Don't quite know exactly how to pronounce SUSE? We've got you covered....Broadway musical style. Singer: Christian BusathSchool age boy: Liam TharpLyrics a...
I always thought those whoe said susa instead of soos are wrong.
SUSE originated in Germany, where it's just the normal pronunciation. "Suse" also pre-existed as a nickname for "Susanne" (of course, the company name was derived from an acronym which isn't used anymore).
The issue comes in when non-Germans, especially English-language natives try to pronounce the word. English pronunciation is incredibly inconsistent. Hence English speakers tend to fail (very confidently) when pronouncing foreign-language words.
(Fwiw, Germans and many others don't know anything about the silent G in "gnome" and will happily pronounce GNOME the way the project intends without being told. Similar things are true for the I in Linux.)
I mostly work with people who learned to speak English in India, and most of them say line-ux or lean-ux. I always assumed it was an accent thing. Though there are a million distinct accents in India, and I'm not really well educated on them, so I'm sort of guessing.
The G comes from the GNU Project. While GNU is an acronym ( GNU is Not UNIX ), the accepted pronunciation is a hard G ( GUH-noo ).
When the GNOME project was started ( and named ), it too was an acronym where the G was GNU. So, it seems very reasonable to use a hard G.
GNOME is no longer affiliated with GNU and the project has stated that it is no longer an acronym although it is still capitalized. If the G is not GNU, it makes total sense to pronounce it as the mythical creature of the same name which is pronounced as a soft G.
I have not seen anything official on how to say it from the project itself. So, it may be a matter of personal preference at this point.
I use a hard G because that certainly WAS the proper name and I have not seen anything official saying they wanted to change it. They have kept the capitalization.
Linux variation is simply because it was named after a Finnish person but became mainstream in parts of the world that pronounce those letters differently.
There are recordings from the early days where Linus clearly says “I say Linux as LEE-nuhks”. That is consistent with how you say his name in Finland. So, some people seize on that.
More recently, Linus has said that his name is pronounced differently in different languages but that “Linux is always lin-nuhks”.
Based on that, I thinks his latter guidance is correct. It is also basically the way most people in North America say it by default in my experience. This makes sense as Linus now lives in the US.
Ubuntu is an actual African ( Zulu ) word. It has a proper pronunciation.
The vacation one is a bad example because some people say vuhkation and some say vaykaytion. From the germans I know the E on the end is like uh, like how they say bitte, danke, etc
I'll admit that this approach did not occur to me. If it worked for genre television...
🎶 Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes. They've got those hoppy legs and twitchy little noses. And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anywayyyy? 🎶
Edit: To be perfectly clear, I've not looked at bunnies the same way since. I suppose we can add that to the list of the many crimes of Joss Whedon, somewhere after "mental and physical abuse of cast and crew" and "killing off Tara and Anya".
You pronounce it any way other than the way the person saying it does.
This results in a few possible outcomes.
The person may get an opportunity to go on at length about why their pronunciation is used, and be entertaining.
The person may get all het up about it, insisting that you're wrong, and you can further mess with them by shrugging and continuing to use whatever you were using.
The person doesn't care, and y'all have a nice conversation about distros and Linux in general.
The person switches to your pronunciation, and you now have a stalker.
I have a rule about acronyms: if the spelling makes sense to be said as a word, I follow the English grammatical rules. A word that's spelled s-u-s-e would be pronounced "soos", so that's what I say.
This is why I don't pronounce GNU as "ga-noo", it doesn't make sense as a word. In those cases, I just spell them out.
Technically there are initialisms which cannot be pronounced ( letters only ) and acronyms which can be pronounced ( form words ).
So, in general, your rule is a good one. Of course, that does nothing to solve the problem of HOW to pronounce the words when so many different origin cultures are at play. As other have said, SUSE is German. So, is following “English grammatical rules” the right take?
I do not really have an answer. It is not self-evident to me. For Linux, Linus himself seems to have defaulted to US pronunciation. There is some precedent there I suppose.
So what's the deal with GNU? When I first saw it, I was sure the G was silent, or formed a dipthong, like gnat or gnocchi or gnaw or gnarly or gnome or just any word starting with gn in English. But IRL, I've only heard it pronounced with a hard G, same with Gnome.
Well thats the thing, generally if I see an acronym and have to ask myself how it would be pronounced as a word, by my rule I just spell it out.
For a great example of this (unrelated to FOSS), look at LGBTQIA+. Even though it's a mouthful to say each letter individually, no one wrestles it into "Leguhbuht'kwia plus", it just doesn't make sense and saying it that way would probably ellicit a dead stare from whoever heard it. Unless it's painfully simple to morph into a word or single syllable, I don't bother.
I'm not trying to say this is the right way, mind you. It's just the way that makes the most sense to me.
Seriously though, unpopular opinion disclaimer, I think I may be only one that didn't find it funny at all, just an informative, overly long, cringey Tenacious D reinterpretation ?
It's always amusing to me how people never insist Renault, Citroen, Dodge, Mercedes, etc etc get pronounced exactly how they're pronounced by the locals, but for Porsche there are people who get really worked up about it.
Ummm ackshullyyyyy it's pronounced...
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter anyway. Everybody knows who you mean so long as pronunciations aren't ridiculously different. I don't particularly care about upholding brands' marketing to be exactly how they want it to be.
I don't care. It's Soos. It's Ace-SUS, not Ah-soos. It's I-Key-Ah, not E-Kay-Ah. These are the way everyone around me says these things for as long as I can remember.
That's about as accurate as if I was adamant that the USA was not pronounced yoo-ess-ey, but ooh-sha, like everyone around me said it for as long as I can remember.
Non-anglophone countries exist, and there are actually more of them with more people than anglophone countries, and most of these projects come from non-anglophone countries.
Non-Anglophone countries are free to exist and are free to pronounce things however they want. I would be looked at as if I had two heads if I pronounced those things like those non-Anglophone countries. It's about not wanting to be treated like I'm a idiot just for pronouncing things the "proper" way.
And that's totally fair, in my opinion. Speech has to flow in the language you speak, or you'll sound like an idiot. As long as people don't go around claiming to know and teaching others pronunciations for things that they themselves don't pronounce the way that was intended.