How to Pronounce GNU (2001)

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnu#Legacy

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gnu#Usage_notes

- "Pronunciation with initial /ɡ/ popularized as a joke, in particular through The Gnu Song.[2][3]"

I was in a computational physics class in grad school when the professor mentioned "guh-new Emacs", and it felt like time froze. I had been seeing this word for nearly a decade since I started using free software stuff, but had evidentially never talked to anybody about it and it was difficult to register this new way of pronouncing the word.

I still pronounce it "new" in my head from time to time.

Now that we've got that out of the way, does Donald Ervin Knuth pronounce the "K" in his name?

Stallman's pronunciation sure sounds like two syllables to me... Guh-new.

It's much harder to say as a single syllable than the word "grew," which they compare it to.

I wish they had named it something better. The recursive joke doesn't help. The odd sequence of letters that are hard for most English speakers to say makes it worse. The fact that there is an actual English word with those letters, but pronounced differently, makes it even worse.