Hacker News Reader

Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

> This [...] has already led to some women [...] getting harassed when they said they were working on Coq.

What's wrong with people?

I'm very curious about the form of this harassment. It's hard to imagine. Maybe if you had extremely immature colleagues, but even then, "harassed"?

- Hey, what are you up to?

- Working in Coq

- Hu-hu you said "cock"

Presumably any adult would be aware that the name is "funny" and would be careful when replying and say something like "working on formal proofs", "programming" or "maths" instead.

It seems to me that the harassers were just searching for an excuse to harass those women.

Half of all people do not get jokes.

And half of all people don't understand that a bad joke isn't funny, especially when you hear it every time, over and over.

I did consider an option of it being a joke, but thenthe discussion continues as if it was a real quote, so it's still worth correcting for the benefit of those who are now arguing the quote instead of the article.

If someone is working on a project, then the expectation is that the name of that project can be correctly pronounced?

What do you mean? Nearly every native English speaker who works with Coq pronounces it "cock" (from experience at POPL, PLDI, and other PL conferences).

Personally, I'm very happy that they are changing the name.

I pronounce it sort of like cog but with a sort of w sound at the end - like the gw sound you get in quiet.

They pronounce it correctly and its pronounciation is the same as "cock" (or close enough for people to understand it so). And that's the problem.

Edit: Literally the first two sentences:

> The name Coq comes from the French word for rooster, CoC (the Calculus of Constructions) and Thierry Coquand, one of the initial authors of Coq. But it is also close to the word "cock" which has a slang meaning that some English speakers consider offensive (it also means a male bird or the firing lever in a gun).

The correct pronunciation is closer to 'coke', as noted in the article.

EDIT: the article is somewhat ambiguous on the subject, and I guess it's a bit subjective, but to me 'coke' sounds much closer to the French than the American 'cahck' at least.

I'm surprised as well, I would've intuitively leaned towards pronouncing it more like "cog" than "cock". Like in Coq au Vin, but I guess that cannot be ordered in the US, gotta go for rooster in wine (or freedom rooster?) to make sure nobody gets upset when their mind's first interpretation of a sound is "penis".

> Like in Coq au Vin

Even assuming you mean “like that is pronounced in English”, its worth noting that there are at least three different first (or only, as some don’t provide more than one) pronunciations of the “Coq” in “Coq au Vin” in thr half-dozen English dictionaries I’ve just checked.)

Thanks, I wasn't aware that they're slaughtering not only the bird but also the pronunciation! Is it one of those things where not being exposed to French at all makes one unable to produce both a hard k-sound as in "ck" and a softer k-sound that is somewhere between g and k, but definitely closer to "cog" than to "cock"?

> Is it one of those things where not being exposed to French at all makes one unable to produce both a hard k-sound as in "ck" and a softer k-sound that is somewhere between g and k, but definitely closer to "cog" than to "cock"?

No, its the fact that the vowel sound in “coq” does not usually occur in English, and is about equidistant from the ones in coke and cock, which are the more common in English; different English dictionaries give each of the three primary status. I can’t find any source with any variation in the final consonant sound, giving it consistently as voiceless (IPA “k”, like “cock”) not voiced (IPA “g”, like “cog”), both in English and French.

I’m pretty sure the vowel sounds the same in cog and cock in US English.

Right, but the ending does not, does it? "cog" and "cock" are like "god" and "got", "dog" and "dock(er)".

Are people getting upset when they say "cogwheel" or "a small cog in a big wheel"?

Then I simply don't understand. Coq au vin is pronounced cock, not cog.

It's ambiguous because it's going to depends on your accent both in French and English.

I don't think it's that ambiguous, at least not in French. Even if you are more familiar with a local variation of the language or have an accent (that's my case, my native language is technically Swiss-French, and we have strong local accents) you are still aware of the "standard French" pronunciation.

I face this with German too, people might speak a dialect or have a local accent but are also familiar with Hochdeutsch.

English doesn't have a standard body as far as I know, and pronunciation vary a lot between different countries, so that may be different.

> you are still aware of the "standard French" pronunciation.

Not that well, at least for me, I think I know most cases where it changes from my local accent, but I would struggle to emit the "correct" sound. It wasn't that long ago that I learnt that "é, ais, er, et, ez" were not supposed to be pronounced the same, and I cannot tell how each one is supposed to be pronounced. I would say people from Switzerland are probably more aware of the difference, because it is acknowledged that it is slightly different, whereas I have never heard anyone tell me that I wasn't learning "proper/standard" French and that it's "supposed" to be pronounced differently.

You make a very good point, I never thought about this.

Btw, I was 16 when I learned that "un" (like in the number 1), "en", and "an" have different pronunciations and that I pronounced them incorrectly my entire life! I still have to force myself from time to time to make a clear distinction.

> English doesn't have a standard body

It'd be wherever it wouldn't be a dialect, which to my mind is obviously british english. Other variations are regional dialects born of distance and time.

Every variety of a language is a dialect; what OP means is that there is no governing body determining what constitutes "standard" English, like the Académie française. Rather, there is an informal standard used by the media and elites in every English-speaking country, making it a pluricentric language[0].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluricentric_language

The following sound the same to me:

- in French, word coq

- in English, word cock

In English the "o" from "coke" sounds more like the way the letter "o" is pronounced in the alphabet, which is slightly different from the "o" in "cock".

The "o" in "coke" is what linguists call a diphthong: two vowel sounds pronounced in quick succession. Pronounce it slowly and notice how your tongue moves as you say it. In IPA it's written /oʊ/, it's a combination of the vowels /o/ and /ʊ/. The "o" in "cock" is a single vowel that's pronounced quite differently in British vs. American English.

The French "o" isn't like any of these; I believe in the case of "coq" it's pronounced /o/, i.e. the first half of the English /oʊ/. Your tongue shouldn't move while you say it. Pronouncing this single vowel like the English /oʊ/ is a very common mistake that English speakers make in French (or Spanish, Portuguese etc.) - it's a distinctively English sound that gives you away as a native English speaker.

Just curious, did you learn the IPA in school? I always find it surprising how familiar people online seem to be with the system, I personally have no idea how to read those notations.

Edit: I found out there is a chart with sound on the IPA website[0]!

[0]: https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa...

Nope, wasn't covered in school at all. I taught myself from Wikipedia, it's a slow process but you don't need to learn it all at once.

> The French "o" isn't like any of these; I believe in the case of "coq" it's pronounced /o/

The sources I find mostly say /ɔ/, which is one step more open than /o/

Could be; my French is rusty as hell. /o/ is how the written "o" is pronounced in Spanish.

Where I am ATM, it's pronounced 'cock'.

> This similarity has already led to some women turning away from Coq and others getting harassed when they said they were working on Coq.

Full quote which you managed to misrepresent by "helpfully" cutting text out.

So, women were turned away, and others were harassed.

So I guess that's exactly what's wrong with people: they will frequently misunderstand things and then spread those misunderstandings.

Women weren't turned away, they did the turning away. I don't see what was misrepresented. The person you're chastising seems to have edited the quote to ensure we know they're replying to one specific part of it. After all, if they had left the part about women turning away, it might seem like they were asking "what's wrong" with the women.

I read that as some women turned away, and other women were harassed.

That's certainly a reasonable understanding, though I can't imagine there not being any men who've been harassed too (even by simple mockery), which is why I read it as if there were women who did not even use it because of the name, and a separate group of others (which includes women too) who still used it, but were being harassed (eg. when they spoke about it).

I think that makes a big difference in the interpretation, not that it should make a big difference in action taken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com