Do you pronounce it GUI or GUI?

[Sanedish]

On 1/1/2024 at 4:42 AM, NubeBuster said:

Recently I saw a video where Linux had a segmentation fault when he found out that dan pronounces .exe like ".exe" and pronounces .ini like ".ini" (I've pronounced ini like that too and never thought about it either) I've spent some time thinking about getting in touch to see what you think about GUI. Is it pronounced GUI or GUI? 

i usually say G U I, gui is just... weird....

[Uttamattamakin]

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

....

 

The real question is how do you pronounce GNU as in GNU/Linux? 

I've heard it say Guh New Geh New. 

 

In my head and if I've ever said it out loud it sounds like Ginyu like. 

 

(Incidentally BTRFS in my head sounds like Brr teer). 

 

I like this thread reminds me of the old days on USENET

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The real question is how do you pronounce GNU as in GNU/Linux? 

I've heard it say Guh New Geh New. 

 

In my head and if I've ever said it out loud it sounds like Ginyu like. 

 

GNU, as far as I care is "New", though I know it's "guh-new"

 

This falls into the same weird kind of "NG" somehow becomes "Win" and Hua (as in Huiwei) becomes "Wa". There is no connection to how to pronounce a foreign word/name in English when the vowel sounds aren't the same.

 

When I worked at a call center, I'd see "ng" as a name and I'd be like "Thank you for calling (company), What can I help you with (where I would say the name but instead just trail off)"

 

When there is no vowel, it's basically undefined how to pronounce it other than spelling it.

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 1/1/2024 at 3:50 PM, Needfuldoer said:

SCSI - "scuzzy"

i mean, yeah, but this weirds me out. what is wrong with S C S I ?(like the tv show lol) 

[Needfuldoer]

7 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i mean, yeah, but this weirds me out. what is wrong with S C S I ?(like the tv show lol) 

Easier and faster to pronounce. It rolls off the tongue because it's a real word.

 

"Ess Scee Ess Eye"? Come on, that's like "Aitch Dee Dee Vee Dee". Too many hard consonant sounds in a row. (I really believe that's part of the reason Blu-Ray came out on top of the early 2000s format war.)

[Mark Kaine]

29 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Easier and faster to pronounce. It rolls off the tongue because it's a real word.

 

"Ess Scee Ess Eye"? Come on, that's like "Aitch Dee Dee Vee Dee". Too many hard consonant sounds in a row. (I really believe that's part of the reason Blu-Ray came out on top of the early 2000s format war.)

seems to be kinda like S N E S too... i shudder how people pronounce that ...

 

(S C S I is more natural to me, idk the scuzzy guy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)  

 

 

29 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Aitch Dee Dee Vee Dee

i mean that just sounds stupid, no matter how you pronounce it, yeah... 

[Alex Atkin UK]

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

Why is Jesus pronounced "Gee-Jus" by Americans, but "Hey-Zeus" by Latin Americans?

 

There are certain letters that have different pronunciations in different languages. So the "Gif" / "Jif" thing is entirely understandable, because J tends to be "Jay" and G tends to be "Gee" as English natives pronounce them. 

 

But is one more correct than the other?

All joking side, it really comes down to two things to me:

 

1) How does the person who invented it pronounce it, as ultimately it should be their opinion that matters.  The obvious contention to this one is GIF, I spent too many years pronouncing the hard g to adjust to jif, which brings me to point 2.

 

2) How do most people pronounce it.  Obviously the most important thing with language is that people will understand what you mean, so right or wrong aside, you ultimately have to adopt whatever way other people will understand.

 

When it comes to GUI vs Gooey, you're out of luck either way, as I'd bet most people don't know what either is.  Given most of my communication about one would be over text, its kinda irrelevant and I never got used to saying Gooey over spelling it out, as I never needed to.

