Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: > On Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:01:30 +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > > [“Tkinter” is] not an English word. Yet we are still called upon to > > pronounce it. > > This is the first time I've heard an English language jargon word > described as "not English". If it is not English, what is it? > […] > That makes it as English as any other jargon used by English speakers.
Yes, I agree. “Tkinter” is as English-language as “lxml”. That is, you can trace its roots to English-language words; but *as a word* it is not English language, it is an abbreviation jargon term that was created in writing, not speech. So its pronunciation follows very different rules from English-language words. Such as, you would be ill advised to try blurting it out as one or two syllables. It's not an English-language word. The sense in which I mean “not an English-language word” here, is the same sense as “English-language” in your “very little precedent for spelling out the letters when pronouncing English-language words”. That is true for English-language words, but the precedent for those words doesn't necessarily apply when we're trying to pronounce an initialism jargon word born in writing and not speech. > On the other hand... there are initialisms which are never, or hardly > ever, spelled out letter by letter either. I don't know anyone who > spells out "N S W" for NSW (New South Wales), or "Q L D" for > Queensland, for example. They always expand the acronym and pronounce > the full words. Which is another way of saying, those people don't attempt to pronounce “NSW’ or “Qld” as words. They pronounce something else instead, not even attempting to pronounce those initialisms. And I do the same. I don't usually try to pronounce the words “NSW” or “Qld”, unless I'm trying very hard to distinguish the words from which they're abbreviated versus the particular spelling I mean. In other words, when I'm trying to convey a particular term that is not typically intended for speech. So that would only be relevant to the discussion about “Tkinter” pronunciation, if you were advocating that nobody should even attempt to pronounce that and should instead always replace it in speech with the phrase “Tool kit interface”, with no regard for conveying the particular spelling “Tkinter”. Are you advocating that? If not, I don't see the relevance of “NSW” or “Qld” in this context. -- \ “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, | `\ neat, and wrong.” —Henry L. Mencken | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list