How do you say...... (words with different pronounciations)

How do you say some of the internet/*nix derived words, like "GUI" and "regex"... Here's some of mine:

/usr => 'slash you ess are',
/var => 'slash var',
/etc => 'slash e tee see',
vi => 'vee eye',
vim => 'vim' (just like it looks),
regex => 'reg ex' (reg like register),
fstab => 'eff ess tab',
gnu => 'gee enn you',
sudo => I mix between 'so do' and 'sue dough'
 
CodeBlock said:
How do you say some of the internet/*nix derived words, like "GUI" and "regex"... Here's some of mine:

/usr => 'slash you ess are',
/var => 'slash var',
/etc => 'slash e tee see',
vi => 'vee eye',
vim => 'vim' (just like it looks),
regex => 'reg ex' (reg like register),
fstab => 'eff ess tab',
gnu => 'gee enn you',
sudo => I mix between 'so do' and 'sue dough'

Here's mine (which are different)

/usr => "slash user" or "root user"
/etc => sometimes I just call this "et cetera"
vim => "vee eye em"
regex => With a hard(?) g. It's shorthand for "reg-u-lar ex-pres-sion", so I believe this is correct.
fstab => "eff stab"
gnu => "guh new"
sudo => "sue dough" (only)
 
What about char or SCSI? :)

I would appreciate it if someone native english speaker told me how the word "integer" is pronounced.
 
CodeBlock said:
How do you say some of the internet/*nix derived words, like "GUI" and "regex"... Here's some of mine:
/usr => user
/var => var (rhymes with car)
/etc => et cetera
vi => vi (rhymes with hi)
vim => vim (rhymes with dim)
regex => Same as OP
fstab => f-stab, just like it looks
gnu => new or g'new with a hard 'g'
sudo => sue dough, as the OP put it.

anemos said:
What about char or SCSI? :)
SCSI = SCUZZY, or that's how I've known it for eons.

I would appreciate it if someone native english speaker told me how the word "integer" is pronounced.

http://www.answers.com/integer
Click on the little speaker icon after the pronunciation key to hear it.
 
GUI I have always pronounced "gooey", when I am talking about SCSI devices I have always pronounced them as "Scuzzy" but in my local dialect of English "Scouse" that can be taken as really hung over OR as really nasty looking thing as in "That car looks scuzzy" or "She is really scuzzy" so when a non techie hears it they give me a odd look.
 
saxon3049 said:
GUI I have always pronounced "gooey", when I am talking about SCSI devices I have always pronounced them as "Scuzzy" but in my local dialect of English "Scouse" that can be taken as really hung over OR as really nasty looking thing as in "That car looks scuzzy" or "She is really scuzzy" so when a non techie hears it they give me a odd look.

That's interesting :p

I say scuzzy too. And Gee You Eye for GUI.
 
Ah, if you knew my native language, you'd laugh, how easily it's to write what you pronounce.... in Latvian

Char > čar
regex > regeks
integer > intidžer or intedžer
others mentioned here are same

If I had to write in latvian, how I english characters sound, it would look like this:
Code:
a = ei      b = bī      c = cī      d = dī      e = ī
f = ef      g = gī      h = eidž    i = ai      j = džei
k = kei     l = el      m = em      n = en      o = ou
p = pī      q = kjū     r = ār      s = es      t = tī
u = jū      v = vī      w =         x = eks     y = vāi
z = zet

While I could do this from english to latvian, I couldn't do it from latvian to english.... I'm not sure it's possible....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_language
Latvian spelling has almost perfect correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Every phoneme has its own letter so that a reader need not learn how a word is pronounced, but simply pronounce it. There are only three exceptions to this that could cause mispronunciation.....

Hello! How do you do?
To us sounds like
Hellou! Hau du ju dū?
 
I say "char" very similar to "care", since "char" is short for "character", and the first syllable sounds like "care". GUI is always pronounced by me according to its letters...G U I. Same with SCSI.
 
killasmurf86 said:
Ah, if you knew my native language, you'd laugh, how easily it's to write what you pronounce.... in Latvian

Seems like an interesting language. My native language (Chinese) is quite complicated. There are thousands of characters and there isn't really any relationship between the characters and pronunciation.
 
dennylin93 said:
Seems like an interesting language. My native language (Chinese) is quite complicated. There are thousands of characters and there isn't really any relationship between the characters and pronunciation.