[Milesqqw2]

I will typically say each letter like how most people say I-C-B-M (intercontinental ballistic missile for those who don’t know), but for things like BIOS, GIF, and .BAT I say them like words. But like most people have already said, it all comes down to whether people will understand you or not (whether you say GIF with a hard G or not, people will probably know what you mean).

[Avocado Diaboli]

Guy.

 

That's how it's pronounced.

On a side note, did anyone of you ever DUI?

[Lunar River]

41 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

On a side note, did anyone of you ever DUI

Isn't that the youngest child from Malcolm in the middle?

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

All joking side, it really comes down to two things to me:

 

1) How does the person who invented it pronounce it, as ultimately it should be their opinion that matters.  The obvious contention to this one is GIF, I spent too many years pronouncing the hard g to adjust to jif, which brings me to point 2.

 

I've always pronounced it with "G" as in Gift if saying it aloud, but it's more of a "I don't care because you should have stopped using GIF files when Unisys was being a jerkass about the LZW patent." PNG should have replaced GIF in all use cases, but because of an oversight "animated PNG" does not exist. At least not officially.

 

The google stepped in and tried to pass off video files (webp) as images and now browsers have to have an entire video decoder stack just in case some site developer is stupid enough to use a WebP file. APNG is basically "better GIF", but because it's not a sanctioned format, software that implements it needs to reinvent a decoder (thus defeating the purpose of libPNG's reference decoder), and most software is going to have to borrow Mozilla's version. Funny how all that complaining by Mozilla that libMNG was "too big" at 300KB when to decode webp without a hardware decoder you need libvpx which is 4.5MB.

 

Maybe we should go back and re-evaluate the MNG format, but that bus has probably long gone.

 

6 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

2) How do most people pronounce it.  Obviously the most important thing with language is that people will understand what you mean, so right or wrong aside, you ultimately have to adopt whatever way other people will understand.

 

When it comes to GUI vs Gooey, you're out of luck either way, as I'd bet most people don't know what either is.  Given most of my communication about one would be over text, its kinda irrelevant and I never got used to saying Gooey over spelling it out, as I never needed to.

 

I think only "Gif/Jif" is contentious at all because:

So if you say "JIF" without context, you are ALWAYS talking about peanut butter.

 

[Godlygamer23]

On 1/2/2024 at 11:03 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

What determines they are correct is if people understand what you are saying.  If what you say is technically correct but no one understands you then are you really correct?

While I agree with most of your post, I did hone in on this.

 

People not understanding something does not mean one is incorrect in what they're saying. You can be objectively correct - that is, your statements are in line with objective reality - but people won't understand the subjects. There are many examples of that. I'm not claiming most people are dumb, but there are subjects that are just inherently difficult to understand, especially subjects that are abstract.

 

To say that someone is incorrect simply because no one around them understands their statements is quite frankly...incorrect. Personal incredulity does not change reality. Reality is under no obligation to make sense to anyone. 

[Godlygamer23]

12 hours ago, Sanedish said:

i usually say G U I, gui is just... weird....

I say both personally, although Gooey is fun to say.

[fartmuncher69_420]

22 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The real question is how do you pronounce GNU as in GNU/Linux? 

I've heard it say Guh New Geh New. 

 

Free Software Foundation which own the trademark say it's two syllables with a hard g (guh new). Much like I do with the German guy at work who gets angry when you pronounce SAP as sap and not ess aye pea, I personally go with what makes everyone the most mad.

[smcoakley]

Another aspect to consider is that pronouncing the individual letters of an acronym is almost always slower than finding a way to pronounce it as a single word that flows more easily off of the tongue. I think that's why generally you see pronunciations like this in industries where particular acronyms are very commonly spoken aloud; it saves time, and if everyone agrees that is what it refers to, then everyone understands what you mean.

 

I'm a software engineer, and yeah we more often turn acronyms into words because it saves time and is easier to speak. We almost always pronounce GUI as gooey and SQL as sequel, especially the more experienced engineers, and no one is ever confused about what we mean, except sometimes the new devs fresh out of school who maybe haven't heard these pronunciations before, but they catch on quick.

