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From iOS to SQL: the World’s Most Incorrectly Pronounced Tech Terms

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 18 2020, @01:32AM   
from the just-like-it-sounds dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

From iOS to SQL: The world's most incorrectly pronounced tech terms:

A lot of people pronounce common tech terms wrong, from iOS to SQL to Qi. It's understandable: Some of the proper or official pronunciations of these terms are counterintuitive at best. Still, we think it's time to clear the air on a few of them.

To that end, we're starting a discussion and inviting you to share your examples with us. Next week, we'll look into a bunch of them and publish a pronunciation guide.

[...] Below are a handful that have come up within the Ars [Technica] staff. Again, dear readers, feel free to discuss and debate, and to introduce some others of your own. For some of these and other terms suggested, we'll follow up with an article making the case for some correct (or, at least official) pronunciations versus incorrect ones, sourced as best as we can.

• [...]iOS and beOS
• [...]OS X and iPhone X
• [...]SQL and MySQL
• [...]Linux
• [...]Qi
• [...]Huawei

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Original Submission

• Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @06:00AM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @06:00AM (#995626)

  In addition to meditation and martial arts, the word should be familiar to many from the game Wei qi

  Uh, no. The former is 氣, qì, and means breath, pneuma etc. 棋, qí, is a chess type game (圍棋 == surround chess, go).

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• Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday May 18 2020, @11:32AM (1 child)

  by Arik (4543) on Monday May 18 2020, @11:32AM (#995692) Journal

  Well done noticing the tones.
  
  But I'm not unaware of the tones, I was just trying to avoid making my post unnecessarily long and confusing for those who don't really want a full lesson on mandarin. And despite knowing the tones, you seem to have missed my point, perhaps because you don't know the game.
  
  In the game weiqi (qi here is rising tone, meaning game) one of the fundamental concepts is qi (and here it's falling tone, meaning breath.)
  
  Each stone, or group of stones, must have at least one breath available at all times. Should the last available breath be lost, then the stone or group of stones are removed from play. A group of stones may have an /internal/ breath hole, which makes it more difficult to attack, or it may even reach the point of having /two/ internal breath holes, in which case it is invulnerable to attack.

  --
  If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?

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  • Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin (Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2020, @01:19PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday May 18 2020, @01:19PM (#995737) Journal

    You're both so, so wrong. Qi means "weird," as in 奇怪, which is clearly an ancient Chinese reference to Arik's choice of typeface.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.

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• Re:There is no right way of pronouncing those thin (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @08:01PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @08:01PM (#995985)

  whoever said "chinese chars" are picto grams originally is talking shit.
  no one making up pictograms with a mediocre sense of logic would not consider a "magical fire embodied into life" pictogram to not have a circle in the middle.
  maybe, just maybe, it's just phony and the pictogram creator knew it all along and the REAL pictogram revolves around ... $

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