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Comment by graue | Hacker News Reader

Now that's a confusing explanation! Most Python programmers I've met have pronounced it "duh-jango", and I thought this article was going to defend that pronunciation. But it actually says that pronunciation is wrong, and the D is, from an English speaker's perspective, silent. But because J is pronounced differently in French, saying that the D is silent is, although it leads English speakers to pronounce the name correctly, technically semantically incorrect.

...Did I get that right?

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The reason "Django" is pronounced /dʒɑ̃ɡo/ or /dʒæŋɡəʊ/ is not because the "D" is silent and the "j" is pronounced /dʒ/ but rather because the "D" is pronounced /d/ and the "j" is pronounced /ʒ/.

Explaining how to pronounce it by saying "the D is silent" might be helpful but it's technically incorrect.

It may seem like pedantry to many but I thought people with an interest in linguistics might find it helpful.

That's not a precisely correct explanation either, though, because English 'j', pronounced /d͡ʒ/, is a single consonant sound (a voiced palato-alveolar affricate), not a sequence of two consonants. Though it's true that it's what English speakers would produce if you asked them to pronounce /d/ + /ʒ/ in sequence, because they always collapse into the single consonant. Not sure if that's also true in French.

Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the <d> exists in <Django> because <j> alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the <d> isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

Ah yeah, that makes sense to me. Even if you treat 'd' as a kind of modifier in French (it turns the 'j' from a sibilant into an affricative) it's clearly still having an effect on the pronunciation. I was somewhat objecting to whether the the 'd' itself is being pronounced, but that does get pretty hair-splitting, especially since /d/ is a stop. The transcription /dʒ/ sure makes it look like it's pronounced, but if IPA used a single character to transcribe the affricative, the 'd' would look like it disappeared in French too. But, granted, rather than having no effect (as in English), in French it'd still modulate the pronunciation of the 'j' even in that analysis.

Incidentally, I wonder if there are any languages where /d͡ʒ/ != /dʒ/ or if it's just impossible to produce that sequence.

Polish apparently contrasts /t͡ʂ/ and /tʂ/

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant#Affricates_...

I'm trying to think of other modifier examples. Not a perfect analogy but I don't think you'd say that, in English, the <h> in <sh> is silent.

I wonder about Italian, though. Would it be correct to say the <g> is silent in <gli>?

Seems a much tougher call in Italian. I would say /d͡ʒ/ has a much closer relationship to /dʒ/ than /ʎ/ does to /gli/ for example.

Also /d/ + /ʒ/ does become /d͡ʒ/ in English (and potentially all languages that have /d/ and /ʒ/) so even if you had a single symbol for /d͡ʒ/ that was unrelated to that for /d/, the relationship between /dʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/ is still close.

Most Python programmers? I guess it depends on the circles in which one travels. I've personally never heard it said as "duh-jango" before. I've never pronounced it that way, personally.

In this talk, you can hear a Django dev pronouncing it (quite often): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-WXiqrzAf8

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