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Comment by rvkennedy | Hacker News Reader

You know why this is? Because there is no correct pronunciation in English for two consecutive consonants. Similarly, SQL is not pronounced "sequel", because it contains no vowels. TeX is not pronounced "teck" because there no letter chi in the Roman alphabet.

All these cutesy insider pronunciations only serve to confuse and alienate the uninitiated, it's elitist nonsense.

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Or if you deal in it every day, saying sequel comes more natural than saying ess cue ell. There's a lot more legitimately confusing things in the world of IT than pronunciation of commonly used names.

I don't fight my colleagues when they say "Suss" rather than the correct pronunciation of Suse Linux, because when it comes down to it, language is just an agreement that certain sounds mean something to the group that they are being spoken to. There's nothing inherent about the sanctity of language. If you can't be flexible, you might not be cut out for it.

SQL is pronounced 'sequel' not because it's cute, but because that's what it was originally called by IBM, and was changed only due to a conflicting trademark. The then-current DBA's never stopped calling it 'sequel' and the pronunciation stuck.

I pronounced SQL by saying each letter for a long time, as I'd learnt all about it online and never spoken to anyone about it. It didn't help that I often worked with MSSQL, or... Messequel?

"Sequel Server", maybe? It's more pleasing to the ears.

I tend to say "Sequel Server" but also "My S Q L". Am I weird?

Not as weird as me because I've been calling it "Mysquirrel."

It can't be that weird, as I too call it this. I had assumed that I was the only one!

Lighten up!

Yes, a proper romanization would be 'tech', but for obvious reasons that was discarded.

I've always thought that this, rather than any misunderstanding of what makes up an OS, is why "GNU/Linux" never caught on.

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