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Comment by mgr86 | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing some obvious joke...but why is he pronouncing it yava-script.

He's in character of it being 2035 and the pronunciation was lost/changed.

I think you're probably right -- he almost slips up at one point, but corrects himself before pronouncing the "va".

I was hoping he'd drop in some reference that would explain it, like the take over of world government by Norway after the war (sort of like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero). But I guess he just wanted it to be inscrutable.

I thought it was supposed to be some future pronunciation thing, imagining the way languages evolve. I've seen SciFi movies where in the future english is heavily influenced by spanish.

I thought it was supposed to be a callback to this scene in Anchorman, but I'm not sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-LnP3uraDo

No hard 'J's in many languages (Like Slavic languages). It's pronounced 'y'. Anyone have a list?

The sound ʤ seems to occur in most Slavic languages [1], I guess the primary reason why "Java" is read as "Yava" is because people tend to apply local pronunciation rules to commonly used foreign words, either because of lack of knowledge of native pronunciation or because native pronunciation sounds just silly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricat...

YavaScript is a very common pronunciation in Germany, the dj sound only appears in "loannames" like Jennifer. My grandfather always told me to find a nice yob :)

Ask a Hispanic friend.

gotcha.

Rather, ask a Scandinavian friend.

My scandinavian friends call it yay-va-script.

I'm Icelandic and we use yava-script, I find it hard to figure out how yay-va sounds.

YAY as opposed to nay VUH as in vagina SCRIPT pronounced normally

Perhaps it would help to see that pronunciation rendered in IPA for English [0]: /ˈiːeɪ.və.ˌskrɪpt/

Note particularly the italicized phoneme (eɪ), which corresponds to the "long A" sound in English, e.g., the 'a' in 'face'. I'm unfamiliar with the Icelandic language, but according to the English equivalents listed on Wikipedia's page on IPA for Icelandic [1], the corresponding phoneme in that language appears to be ei.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Icelandic

I'm from Scandinavia and have never heard anyone pronounce it like that.

At the 8:00 mark, he accidentally pronounces it correctly for a moment, and then "corrects himself" by mispronouncing it :-)

I'm assuming the original pronounciation was lost in the war.

How else would you pronounce it?

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