[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Egbert Bouwman) wrote: >On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 12:06:56PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: >> The English word gnome has the gn as the first part of knee; in the case >> of GNOME I pronounce a hard 'g' separated from the 'n', so guh-NOHM (not >> proper phonetic alphabet, but it should suffice ...), by analogy with >> GNU. > >Thanks for your other explanations, but I think GNU introduces >a further difficulty. >I always thought that GNU should be pronounced as the wildebeest, >just as the lion did after he ate a whole herd of gnus: >It's twenty minutes past six. This is the end of the news.
Is gnu pronounced with a y-glide, like news (nyooz)? I always thought that it was also pronounced guh-noo (without that glide), but I could be wrong. 'dict gnu' isn't clear. >To my ears that pronuciation makes sense in the pun 'GNU is not UNIX'. >However you seem to suggest that, by analogy with GNOME, >GNU should be pronounced approximately as guh-new, >or maybe as rhyming with canoe, giving guh-noe. 'dict gnu' is clear on this one, though: # From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (07Oct99) [foldoc]: # # GNU # # <body, project> /g*noo/ [...] # From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]: # # GNU /gnoo/, *not* /noo/ I think the * in the first one indicates a stop, though IANALinguist. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
