I know it is a joke, but even if you derive if from variable character, I wouldn't pronounce variable like "air". But I would say char and character are two dif

I know it is a joke, but even if you derive if from variable character, I wouldn't pronounce variable like "air". But I would say char and character are two different things. A character is a glyph, a char (pronounced like to char something) is a low level datatype. And even then, English is full of cases where similar words are pronounced completely differently. Why is millimeter milli-meter, but calorimeter calo-rimmeter? Why is maintain pronounced main-tain or man-tain, but maintenance pronounced main-tennence? It doesn't have to make sense, that ship sailed a long time ago.