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Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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".

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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