blueshiftoverwatch
December 27th, 2009, 05:39 AM
Has anyone else ever noticed that in the world of technology theirs more of a wide range of pronunciations for the same terms than in other industries?
I've heard Phenom pronounced "phee-nom" and "phen-nem". In the second pronunciation the N is so quick that it's almost silent.
SATA pronounced "sah-tah" and "say-tah".
OpenSUSE has quite a few different pronunciations. The 'correct' one being the word Suse pronounced like the girl's name 'Suzy'. Those crazy Germans. I think it sounds kinda cool though.
I think this is because of two reasons:
1. More and more interactions between people taking place on the Internet where things are typed rather than pronounced. So when these people talk about the product in real life they've never heard it pronounced before. So they make up their own pronunciation based on their best guess.
1A. With more and more discussions taking place on the Internet people have more of a tendency to give their products crazier names than what they would in real life. Because a name that might look really cool spelled out on a computer screen might not sound nearly as good pronounced in real life. Which leads to more confusion over the pronunciation of the name. As in English words are often not spelled the way they're pronounced.
2. With the rapid evolution of technology, product names never have a chance to become 'household names' because by the time that might start to happen the technology is replaced by a better technology and therefore never acquire a near uniform pronunciation. For example, Phenom processors might be popular right now. But in 15 years how many people are ever going to use the term "Phenom" as apart of their commonly used vocabulary in a sentence when talking about computers?
What ones can you think of?
I've heard Phenom pronounced "phee-nom" and "phen-nem". In the second pronunciation the N is so quick that it's almost silent.
SATA pronounced "sah-tah" and "say-tah".
OpenSUSE has quite a few different pronunciations. The 'correct' one being the word Suse pronounced like the girl's name 'Suzy'. Those crazy Germans. I think it sounds kinda cool though.
I think this is because of two reasons:
1. More and more interactions between people taking place on the Internet where things are typed rather than pronounced. So when these people talk about the product in real life they've never heard it pronounced before. So they make up their own pronunciation based on their best guess.
1A. With more and more discussions taking place on the Internet people have more of a tendency to give their products crazier names than what they would in real life. Because a name that might look really cool spelled out on a computer screen might not sound nearly as good pronounced in real life. Which leads to more confusion over the pronunciation of the name. As in English words are often not spelled the way they're pronounced.
2. With the rapid evolution of technology, product names never have a chance to become 'household names' because by the time that might start to happen the technology is replaced by a better technology and therefore never acquire a near uniform pronunciation. For example, Phenom processors might be popular right now. But in 15 years how many people are ever going to use the term "Phenom" as apart of their commonly used vocabulary in a sentence when talking about computers?
What ones can you think of?