That is just nuts....
I just can't understand, how do you far-east people learn to read, write..... it's nuts.... You probably have very good memory....
 
killasmurf86 said:
That is just nuts....
I just can't understand, how do you far-east people learn to read, write..... it's nuts.... You probably have very good memory....

Don't underestimate human brain. There was an article on BBC - it explained that we born with some sort of hard-coded genetic firmware that allows babies to learn quickly. However, as you get aged your learning capacity goes down. Just google it and you may find it out.
 
yes, but come on.... azians take it to extreeme....
I heard you need to know about 2K heuroglifs (or how do you call them correctly) to read newspaper.....
and more if you want to read books
 
killasmurf86 said:
I heard you need to know about 2K heuroglifs (or how do you call them correctly) to read newspaper.....
and more if you want to read books

I think they're usually just called characters. Hieroglyphs are really (non-abstract) little graphic drawings of birds, eyes, feathers, boats etc. Probably the most well-known example is that of the old Egyptian writings such as those found in pyramids and on sarcophagi(sp?) and stuff, but during the course of (ancient) history there have been more of these logographic" alphabets".

But people occasionally call kanji characters hieroglyphs too, so maybe I'm picking nits here.

And I do seem to remember something about knowing 2K kanji characters being the treshold of literacy in Japanese, but it's been a long time since I "studied" that language so I can't be sure about that.

Alphons
 
vivek said:
Don't underestimate human brain. There was an article on BBC - it explained that we born with some sort of hard-coded genetic firmware that allows babies to learn quickly. However, as you get aged your learning capacity goes down. Just google it and you may find it out.

Quite true. In fact, many native speakers of Chinese don't have problem learning the language. It's just hard as a second language. Younger children learn languages quick and better than adults do.

Sometimes it's just relative. People who speak Chinese think that it's easy, but English is extremely hard because of all the grammar. On the other hand, native speakers of English tend to face difficulties when they learn Chinese characters.
 
Way off-topic but hey, this IS the off-topic forum...

dennylin93 said:
Sometimes it's just relative. People who speak Chinese think that it's easy, but English is extremely hard because of all the grammar. On the other hand, native speakers of English tend to face difficulties when they learn Chinese characters.

You're right on the money here. The underlying structure of a language (compared to what you're already used to) is key to the learning curve.

For example, Dutch and German are quite similar languages. Most Dutch people with reasonably well-developed linguistic intuition can at least get by in German without much effort and vice versa. Sure, you need a workable grasp of vocabulary (although there is quite a bit of overlap between the two languages) and you may not "get" the finer points of conjugation, but both grammars are based on pretty much the same underlying concepts so sentences are built in more or less the same way. And with some study it's relatively easy for a Dutch person to learn fluent German and vice versa (I do think that Dutch is somewhat more difficult to learn properly than German though).

The same applies to the "class" of roman/latin languages, e.g. Italian, French, Spanish and Portugese. If you know one of those, it's relatively easy to learn another one. And I've been told that this also holds for most Scandinavian languages.

Oriental languages on the other hand are based on completely different concepts and therefore have a totally different underlying structure, making it much more difficult to learn an oriental language if you're from "the west" or to learn a western language if you're Asian.

To illustrate: I once knew a Japanese computer scientist who came to Leiden University in The Netherlands to pursue her Ph.D. degree. She is very intelligent (not to mention breathtakingly beautiful, but that's besides the point ;)) but she spoke and wrote English like a six-year-old. It can really be that hard if languages are so completely structurally and conceptually different. Plus: while we in the west tend to think: "it should go something like this and if I'm understood that's close enough", the Japanese tend to be much more perfectionistic and be more afraid of making mistakes. That mindset, if present, probably does't help matters either.

However, I do think that the "problem" of different characters is often overstated. When I tried to learn a bit of Japanese I found out that it was actually easier to first learn the Japanese's phonetic alphabet (in this case hiragana, for those of you who know what on earth I'm rambling on about) and then learn the actual language in that script, gradually adding kanji to the mix. Trying to learn the language right away in our western alphabet and then later worry about the Japanese characters proved to make things much more difficult. The characters in most oriental languages are such an integral part of the underlying structure that it's usually better to face them head on than to try avoiding them initially.