 

So in terms of computers and software, file extensions are very much a part of our discipline (especially my team, where file format processing is actually one of our services) and so naturally we use a lot of "wordization" pronunciations for quite a few file extensions. The ones that are common of course, but also a few others. I even had a coworker who pronounced .PNG as ping, though that particular one I never got on board with because a "ping" was already another term for something else in our discipline.

 

Of course some acronyms are just a jumble of consonants, and you'd have to stretch it really far to come up with a pronounceable word for it. In those cases we just spell out the acronym all the time. Not for lack of trying, just there's no word that makes sense and would be relatively comprehensible. Like CSV -- I've never heard anyone say Cuss-Vuh because that doesn't really roll off the tongue well, and the sound heard doesn't really "look" like the acronym spelling.

 

When I'm not talking to other software engineers, I try to turn down these wordizations of computer acronyms, because I'm less concerned about saving time and more concerned about clear communication. Someone who isn't really a computer person isn't going to know what an Eck-See is, but they can probably find a Dot-Eee-Ecks-Eee file. But when talking with other engineers, it's always Eck-See. (Or my dad, also a software engineer, says Ick-See. Not sure how you get that one, but I have heard that from multiple people too.)

 

My suspicion is that the same behavior is present in some other disciplines too; lots of industries are full of acronyms. I'd be curious to hear of some non-computer-related acronyms that are mostly used in other industries that people pronounce with similar wordizations.

 

Note this also doesn't take into account acronyms that were either intentionally or unintentionally developed with a very natural English letter order that just begs to be pronounced, like MIDI, or acronyms that mimic an existing dictionary word like REST, SOLID, ELF, or SOAP (I mean come on, who's going to say Ess-Oh-Ey-Pea?). This also doesn't include words that people have been pronouncing a wordization of an acronym for so long that most have forgotten that it's an acronym at all, like HMMWV (Humvee) or SCUBA.

 

Here's some other pronunciations we use in software engineering:

• SaaS: Sass
• WYSIWYG: Wizzy-Wig
• DOM: Domm
• JSON: Jason
• JWT: Jawt
• GUID: Gwidd
• CIDR: Cider
• IMAP: Eye Map
• MPG: Emm-Peg
• SPI: Spy

At the end of the day, most file extensions are abbreviations or acronyms, so they're treated in the same way.

[Alex Atkin UK]

15 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I say both personally, although Gooey is fun to say.

Gooey sounds like when we used to have ball mice and the cursor would get stuck in all the gunk inside.

[Godlygamer23]

5 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Gooey sounds like when we used to have ball mice and the cursor would get stuck in all the gunk inside.

I do remember those days lol.

[Uttamattamakin]

On 1/3/2024 at 9:17 PM, Godlygamer23 said:

To say that someone is incorrect simply because no one around them understands their statements is quite frankly...incorrect. Personal incredulity does not change reality. Reality is under no obligation to make sense to anyone. 

In a important sense you aren't wrong.  I think it comes down to the purpose of speech.  To someone in 1700's or 1600's it was only really technically correct to speak Latin.  

To them we'd seem like 

when speaking in a way we'd think was technically correct. 

This is a very old discussion we are having.  Descriptive VS prescriptive grammar / spelling/ pronunciation is what they call it.  I am a descriptivist.  The correct way to say something is whatever people understand the most.  The opposite can be valid too.  

[Alex Atkin UK]

Its all very problematic as over time we have cases like "literally" being redefined in the dictionary as both to mean "this is actual truth", and as an exaggeration - leaving no actual word for literally. 

 

Words that used to have a literal meaning, suddenly become context dependant and often you're left guessing if the person is exaggerating or not.

 

Lets not forget also the famous misuse of words by certain people such as "alternative facts".