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From: jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: On the Naming of UNIX Things
Date: 3 Dec 1996 18:58:28 GMT
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In article <329f66bc.19193101@news.compulink.gr>, Cpt.Iglo@Bigfoot.com 
says...
>
>On Thu, 21 Nov 1996 16:56:31 GMT, mjl@draper.com (mj leblanc) wrote:
>
>
>>
>>...and then there are those of us who've been forced to take Latin in the 
past.
>>
>>The Latin dipthong 'ae' is pronounced, roughly, as /eye/, therefore
>>"daemon" would be pronounced d(eye)mon.  
>>
>>If I try to pronounce it any other way, I half expect to be brutally
>>whipped by avenging nuns.  
>>
>>:mj
>>-- 
>>Hey, this post may or may not have contained SATIRE, depending upon my 
mood.
>
>For God's Sake, this is a Greek and not an Latin word! It is written
>as DAIMON (delta-alpha-iota-mi-omega-ni) and is is definitely
>pronounced as DEMON (I suppose just like lemon, with a clearly heard
>'o'). Taking this into account, I believe that the whole conversation
>is meaningless, since every other pronouncement is incorrect. I would
>like to add that the GREEK dipthong (in ancient and modern Greek:
>'difthongos') is 'ai' which is heard just like 'e' from 'echo'.
>

Language is a living entity, and usage counts. At one point in my life I was 
building race engines with Hepolite pistons. Someone pointed out to me that 
there was a greek goddess name Hepolite, pronounced sort of like 
hep-POL-lit-tee. In the racing community it was HEP-po-light. If I called my 
pistons hep-POL-lit-tee, I'd have been laughed out of the garage.

When my kids were small they called their sneakers nikes, one syllable, 
rhymes with likes. I didn't matter that I knew they were nigh-keys, in their 
microculture it rhymed with like, end of discussion. At some point in their 
lives they made the transition.

So once again, I don't care how the greeks, romans, or chinese pronounced it. 
When I worked on DAEMON for the PDP-10, it was dee-mon...and that's a fact.

-- 
jeverett@wwa.com (John V. Everett)
http://www.wwa.com/~jeverett