jtauber

Having experienced similar when I was your age (I'm now 41) here's what I've found useful:

1) never ever compare yourself to others, especially based on age. do your thing. for you.

2) wanting to achieve things in life is great but how young you do them really doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does

3) wanting to achieve things in life is great but the way you treat people day-to-day trumps any achievement

4) go with where your energy is and let your goals emerge from that rather than expect the other way around. Don't set a goal of running a marathon if you hate running.

The source will be released in full on June 1st with various components being released earlier.

That presupposes I understand them :-)

My coding followed a specific talk which didn't go at all into why these particular gates are useful.

Once I grok that, I'll improve the code.

While the affricate /d͡ʒ/ is not pronounced as a separate stop+fricative, it can result from the combining of the stop and the fricative and that is presumably what is behind the choice of "dj" as a digraph for representing /d͡ʒ/ in Django.

Given all the confusion here, I've added what is hopefully a simpler and more introductory explanation:

Django is pronounced with an initial sound that, in English is often written "j". This might lead one to think of the "D" as silent with the "j" being pronounced the way it is in English.

However, that doesn't explain why the "D" is there in the first place.

A more insightful way to think of it is to remember it's a French spelling. Think of the "j" as being pronounced as in French. Now put a "d" sound in front of it. When the "d" sound and "j" sound merge, you get something called an affricate. This particular affricate is the same sound used in English to pronounce just "j".

So a French "dj" is like an English "j". The "d" isn't silent, though, because the French "j" is not the same as the English "j".

I'm not sure what the confusion is. I agree with what you've said above.

Basically: 1. "d" in French is pronounced "d". 2. "j" in French is pronounced "zh". 3. "dj" in French is pronounced as the same affricate you get by combining "d" and "zh". 4. This is a better explanation for the "dj" in Django rather than saying the "j" is an affricate and the "d" is silent.

Not sure where you think I say that, but to clarify anyway: the sound at the start of all those words in English is not the same as the sound the French write as "j".

It just occurs to me: does French even have the affricate /d͡ʒ/ natively? Do some native French speakers pronounce "Django" with an initial /ʒ/? That actually would be a silent D and would explain why the French would say "Django with a D" rather than "the D is silent"

Well, firstly that comment postdates your initial comment that "everybody else in this thread" explains it better and you added the "(such as has pash's sibling comment)" after I'd responded.

Secondly, I wanted to dive in a bit more and explain the relationship between the "j" in English vs French and hence the role of the "d" in the French spelling (as that's kind of the whole point).

I haven't seen anyone else explain why Django is spelled with a D. All I've seen is people reiterate the reason for the pronunciation given the spelling as "the D is silent" rather than the more insightful fact that, far from being silent, the D was necessary for Django Reinhardt to express the pronunciation of his nickname in his native language.

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.

But if you're trying to explain why Django is spelled the way it is, it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> <d> and /ʒ/ -> <j> than to posit the <d> comes from nowhere and is just silent.

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.

Polish apparently contrasts /t͡ʂ/ and /tʂ/

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

Yes, but that is irrelevant to why Django Reinhardt spelled his name with a D.

Right, but the best explanation for why "Django" is spelled with a <d> is not that the <d> is silent and the <j> represents /d͡ʒ/ but rather that, as you say, the diagraph <dj> represents /d͡ʒ/.

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/

Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the <d> in the name "Django".

I honestly don't think people who say "the D is silent" are making a distinction between the true affricate and /dʒ/.

Saying "the D is silent" is missing the most sensible explanation for why the name "Django" is spelled that way: namely that the <j> would normally be pronounced /ʒ/ in French (not sure about Romani).

If you're trying to explain why /dʒɑ̃ɡo/ is spelled <Django>, it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> <d> and /ʒ/ -> <j> than to posit the <d> comes from nowhere and is just silent.

We're talking about a web framework named after a Belgian with a Romani nickname whose creator (the web framework's) desires that the web framework be pronounced the same as its namesake. If it were truly Anglicized, you would expect it to be spelled "Jango".

So how can we best analyze why it is spelled <Dj-> and yet pronounced /dʒ-/?

Either it's because:

1. <d> is silent and <j> is /dʒ/; or 2. <d> is pronounced /d/ and <j> is pronounced /ʒ/

2 seems by far the more perspicuous analysis to me given the absence of other examples of a silent <d>. And it's certainly the correct analysis in the case of the guitarist.

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.

/dʒ/ doesn't have to be be written "dj" (it isn't in English, for example). It just is written that way in French because "j" alone is just /ʒ/ (as you quote above).

When you ask "why not just say...", well that is pretty much what I say in the first sentence of the third card.

I wrote a little on this topic many years ago on my blog: http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/04/30/grammar_rules/

Almost every linguist (myself included) would agree. I'm not arguing about how the word is pronounced, I'm arguing about the description of how it's pronounced.

Heroku was able to do it because it had a lot of funding in the beginning (and is now part of a public company). Very hard to bootstrap freemium, especially if there are per-user costs like with hosting.

(I run gondor.io so I understand :-)

We'll eventually offer monthly plans with a free trial but we're looking for supporters at the moment, like the 10,000+ people that paid $50 for app.net

Over 10,000 people were willing to pay $50 to see app.net built without ever having seen it.

Sorry, that was an unintentional side-effect of switching away from requiring a credit card upfront.

We'll put the information somewhere else.

Until then, for everyone else: it's $5/month or $50/year.

I started implementing https://thoughtstreams.io the last few weeks for very much this kind of thing.