Now for the encore of this already way too elaborate post: similar principles apply to programming languages. If you know, say, Java, it's relatively easy to learn languages like C, C++, Pascal, Perl etc. etc. But it is much harder to learn languages like LISP, Prolog or Miranda because such (logic or functional) languages are based on entirely different paradigms and therefore require a totally different way of thinking (or possibly even state of mind). If you're used to imperative programming and trying to learn functional or logic programming, it can take quite a bit of time for the proverbial penny to drop.

Alphons :stud :h
 
anemos said:
What about char or SCSI? :)

char is just like it looks, and just like the other word spelt the same (meaning burnt).

SCSI is normally pronounced "skuh-zee".

I would appreciate it if someone native english speaker told me how the word "integer" is pronounced.

in-teh-jur (where teh is pronounced like in "ten" and jur is pronounced like in jury) Emphasis on the "in" syllable.

Something along those lines. Hard to explain the "teh" sound in print.
 
CodeBlock said:
How do you say some of the internet/*nix derived words, like "GUI" and "regex"... Here's some of mine:

/usr => 'slash you ess are',
/var => 'slash var',
/etc => 'slash e tee see',
vi => 'vee eye',
vim => 'vim' (just like it looks),
regex => 'reg ex' (reg like register),
fstab => 'eff ess tab',
gnu => 'gee enn you',
sudo => I mix between 'so do' and 'sue dough'

"slash you ess are" or "slash user" depending on who I'm talking to
"slash var"
"slash eee tee see"
"vie" (just like it looks, one syllable)
"vim" (just like it looks, one syllable)
"reg ex" (reg like in register)
"eff ess tab"
I try not to say it. ;)
"sue doe"
 
You guys can add more to the list you know :p.. My list was just to start off. Keep 'em coming, it's neat to see different variations of how people say some things :p.
 
Almost forgot to answer the OP...

CodeBlock said:
How do you say some of the internet/*nix derived words, like "GUI" and "regex"... Here's some of mine:

  • /usr
    => 'slash user' when used by itself, just 'user' when used in a path, e.g. 'user (ess) bin' or 'user local lib'
  • /var
    => likewise: 'slash var' when used by itself, just 'var' when used in a path, e.g. 'var mail'
  • /etc
    => usually 'etcetera', see above for 'slash' usage, to myself I usually say/think 'etch'
  • vi
    => 'vee eye'
  • vim
    => 'vim' although I'm often lazy enough to call vim vi :)
  • regex
    => 'reggex' (or 'regular expression' in full, depending on whom I'm talking to)
  • fstab
    => eff ess tab
  • gnu
    => 'gnoo' (with English G or Dutch G, depending on circumstances)
  • sudo
    => 'sue dough' or 'soooh dough' (again depending on the audience)
  • char
    => 'car'
    I often use 'kar' as a variable name in this case (rather than foo or something), e.g. char kar;
    It's a Dutch play on words, kar roughly means cart (as in shopping cart, mining cart or a really crappy automotive vehicle)
  • integer
    => 'intejer' or just 'int'
  • SCSI
    => 'skoozee', say it differently and you'll get flamed ;)
  • IRC
    => 'eye arr sea'
    An American professor I used to know says 'urk', the first time he did that it took a while before I figured out what the f*** he was talking about :)
  • httpd
    => 'apache daemon' :)
  • IRIX 5.3
    => no, can't say that in public without getting banned ;)
  • Emacs
    => better not go there either ;)
  • /tmp
    => 'temp', 'slash' usage as mentioned earlier
  • GUI, TUI
    => 'gooey', 'tooey'
Alphons (oh, and in Dutch I usually say 'Free Bay Ass Day', too)
 
Some non-techs (who think they're 'in the know') call MySQL 'my sequel'. Please tell me no one else does ...
 
Too many professors and database people say "sequel" for SQL. Especially MS people. Seems the "unofficial" name for SQL Server is "sequel server". So, what was the prequel server? ;)

Damn it people, it's SQL, as in "ess kew el". It's not "sequel". There's no "e" in there.

I tried to get people to call it "squeal", since that's what the letters sounds like if you read it as a word. And it just fits so much better. ;) Especially when talking about "MS squeal server". :) None of my MS-loving fellow students seemed impressed. ;)
 
DutchDaemon said:
Some non-techs (who think they're 'in the know') call MySQL 'my sequel'. Please tell me no one else does ...

I often hear "my sequel" in Taiwan (mainly due to ignorant non-techs and incorrect English), and I'm sick of it now.
 
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