Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

Pronouncing Qt as Cute is like pronouncing gif as jif. Maybe someone 'officially' says it's correct but basically no one does it and if they do, everything secretly judges them.

View on HN

Haavard Nord, co-author of Qt, pronounces it as "cute".

Right and the gif creator calls it jif: and nobody cares.

Peak entitlement there. “The creator of <x> says it is pronounced <xx>, but I say they’re wrong”

And yet Americans pronounce Audi as ow-dee. British pronounce Nissan as niss-an (should be knee-sawn), etc. Americans pronounce La Croix brand water as La Croy (Should be ~lakwa, it's a pun on l'aqua) etc etc. Let's not worry and just enjoy life. :)

The creator of x decided to spell it as x. One could call it entitlement for the creator to try to demand that everyone follow some unintuitive pronunciation rule (or, in some cases, a rule that made sense only in another language).

I do and I don't hear cue-tee almost ever

apparently "everything secretly judges [you]" ;)

oof, thanks for the correction. :(

I don't trust people that do not pronounce it as jif. If you can't bother to learn the correct pronunciation, how can you be trusted to do other things correctly?

I assume you also spell "colour", "naïvety" and "aluminium" and don't trust anyone who doesn't? Though you're clearly not even spelling "pronunciacioun" correctly so maybe you shouldn't be trusted?

Just to drive the point home: Language is fluid, English has no organisation setting any rules and we the people get to decide how we pronounce things. And we've pretty clearly decided on what way we want to pronounce gif.

language evolves. How the creator of a word pronounced a thing is irrelevant. Witness essentially every word in the English dictionary. None (possibly literally) of them are pronounced as they originally were (frequently not spelled as they originally were either) unless they are _very_ new.

the "correct" pronunciation is whatever the community decides, despite what we may individually think of it.

As such "jif" is decidedly _not_ the "correct" pronunciation because essentially the entire community says "gif"

"jif" would be the "archaic" pronunciation. Technically valid, but not used by anyone except for hold-outs and people who refuse to accept modern pronunciation standards.

You remind me of a history teacher I had in high school that lectured me in front of the entire class on how my name was being mispronounced based on the way it was spelled. At the time, I just thought to myself "what an idiot" and carried on with my life.

If you can't bother to learn the correct pronunciation of your own name, how can you be trusted to do other things correctly?

Are you Scarlet Johansson?

In the UK, the shop Lidl was supposed to be pronounced Lie-del and I think that is how it is pronounced in Europe.

But, everyone pronounced it with a short 'i' and now they've adopted that in adverts - 'Every little [lidl] helps' - doesn't work if you pronounce it Lie-del!

If they wanted it pronounced Lie-del - they should have spelt it like that - Lidle!

"Every little helps" is the slogan for Tesco.

Oof, that's going to be awkward as Lidl grows.

How do you pronounce png? (no googling!)

“ping”, it’s in the spec ;)

Horrible decision imo, since ping can easily be confused with the networking action and there’s no way an “i” could be easily assumed from just seeing “png”.

but PNG means you're someone that's no longer welcome, so that's just not nice for an image format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com