounce "chmod" - two syllables, /tʃə 'mɔːd/.)

"Schmear" is a Yiddish loanword coming from German, where /ʃm/ is perfectly legal. So it's pronounceable by the human mouth, it's just a little awkward for English speakers.

/sm/ and /ʃr/ are both legal in English, so you might think of it as something like those. Can you pronounce "smear" or "shrine" as one syllable?

(I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)

> (I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)

Oh it sure is in Croatian (and other Slavic languages), "tʃ" is written as "č". We even have slang words like "čmr-lji-ti" [t͡ʃmrʎiti]. "r" (rolling r) can function as a vowel.

“vzkvět” is a word in Czech that is pronounced in one syllable, exactly how it's spelled, of course.

The Dutch word “striktst” is of course also pronounced exactly how it's spelled, and in one syllable.

Or Swedish "västkustskt" (lit. west coast-ish), where "kustskt" is one syllable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Phonotactics

On-topic, I pronounce chmod as one syllable with "sh", like schmuck.

Forgive me, but I don't understand how you can pronounce it as one syllable. I would have to pronounce /shmod/ as either /sh-mod/ or /shm-od/, making it two syllables. I'm happy to be corrected, I just physically can't understand how to pronounce it as one syllable.

If you think about a lisping pronunciation of smoke, sounding like "shmoke", this is how I imagine it would sound. One syllable.

I wonder if the grandparent is French, because I would never have considered to pronounce chmod like this. Then again, I say C H mod and C H own, which apparently isn't the standard pronunciation, so what do I know!

Ha! This is great. I would have loved to have had this insight when I worked on Midori, at one point there was an M# keyword shmutable (for shared mutable objects) and one objection was the concern (beyond the obvious objections to silly keywords) that if said as sh'mutable that it sounded very close to shimmutable which would be a critically bad confusion

White-bread American Midwesterner. :-) Not sure where I picked this pronunciation up.

I think what I’ve learned today is that no one pronounces any of these words even remotely the same!

...and while we’re at it, let’s do “char.”

As in chard, but maybe we should all say it as in chardonnay

First half of carrot.

I pronounce chmod and chown same as you do. Although sometimes I'll pronounce chown as one syllable... not sure the when or the why..

I hear ya. It’s not a terribly common consonant cluster. (In fact I think all English words that start with s[c]hm are Yiddish loanwords, but don’t quote me on that.) Try pushing your lips forward before making any sound, and drawing them back+together as you make the sh sound. It’ll come out as a single shm sound.

It’s pronounced similar to schmaltz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmaltz

The trick is one continuous motion of pursing your lips, closing and then opening your mouth as you roll the constants together.

I pronounce chroot as "change root". I pronounce "chown" as just "own" with a "ch" sound in front though.

> /var: rhymes with jar

While I've heard people pronounce it that way, given that "var" is short for "variable" or "varying" (as in capable of changing), I've primarily heard people pronounce it as the first syllable of "variable": vair.

(I have also, rarely, heard people pronounce "variable" as though the first syllable rhymes with "far".)

Isn’t there a US/UK difference? It seems to me that English people pronounce this closer to (though not exactly) a as in “jar” than to e as in “very”, though I think I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum.

To my (admittedly non-native) ears, an open and long sound is strange in such a word, and the closed a sounds better. Same with i versus ai in bin or lib.

- ifconfig: eye eff config (not “iff-config”)

- “#!”: hash bang (not “shub-ang”)

- sh: shuh like le as in le monde (not “ess ayche”)

- tcl: tickle

One of the hardest for me though is on a different topic to pronunciation. What name would you give to a variable that keeps track of the current working directory? What name did bash use for this variable?

Answers (for me):

- pwd: is “print working directory”

- $PWD: is “pcurrent working directory”, the P is silent.

I think of pwd as “present working directory”, but I have no idea where I got this from.

And, it’s always a shebang line :)

‘pwd’ comes from Multics, where it abbreviates ‘print_wdir’.

