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Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

>pronounced "paw"

What? Call it "paw" then. No one is gonna see "pa" and think it's pronounced "paw", and no one is gonna hear you say "paw" and think the invocation is "pa"

Why the intentional confusion?

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I would pronounce pa as “paw”, like papa. Would you say it like the a in “apple”?

If papa is a stand-in for father, I'd pronounce it with a long a, as in father. If papa is a stand-in for grandfather, I'd pronounce the first a as in apple, and the second as in paw. But of also spell it papaw. Seeing 'pa' in its own, I'd never think it was pronounced like paw, unless I was reading something written in Hungarian.

I pronounce 'pa' like 'paw.' Short for papa I guess. Always have, always will.

None of the above. No one pronounces "aw" like the a in Apple. And most people do dinstinguish between "a" and "aw" by pronouncing the latter more like the a in "awe".

Merriam-Webster at least gives one of two possible pronunciations for “pa” as identical to “paw.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pa

Relevant for the US.

Right I’m just confused how you would pronounce it. Because I would almost certainly default to saying pa like “awe”.

ESL speaker here, "pa" like in "parking"

There is a favourite old joke of mine that depends heavily on this pronunciation:

    A dog limps into a bar. The barman looks at him and say "What can I do you for?" and  
    the dog replies "I'm a looking for the man that shot my pa".

"pa" would be pronounced between these two, depending on speaker:

/pɑː/ — if I had to use "normal person's IPA", "pah" would be my attempt. This, to me, is the more common pronunciation. Should rhyme with "bra" … assuming you pronounce that like I do.

/pɔː/ — like "paw" or "awe". This is a region-specific dialect, to me. This appears to be the one you're familiar with.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English for a chart.

To me (American Midwest), “papa” (father) and “pawpaw” (a type of fruit) are not pronounced the same way. “Papa” is more like “pahpah”.

> No one is gonna see "pa" and think it's pronounced "paw", and no one is gonna hear you say "paw" and think the invocation is "pa"

Well consider me a counter example.

Wait till you hear how age is pronounced

Awgee?

What regional dialect of English are you using that the word "pa" is pronounced any differently? To my West Coast / NorCal ears, urying to use a stressed, second-a-in-"banana" pronunciation, is really weird, as is schwaing it to the point of "uh". The unstressed-short a (the other two 'a's in 'banana') sounds the best, and is perfectly reasonable to describe phonetically as "aw".

.. In the same way "fa la la" is not sung "faw law law"

I would write that as either "faw lah lah" or "fuh lah lah" or maybe "fuh luh luh". The "paw" sound is undeniably how I'd refer to my father, not "puh", or "pah", though I could imagine like a New England accent using the latter.

Or, who really cares how people pronounce it? It's very unlikely for there to be many scenarios where someone was trying to find this, but couldn't, just because they heard someone say it wrong. Most people will find it through textual means. I don't get the obsession with projects specifying the pronunciation in the README. If anything it just means you failed at naming your project.

oh hey - I too made a password manager - and it's named paw! Pronounced however the heck you like.

https://github.com/alexlance/paw

It's a wrapper around gpg symmetric encryption that accesses a store of encrypted passwords sitting on a remote server accessible via ssh.

You're not in the American South, are you?

These are not far from one another here.

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