Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyruzic | Hacker News Reader

People for some reason think that they get to decide how to pronounce a name rather than the creator of the name. Oh well. Its an easy way to determine someone's level of internet knowledge.

View on HN

That is how words work, they evolve as the consensus pronunciation evolves, they do not stay forever static.

This gives us an easy solution to make everyone happy though! We gust have to change "graphics" to be pronounced as "jraphics"

Its a name not a regular word.

It's an acronym really, where the first word of the acronym is "graphics" :)

Does 'scuba' rhyme with 'rubber'?

Since someone seems to need an explanation, 'scuba' stands for 'self-contained underwater breathing apparatus'.

The pronunciation of names also changes over time, and across locations.

Your argument is descriptivist, whereas theirs is prescriptivist.

And the former is right, whereas the latter is only present in academic discussions of use of language.

If someone has a regular-looking name yet tells you their name is pronounced differently (and knows that it is irregular), would you say their name the way they want you to, or would you insist on saying it the regular way?

I’d say their name the way they wanted to, because I’m not an asshole. But I don’t think that’s as much of a contradiction as you think it is. It’s a great example of how language evolves.

It's an example of prescription in language. Correcting someone's spelling/grammar is another.

Whether to prescribe language or not is somewhat arbitrary at times and is determined culturally, so I don't think the argument above can be resolved.

I know that was your point and I said I knew it in my response. But it’s not prescriptivism. It’s proscribed, and that’s different. Accepting that someone’s name is linguistically different than the rules you expect it to follow is both not being an asshole and descriptivism in practice. The fact that it’s proscribed is just a testament that it’s important to the person who prompted you to accept that particular language evolution.

So it seems you are saying it only makes sense to describe prescriptivism as explicitly calling for conformity to an existing norm.

There seem to be plenty of people who will argue to conserve grammar/spelling/semantics etc. I can't say their work is unfruitful, yet it does seem to be the case that language follows the habits of the majority.

> Oh well. Its an easy way to determine someone's level of internet knowledge.

No it’s not, plenty of people are very much of aware of the intended pronunciation and still choose to pronounce it another way.

Indeed. I'm well aware of how the creator wants me to say it. I reject his reality and substitute my own.

That's not how language evolves. I'm sure you don't pronounce every French word that was assimilated into English with a French accent / pronunciation.

Its a name.

I'm pretty sure that Matthaios, Markos, Loukas and Ioannes would not recognize their own names in the present-day English pronunciations (well, Mark and Luke might, but John would certainly not).

Come to St. Louis where everyone mispronounces the French street names. Doug Crockford coined JSON as "Jason", but nearly every developer I've ever run into says "jaysawn", so that's how I say it too.

Or the name of St. Louis itself, for that matter.

PNG was supposed to be "ping", but I've only ever heard people spell it out.

And? That's only relevant if it's their own name, or potentially if something falls under the purview of the Académie Française, and even then, that requires you to care what the Academy thinks.

There is more than one canonical way to pronounce things, even names. For example, what's the correct way to pronounce Arkansas?

The real issue here is people trying to assert there is only one correct way to pronounce it.

Virtually all names are pronounced differently from how they originally were.

So are the names of countries but people rarely pronounce them as they are in their country of origin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com