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Comment by dmit | Hacker News Reader

I mean, as someone who grew up pronouncing it "Ess-Cue-Ell", I wish I learned earlier on that "Sequel" was the intended pronunciation. :)

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Yes, in Ukrainian/Russian PRQL can be easily read as "prikol" (joke/gag/quirk). But I guess the best name would be "perkele" (emotional, like "damn") in Finnish.

I always used ess-cue-ell to refer to the language, and sequel to refer to the Microsoft product. It would never occur to me to pronounce the Open Source alternative as postgressequel either, that's also invariably called post-gress-cue-ell here.

Nobody calls it sequel in my country.

Even people who know because then they have to explain it which wastes time for no benefit.

Which is my point. A better name wouldn’t have had that problem. How could you ever know how it’s pronounced if you bump into it on a blog or social media post instead of the official website? We don’t write “SQL (pronounced “sequel”)” every time, we just write “SQL”.

But even then, it makes sense to choose to pronounce it “the wrong way”. I say “sequelite” because that’s fairly clear in context, but “sequel” might not be so I pronounce each letter in that case.

Did know PNG is supposed to be pronounced “ping”? I don’t know anyone who chooses to do that, even if they know.

I pronounce PNG "ping". Also JPEG as "jay peg" but, counter to the creator's intention, GIF with a hard "g".

My favorite answer to the GIF pronunciation debate is to prefer the Old English pronunciation from back before the noun "gift" picked up that extra consonant at the end, which Old English pronounced it rather like "hyeef". (Similar to what a "g" will do in some latinx dialects.) That pronunciation splits the difference and makes some of both hard and soft "g" proponents angry, which is to say that pronunciation is also a gift from the past.

SQL's terrible name is IBM's fault for multiple reasons. They were going to spell it Sequel but IBM's lawyers found another company had a trademark on Sequel and forced them to rename it to avoid lawsuits. Rather than pick a new, more original name they instead shrunk the acronym and then IBM's legal also made them tell people to spell it out instead of call it "sequel" to continue to avoid the other company's trademark. So IBM made sure the name and its pronunciation was always a mixed message from very early in the language's history. Thanks, IBM

(I've always pronounced PNG "ping". It's interesting that there is a split there, I'm not sure I would have expected a large one.)

I continue to pronounce it S-Q-L... and G-U-I; generally I pronounce most things as initialism and I'm right to do so.

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