4 ms·

I've always mentally pronounced chmod as changemod (and changepass, changeroot, changegroup), I guess it was sort of intuitive. Going back to the comment about

by eyko 6y ago

I've always mentally pronounced chmod as changemod (and changepass, changeroot, changegroup), I guess it was sort of intuitive. Going back to the comment about dyslexia and naming, the unix core utils are probably a good example of "a lot" of abbreviated names that might be difficult to read for people with dyslexia. I wonder if there is a project to automatically create long named aliases for those (list, move, copy, remove...)

rodw 6y ago
Pronunciation of shortened technical jargon is an interesting thing. I've noticed certain common variations but outside of very localized "communities" (like the employees of a particular company) it's not clear to me that there is a particular regional or community pattern for most of them. * I've always assumed the conventional way to pronounce `chmod` was something like "ch-mod" (i.e., "chŭ-mod", with a short u). Is that less common than I think? * `char` (like the C-style character variable type) is an interesting example. I've always read it as - and usually heard it as - "car". But there are groups where "char" (like the word meaning "burn") is more common. Strangely no one seems to say "care", which would be the corresponding part of the root word "character", right? * "JSON" is another curious one. I've always just read that as "Jason" (like the name) but others seem to emphatically drop the missing "A", saying it more like "j-SON". * For that matter, I've always read `fsck` like "f-seek", but apparently the creators intended it as "fisk". Is there some kind of ethnographic study on this topic? Surely there are identifiable communities of these, but I've never been able to discern the broader pattern. I'm guessing it was once relatively regional, but it's probably more broadly distributed (and maybe domain/community-based) in the post-YouTube/podcast era.

by eyko 6y ago

rodw 6y ago

Pronunciation of shortened technical jargon is an interesting thing. I've noticed certain common variations but outside of very localized "communities" (like the employees of a particular company) it's not clear to me that there is a particular regional or community pattern for most of them. * I've always assumed the conventional way to pronounce `chmod` was something like "ch-mod" (i.e., "chŭ-mod", with a short u). Is that less common than I think? * `char` (like the C-style character variable type) is an interesting example. I've always read it as - and usually heard it as - "car". But there are groups where "char" (like the word meaning "burn") is more common. Strangely no one seems to say "care", which would be the corresponding part of the root word "character", right? * "JSON" is another curious one. I've always just read that as "Jason" (like the name) but others seem to emphatically drop the missing "A", saying it more like "j-SON". * For that matter, I've always read `fsck` like "f-seek", but apparently the creators intended it as "fisk". Is there some kind of ethnographic study on this topic? Surely there are identifiable communities of these, but I've never been able to discern the broader pattern. I'm guessing it was once relatively regional, but it's probably more broadly distributed (and maybe domain/community-based) in the post-YouTube/podcast era.