Hacker News Reader

Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

> 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/!

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.”

First half of carrot.

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

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..

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

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com