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The argument over this always frustrates me. People argue about which pronunciation is correct, but for a made-up word, the creator is the only one who can deci

The argument over this always frustrates me. People argue about which pronunciation is correct, but for a made-up word, the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct. People are free to ignore the creator's wishes or do something different out of personal preference or disagree about what should be correct, but if the creator pronounced gif "Throatwobbler Mangrove" that'd still be the only thing that counts as "correct".

e1g 5y ago
Right, but when the president declares it’s a hard g… well, the guy with the most nukes wins. https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/ https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/
JohnAaronNelson 5y ago
There is no objectively correct way to pronounce anything. The only correctness that matters is if you were understood correctly. In that case both are correct, but they each are different signals.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Even in normal everyday conversational words let alone tech words. People in New England pronounce words differently than people in Minnesota or the South. Hell, in Texas, syllables are seemingly added to words in our pronunciations.
marcan_42 5y ago
All words are made up. The creator can certainly suggest whatever pronunciation they think should be used, but if most of the world decides otherwise, tough luck. "Correct" language is whatever language is most widely used and understood by people. Linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one.
knome 5y ago
>the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea. An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work. I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.
- psyc 5y ago
  The vast majority of my favorite authors - ergo the ones I'm interested enough in to go looking for their opinions - have explicitly recused themselves from public interpretation.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    It's a lose lose for them. Regardless of the pronunciation they declare will effectively anger half of the fans. Debate on one of my novels on the internet so that people are continuously talking about that novel is a good thing. Why wreck it?
divbzero 5y ago
This might be somewhat true for English where there are so many odd spellings and exceptions [1] but, in general, there are rules for pronunciation and they are pretty strong for many languages. [1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-trenite-1689544 https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...
tshaddox 5y ago
Why on earth would anyone think for a second that the inventor of a technology has any input on the pronunciation of the name of the technology? Imagine if someone said “well actually the inventor of the paper clip pronounces it with a soft ‘c’ so it sounds like ‘paper slip’” This seems so clearly absurd that I don’t even really know how to argue against it.
greggman3 5y ago
We don't see that logic applied for foreign words. People in the USA rarely say croissant correctly, nor mayonnaise, nor manga, etc... I don't expect it will be any different for created words. The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix. An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots". In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?
- bradrn 5y ago
  > I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots". This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_close_front_vowels#Weak_vowel_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...

e1g 5y ago

Right, but when the president declares it’s a hard g… well, the guy with the most nukes wins. https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/ https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/

JohnAaronNelson 5y ago

There is no objectively correct way to pronounce anything. The only correctness that matters is if you were understood correctly. In that case both are correct, but they each are different signals.

dylan604 5y ago
Even in normal everyday conversational words let alone tech words. People in New England pronounce words differently than people in Minnesota or the South. Hell, in Texas, syllables are seemingly added to words in our pronunciations.

marcan_42 5y ago

All words are made up. The creator can certainly suggest whatever pronunciation they think should be used, but if most of the world decides otherwise, tough luck. "Correct" language is whatever language is most widely used and understood by people. Linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one.

knome 5y ago

>the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea. An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work. I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.

psyc 5y ago
The vast majority of my favorite authors - ergo the ones I'm interested enough in to go looking for their opinions - have explicitly recused themselves from public interpretation.
- dylan604 5y ago
  It's a lose lose for them. Regardless of the pronunciation they declare will effectively anger half of the fans. Debate on one of my novels on the internet so that people are continuously talking about that novel is a good thing. Why wreck it?

divbzero 5y ago

This might be somewhat true for English where there are so many odd spellings and exceptions [1] but, in general, there are rules for pronunciation and they are pretty strong for many languages. [1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-trenite-1689544 https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...

tshaddox 5y ago

Why on earth would anyone think for a second that the inventor of a technology has any input on the pronunciation of the name of the technology? Imagine if someone said “well actually the inventor of the paper clip pronounces it with a soft ‘c’ so it sounds like ‘paper slip’” This seems so clearly absurd that I don’t even really know how to argue against it.

greggman3 5y ago

We don't see that logic applied for foreign words. People in the USA rarely say croissant correctly, nor mayonnaise, nor manga, etc... I don't expect it will be any different for created words. The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix. An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots". In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?

bradrn 5y ago
> I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots". This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_close_front_vowels#Weak_vowel_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...