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Comment by ccooffee | Hacker News Reader

How do you say "CLI"? I've only ever heard it as "rhymes with fly", though maybe someone has spelled it out once or twice ("see ell eye").

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see ell eye. If I heard "cly", I wouldn't have known what they were talking about until this thread.

I did not realize humans existed who ever attempted to pronounce it.

Now mix in other language speakers pronouncing the English acronyms but while speaking their language.

Ask a German speaker to say CLI. Probably comes out something like "clee". With the C like in "corn". C makes that hard German K sound.

Depends on where in Germany. In the west most pronounce it like K. Like the the word China is pronounce Kina with a hard K. In east and north it is pronounced like a german sch like Schina. The c together with a k like in „backen“ or „lecker“ just sounds like a second „k“ („lek-ker“)

I and my colleagues all pronounce CLI the English way btw. But growing up I had a hard time with the word „cache“. I pronounced it the German way which sounded very silly.

What's wrong with a "Kesch" (er)? :)

OH you mean a "Kache" (l)?

On a related note I find both "Kina" and "Schina" sound weird. It's "China". Like in "ich".

Yes I pronounced it „Kache“. Didn‘t know better ;)

Actually it's french. Therefore "Kaschee". Nix mit Käsch inne Täsch :-)

Similar thing with Budget. Up to this day my toenails roll up when I hear it pronounced like "Badd(dj/g)ätt" instead of "Bü(dj/g)ee".

how do you talk (like actual voice not text exchange) about it otherwise?

I spell it out every time. "The C-L-I flag does foo"

I've never ever heard CLI pronounced as a word but always as an acronym spelled, "see ell eye". Pronouncing as a word seems odd, like pronouncing PII as pie or IPX as epic.

I hear it a lot in sentences like "Is there a 'kly' command for it or do you have to use the 'gooey'?"

If you are saying it a lot, you pretty quickly adjust to saying a 1-syllable word, instead of saying 3 syllables, whatever your moral stance is. :)

Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

> Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

It's probably because the person who made the acronym or initialism had wanted it to be pronounced a certain way and chose a sequence of letters to achieve the desired result. Of course, the speakers of the letter-group will later decide when and how they will pronounce it!

  Acronym: a word formed from the initial letters
  or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or
  series of words and pronounced as a separate word [1]

  Initialism: a set of initials representing a name,
  organization, or the like, with each letter
  pronounced separately [2]

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/acronym

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/initialism

In the mid-90s, there was some controversy/discussion over how to verbalize "WWW". Very unwieldy in its spelled-out 9-syllable form! So one of my coworkers proposed "dub-three" - two syllables - so sorry it never caught on.

In my experience, non-native english speakers pronounce it as "klee". But IBM is just I-B-M (because you cannot actually pronounce it like a word). In general, if the acronym can be pronounced like a word, non-native english speakers will do so. More examples of acronyms that are pronounced like words: AMI, GUI, BIOS, ios, RAID, ROM, RAM, DIMM.

In U.K. I think pretty much everyone spells it.

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