4 ms·
Is there an unambiguous, accepted, monosyllabic way to verbally speak the _ character?
by ssl-3 3y ago
Is there an unambiguous, accepted, monosyllabic way to verbally speak the _ character?
- mcherm 3y agoNo. There also isn't one for "w", yet we get by with that as a letter.
- lelanthran 3y ago> There also isn't one for "w", yet we get by with that as a letter. Warning: Tangential rant ahead. I'm teaching my toddler to read (Distar alphabet). Even with the modified alphabet, it's a chore to "know" how to pronounce a letter. 'a' has at least 4 different pronunciations in words used by toddlers: apple, came, eat, bread. All the vowels are like that, and even some consonants ('y' has at the very least: baby, yesterday, cycle, buy) The only well-behaved letter in English is 'x': pronounced the same wherever you see it, as 'cks'[1]. [1] For toddlers, anyway. I doubt a 4-year old would be interested in LaTeX :-)
- __float 3y agoUnless it's at the beginning of a word, like xylophone?
- ssl-3 3y agoThe only rule in English is that there is an exception to every rule (including this one).
- lelanthran 3y ago> Unless it's at the beginning of a word, like xylophone? Well, we didn't cover sounding out of `ph` yet, and it isn't a toy he has, so thankfully it is not a word he uses.
- Aloisius 3y ago> There also isn't one for "w" There's dub. Dub-dub-dub is pretty widely understood to mean www.
- revlolz 3y agoIf "underscore" gets tedious I just say "tac" But I get that it's confusing with dashes.
- Terr_ 3y agoAlas, no... however you might not need a sound if you can use tonal inflections and pauses to express the boundary instead. Particularly when chunks are short and when the receiver (or the software they're typing into) knows the format already... Although with a tech-illiterate relative you'll have bigger problems, like explaining what an underscore even looks like and where it is on their keyboard. Obviously I can't fully express it in text here, but try to imagine this as a coworker speaking to you: "Hey, write down this IP address. It's ten, seventy, one twentyyyyyTWO, five." They didn't actually say "period" or even "dot", but I bet you'd type 10.70.122.5 .
- jareklupinski 3y agoyes, but to confirm I'd repeat it back to them as "was that ten dot seventy dot one-twenty-two dot five?" having a clear seperator helps me say the numbers faster
- inopinatus 3y agoor you could say 172390917
- stephenr 3y agoI've worked in IT (support, network mgmt and development roles) for 20 years, with colleagues, customers and clients from dozens of countries. I've never once heard anyone drop out the dots in an IP. Non technical users aren't confident enough to do anything but read it exactly as it appears (one zero dot seven zero dot...) and technical users who are generally experienced enough to know what an IP address is, know that the dots are meaningful.
- ssl-3 3y agoGenerally, yeah. If it's something like 56.7.23.231, I'm definitely going to disambiguate it by deliberately saying each one of of those three dots. But if it's more like 192.168.0.1, I'm probably not going to bother with speaking any delimiters in conversation with another person who has at least reasonable familiarity with common IP networking layouts. Bringing it back to the topic: UUIDs should not ever follow familiar content patterns (if they do, then that's an issue in and of itself), so I'm always going to speak the delimiters of a UUID -- whatever they consist of. (If nothing else, doing so breaks up the pattern into human-digestible chunks -- which is probably the sole reason we have those delimiters in UUIDs to begin with.)
- djbusby 3y agoUnicode call it a lowline. PostScript calls it underscore and HTML says UnderBar.
- floating-io 3y agoI feel like "slab" would work.
- v-yadli 3y agonono, was it slab or slash [over a 8k bandwidth phone call]?
- ubitaco 3y agoI would back "blank" as the most likely to be understood by the other person.
- bmicraft 3y agoI'd understand that as space, but then I'm not a native speaker
- mh0pe 3y agoScreenreaders pronounce it "line".
- adontz 3y agoIt's a mess. In Georgian we say "lower dash". No short name in any language I know.