Interesting! Now what is the correct pronunciation…
Day-muhn?
My colleagues all seem to say it differently, and I’ve always been curious which one of us sounds the most foolish.
Day-muhn?
My colleagues all seem to say it differently, and I’ve always been curious which one of us sounds the most foolish.
Exhibit B: In Old English, "æ" was a vowel that did not survive to modern English. There is no direct equivalent sound or letter for it today. Other words that contiained æ have generally taken the long E pronunciation instead, e.g. encylopaedia -> encyclopedia and aether -> ether.
So people can say what they want but in my opinion, the "dee-mon" pronunciation is the most correct. :)
Norwegian, Danish, French, Icelandic, Faroese: Æ.
Æ is, according to Wikipedia, used in Latin, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Ossetic, Kawésqar, and Yaghan. (It is not used in French or English except in loanwords from Latin.)
> By the late 16th century, the general supernatural meaning was being distinguished with the spelling daemon, while the evil meaning remained with demon.
Given that both spellings were used simultaneously back then for the goal of differentiation that transcends mere archaic-vs-modern, I have to wonder if there was verbal differentiation accompanying it as well. I suppose this depends on a more precise estimate of æ's deprecation through the transition from Old to Middle to Early Modern to Modern English (specifically, whether its original /æ/ [0] sound persisted into Early Modern or was already /ee/ by then).
[0] Which, confusingly, has several possibilities [1]. Since we're talking about the 16th century though, we might go with the sound it also represents in IPA, as in ash, fan, happy, last, etc. although I can't say I've ever heard anyone utter /dam ən/...
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3...
But, in accord with the robustness principle, I'm happy to accept any pronunciation.
Same. Even though it's probably technically incorrect in some pedantic sense, this pronunciation just makes more sense to me.
I've heard both in my personal life from different people
Whoever it was that decided “simplified” spellings were an improvement didn’t take into account how difficult they’d make pronunciation. I often hear highly educated Americans coming up with very strange ways to pronounce words, well beyond the normal realms of accent and variation, that are clearly the product of this. English spelling is bad enough but cutting out the hints to a word’s origin makes things worse, not better.
Or De-Men when feeling less nerdy.
In seriousness it's pronounced DEE-mon, but you'll never get consensus on this, so best just to say it the way you want to say it and leave it alone when someone else says it differently.
SOO-dough (like pseudo)
> and 'sysctl'.
see-ISSSSS-cuttle (obviously!!)
Siss cee tee ell
I will die on this hill
But yeah, the filling in is odd unless, as in the case of ctl/ctrl, knowledge of the original guides us into lossless compression.
sysctl: "sys control"
Is that a typo? If not then I see how those would be pronounced the same, but daemon in American English would usually be pronounced "Day-mon". This also helps to distinguish between the long running process and an evil entity, which is good when talking to less technically minded folks.