For me, two of those would be `shebang` (#!) and `S H` (ess eich). It's nice to coalesce around pronunciations, but we should also accept that people will choose different dialects.

Exactly! We all have accents, we don't even pronounce English words the same way as each other.

Agreed on hashbang. It's melifluous to say "hash bang bin bash" - ahhhh :)

Isn’t there an audio clip that comes with the kernel that says ‘Hi, my name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Linux’?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg

The first (and, so far, only) time I heard someone use “etsy”, I misheard it as “ansi” and looked a bit confused as I’d never heard of /ansi before. I usually pronounce it as “et cet”. Needless to say, the path didn’t exist, which heightened my embarrassment!

Another one in the same area, Ubuntu. I mostly hear ubuntu but I'll sometimes hear it called you-buhn-too

https://askubuntu.com/a/34987/26436

One of my professors who taught an OS class pronounced fsck as "eff suck".

It’s slash proc here https://youtu.be/Fow7iUaKrq4

Author mentions L S as an alternate/different way they've heard ls pronounced? What other way would there be? List I guess?

"List" is probably the most common, but I've heard people pronounce it as "else".

To me etc is pronounced "etch".

Since the /etc pronunciation was first in the list, I initially thought this might be some joke list of crazy pronunciations until I saw the rest. Do people really say "etsy" when referring to /etc?

I've never ever heard anyone say this. Usually I hear the spelled out E-T-C and occasionally "et cetera" but never "etsy"

Are you British? I (American) have been pronouncing it "etsy" for over 20 years. When I hear something different it's usually from someone who is new to unix and just hasn't learned all the jargon yet.

Haha, I've been using Unix since the mid-90s on and off.

Weirdly I've always assumed the opposite of you, "etsy" being someone new (and very weird) and "et cetera" being correct.

Yes, British.

I can't accept the US date format as sane and I'm not sure about this etsy thing either. :P

As always, it's just what you're used to. I freely admit that the US date format is weird, and that most imperial units are bonkers, but they're immediately "intuitive" to me just because I grew up with them. I just can't "feel" things like celsius or kilograms.

> Do people really say "etsy" when referring to /etc?

Nice to meet you. I've been saying that for 5 years now. Since etc is _et caetera_ I read it as _et c..._ hence the pronunciation.

There are plenty of us out here. etsy all the way.

Heh, that was the only one I disagreed with too, but I always spell it out e-t-c

For me it’s less etsy and more et-cee; the sound may be the same but the second is clearly E T C with the first two elided.

Its "tump" not temp.

What about nginx pronunciation?

It's Engine X, kinda hard to guess.

Is etsy really the recommended pronunciation? I say et cetera.

It's what I use - but it's a degradation of E T C "ea tea sea" where you combine the first two to "et sea". At least that's how I believe I came around to it. Seeing it spelled as etsy confused me at first.

But how did you pronounce "Linux" when reading the title of this post?

Lih-nucks

Lie-nucks

Lee-nooks

fstab should be f s tab, IMO. I mean it does mean "file system table", no?

fstab pronounced F Stab, obviously a joke website left over from April first.

He is wrong regarding Emacs.

Etsy

E.T. See.

Yes also this sometimes.

Var rhymes with char.

But usr is user

lol at the last tip (⌐■_■)

Emacs is the one true editor.

"emacs: rhymes with junk"

Gottem

I’ve always said lib as libe, as in library.

Common perhaps but Etsy would be confusing in the modern era. Etsy is a web site.

I learned C with VI over twenty years ago, and was taught to call it ‘vie’ rhymes with ‘by’. Always wanted to call it ‘six’.

As for Emacs rhymes with ‘junk’, GTFO. Either this is a joke or a very unexpected pronunciation that I can’t fathom. I say ‘eee-mac-sss’.

‘vi’ is an unusual case in that the documentation gives the pronunciation (vee-eye).

It is most obviously a joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com