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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-hub.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-atl-21.sprintlink.net!news.wwa.com!news 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 Organization: WorldWide Access (tm) - Chicagoland Internet Services (http://www.wwa.com) Lines: 48 Message-ID: <581t8k$7n@kirin.wwa.com> References: <55vhpf$q3o@mail1.wg.waii.com> <steve.847913388@fastnet.prd.co.uk> <328bb47a.2221749@news.msn.fullfeed.com> <56n415$5k6@news.ece.nwu.edu> <mjl-2111961156310001@mjl3825.draper.com> <329f66bc.19193101@news.compulink.gr> NNTP-Posting-Host: pool13-013.wwa.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.8 (x86 32bit) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.misc:26870 comp.unix.bsd.misc:1672 alt.folklore.computers:125457 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