Re: pronunciation of daemon, GNOME and GNU
egbert@bork.demon.nl (Egbert Bouwman) wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 12:06:56PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
>> The English word gnome has the gn as the first part of knee; in the case
>> of GNOME I pronounce a hard 'g' separated from the 'n', so guh-NOHM (not
>> proper phonetic alphabet, but it should suffice ...), by analogy with
>> GNU.
>
>Thanks for your other explanations, but I think GNU introduces
>a further difficulty.
>I always thought that GNU should be pronounced as the wildebeest,
>just as the lion did after he ate a whole herd of gnus:
>It's twenty minutes past six. This is the end of the news.
Is gnu pronounced with a y-glide, like news (nyooz)? I always thought
that it was also pronounced guh-noo (without that glide), but I could be
wrong. 'dict gnu' isn't clear.
>To my ears that pronuciation makes sense in the pun 'GNU is not UNIX'.
>However you seem to suggest that, by analogy with GNOME,
>GNU should be pronounced approximately as guh-new,
>or maybe as rhyming with canoe, giving guh-noe.
'dict gnu' is clear on this one, though:
# From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (07Oct99) [foldoc]:
#
# GNU
#
# <body, project> /g*noo/
[...]
# From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]:
#
# GNU /gnoo/, *not* /noo/
I think the * in the first one indicates a stop, though IANALinguist.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]
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