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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.

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"unpronounceable" is technically hyperbole, but the point is true. It's just an annoying speedbump both reading and speaking. Actually more so in writing than speaking.

Speaking, I don't bother to even try to be technically correct, I just say leebruhoffice. It's honestly about exactly as fast and easy as openoffice, but 1, it's only made equivalent by being wrong and sloppy. 2 still the mental process of reading it is just, more work, somehow.

The name just isn't as good at what good names are good at. It's ok. It's accurate. But it's not good. It's just annoying to crank out and stumble over in a way that neither StarOffice or OpenOffice are. NeoOffice is good on those fronts but is bad simply because the word neo is too I don't know, stupid. I can't take anything seriously that calls itself neosomething. "Drive the new neorunner..." pass.

yeah, plus if you tell someone to "download libreoffice", there's a good chance the thing they're going to type into google is going to be something misspelled.

having watched Nacho Libre (Jack Black's "sport" comedy) many years ago, and laughing hysterically all the way through, I have no problems with the Libre part.

But it ends in libre. You aren't trying to go from libre to O-something.

It needs a consonant of some sort. Maybe thats why oopen office works is because it's going from an N to the O.

I couldn't put my finger on that untill you just said that. Part of the problem is definitely that that transition is just awkward.

Maybe they can take one of the excess ducks from duckduckgo. LibreDucks even works better than libreoffice.

And I'm all the way with you on the movie.

I'm a native French speaker and when speaking English, I just say "Office" because LibreOffice sounds weird. And for similar reasons, I never say "I used The Gimp". I do very much appreciate both projects. Naming is hard.

> I never say "I used The Gimp".

Have you seen Pulp Fiction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B34DmsMxUlA

the gimp is just exceptionally awful, and was apparently intentionally named after the gimp from pulp fiction, which makes it even worse

To me (another native english speaker) it's not that pronouncing "libre" is hard, but that then combining it with "office" makes for a clunky awkward mouthful. Whereas "open" and "office" flowed together quite well.

That's a perfectly fine pronunciation, but the point is that it's not an English word, so plenty of people will think it looks weird or not know how to pronounce it.

What till you hear how many non English words are in your everyday vocabulary.

Words in my everyday vocabulary are English words by definition, regardless of whether they're of foreign origin, in the sense that I meant.

"Libre" isn't an English word at all; not even as a loanword from a foreign language.

> "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong,

That's fine, but if you're curious, the Spanish pronounciation is "li"- as in "list" or "ligament" and "bre" as in "Brenda" or "bred".

> but if you're curious, the Spanish pronounciation is "li"- as in "list" or "ligament"

This is... not correct. Spanish pronunciation would be LEE-bray. The "li" is similar to "bLEEd". And for proper style points make sure to flip the "r".

No, not "bray", just "bre" as in "bred" (from OP example).

Native Spanish speaker here.

I'm honestly having a hard time listening to the difference between English "li" and "lee". If you mean how "lee" tends to hold the vowel for longer, maybe you're indicating that that syllable holds the phonetic accent in "libre", which you'd be right about. Fundamentally though, they sound the same.

Not sure what you mean by flipping the "r".

You're half right. The "bre" e is pronounced like pen or bed, not bray.

And here I thought the schwa just wreaked havoc in English.

Outside of my home country of New Zealand, I think very few English speakers pronounce either "pen" or "bed" with a schwa. (actually, even we don't)

It's not bray. You would stop on bra without the y

I usually pronounce it like 'lee-bur', though at times I've tried a more French version which is closer to 'lee-bruh' but it doesn't flow nicely into 'office'. Hearing 'lib-ray/lee-bray'/'lib-er' (like liberty) I would know what you mean though.

This just means it has ambiguous pronunciation, and there are many things like that. It's not "unpronounceable". Something unpronounceable to an English speaker would be something like words using a non-latin character set or words using latin characters in long or unfamiliar ways like random Finnish words or some words resulting from trying to romanize another language.

Just FYI, in French, we would just skip the "e" and say something like leeb-roffice.

That rolls off the tongue quite nicely in French.

"Lee-bray" is closer to accurate.

I think "Lee-breh" might be closer to accurate.

FTR, the accurate French pronunciation would be something like leeb-roffice, the "e" in "libre" being absorbed by the o.

But in any case, I agree with GP that the naming is meh.

I see! French pronunciation omits the 'e': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre

I was thinking of the Spanish pronunciation.

As a native english speaker, that seems a really much better way to say that awkward combination of syllables.

Probably, I'm just doing a bastardized Spanish pronunciation.

we had some people at work running a copy of librespeed, and they kept pronouncing libre as LEE-BER I had to correct them once a week for 2 months before they got it.

If Linux has taught me anything, when spelled all lower case like that, that is clearly lib-respeed

I have that problem sometimes looking at the name libreoffice, too. It's the Reoffice library, clearly

Thank you for this! Now I have a reasonable way to pronounce it.

Great, now I can't unsee this.

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