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

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday May 18 2020, @11:59AM (2 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Monday May 18 2020, @11:59AM (#995703) Journal
    "I am not sure of what you are referring to"

    See;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

    In short, the way we pronounce vowels under certain conditions changes dramatically a few centuries back. Spellings remain conservative, which helps to keep the spoken dialects from diverging too far from the literary language, but leaves us with a rather complicated relationship between the written and spoken form of the vowels.

    So for a couple of examples;

    'Bite' used to be pronounced as it's written; two syllables, almost like the german word for please. After the great vowel shift, it's still spelled the same way, but the long 'i' has become a dipthong 'aj' and the final vowel has been elided completely.

    The first person singular pronoun used to be 'ic' (very much like german 'ich'.) But just like in 'bite' the long 'i' became a dipthong 'aj'. (The 'c' was lost separately, leaving the modern 'I.')

    English still has pretty much the same vowel values as other languages using the same alphabet (the latin alphabet) if you pick the right words. So 'a' as in papa, 'e' as in pet, 'i' as in bit, and so on. But if a word existed in old english and had a long vowel, then it's probably changed dramatically.

    See also;
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hqQpziIETo [6:26 craptube video; the great vowel shift]

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @02:51PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @02:51PM (#995810)

    In short, the way we pronounce vowels under certain conditions changes dramatically a few centuries back. Spellings remain conservative, which helps to keep the spoken dialects from diverging too far from the literary language, but leaves us with a rather complicated relationship between the written and spoken form of the vowels.

    While there are some issues relating to spelling that occurred in part due to the Great Vowel Shift, it's not really correct to blame the inconsistency of English spelling on it.

    'Bite' used to be pronounced as it's written; two syllables, almost like the german word for please. After the great vowel shift, it's still spelled the same way, but the long 'i' has become a dipthong 'aj' and the final vowel has been elided completely.

    No, that's simply wrong. "Bite" wasn't pronounced like a German short 'i' -- the 'i' was long even in Middle English. It was pronounced closer to "beat" in Modern English. As for the loss of pronunciation for the final vowel, that had absolutely nothing to do with the GVS, as loss of pronunciation for things like unstressed vowels and final sounds in words is very common over time in most languages.

    The GVS simply rearranged the vowel sounds (as well as moving toward diphthongs for many long vowels), but spelling mostly still had a close relationship to pronunciation. Vowels that had previously been long generally remained long; they just were all pronounced differently.

    English spelling is a mess for a number of reasons (lots of different stages of importing foreign words from various languages, gradual disconnect of spelling from pronunciation that happens in many languages, strange insertions of silent letters by amateur etymologists in days gone by, etc., etc.). Not all words went through the GVS consistently, so it did contribute to spelling problems with a few words. It's the reason why English vowel sounds often deviate significantly from the sounds those letters have in other European languages, but it wasn't the reason for all (probably not even most) of English's spelling woes.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:44PM

      by Arik (4543) on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:44PM (#998129) Journal
      "While there are some issues relating to spelling that occurred in part due to the Great Vowel Shift, it's not really correct to blame the inconsistency of English spelling on it."

      And I didn't really do that. You're jousting a straw man. The Great Vowel shift was the first large disruption in the spelling of /vowels/  and explains a good bit of the weirdness in English spelling when it comes to /vowels./ Certainly it doesn't explain ALL of it, but context! I brought this up in response to the poster who complained that English uses vowels differently from the common usage in other languages (derived from Latin, like the alphabet itself.) And I pointed out it's not that the original values are gone (a as in papa, e as it net, etc. still match) but just that we have a bunch of alternate values depending on the context, and that situation is specifically rooted in the great vowel shift.

      "No, that's simply wrong. "Bite" wasn't pronounced like a German short 'i' -- the 'i' was long even in Middle English. "

      Keep jousting that straw man!

      I didn't say the i was pronounced short like German, I said the word was pronounced with two syllables like German, which it was. I could have mentioned the difference in the vowel but why? It's irrelevant to the point I was making, and many readers would have no idea what a 'long-i' sounds like anyway.

      "As for the loss of pronunciation for the final vowel, that had absolutely nothing to do with the GVS"

      And that's absolutely false. You could have argued that it was not the same thing exactly, and made a decent case there, but 'nothing to do with' it? Absolutely wrong. The two changes were at the least intimately connected.

      "Vowels that had previously been long generally remained long; they just were all pronounced differently."

      Completely incorrect. Long vowels were converted to other vowels - and Modern English has no long vowels as a result. Even if we still /call/ them long vowels in certain context (grammar school teaches much nonsense) that's not what they are.

      Anyway pointless post, as you didn't understand what you were replying to.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?