tl;dw: the Swedish and Finnish pronunciations use the same “i” as “Linux”, but Torvalds doesn’t care if people use the English one.
I first started using Linux in 1995 (I think it was kernel 1.2 or something), and this was being argued over (or at least discussed) even back then. The conclusion was that Leenus doesn’t care how you pronounce Leenux.
And he pronounces it Leenooks
You’re exactly correct. That was my best approximation.
That was very enlightening, the Spanish pronunciation is actually more close to that than the English one, so I feel very validated as an Spanish speaker. Thank you. Also didn’t knew that he wasn’t from an English speaking country.
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I’ve heard a lot of people pronounce it “Line-ux” lately. I hope it doesn’t blow up into another Gif vs Jif debate.
Edit: and if it was supposed to be pronounced jif it would be spelled “jif”, regardless of what Steve Wilhite says.
There is nothing to debate, Linux is just Linus with an x at the end and should be pronounced as such.
Though sometimes I wish Linus had claimed it was pronounced laynaxe just to fuck with people. Too bad we already know: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU&pp=ygUpbXkgbmFtZSBpcyBsaW51cyB0b3J2YWxkcyBhbmQgaSBwcm9ub3VuY2U%3D
Y’know the gnome/Guh-nome debate? I intentionally pronounce it Zhnome to fuck with people.
It’s jee-nom, pronounced while rotating your eyes
It’s pronounced djinn-ohm, like Genome. It’s a direct reference to magic, Buddhism, and the building blocks of life.
Also remember to pronounce KDE as “kdeeh” instead of spelling it
The G and m are silent
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I started back with kernel 0.12 and called it Line-ucks. I still do and people look at me funny, but it’s an old habit and I’m an old dog.
When Linus released his audio file it was already etched into my brain the other way. I do remember being joking that I’m glad his name wasn’t Pinus (like the genus for pine trees) after hearing him say it.
it’s jif. every argument for gif is wrong, and it sounds awkward af, like you got swiped by candlejack mid-wor
Jraphics Interchange Format.
They are usually seen next to J-fegs
we say jay-peg for jpeg, pee en gee for png, and ay tee em for atm. none of these are based on the pronunciation of the words they represent.
Most of those are the way I commonly hear, except I’ve always heard PNG pronounced “ping”.
People know what a GIF is. So I use GIF. It’s worked out fine so far.
English doesn’t make sense because it’s been influenced by so many other languages. I’m not sure of the etymology of Linux and Linus, but I would guess that they have different roots.
I thought of that meme when making my original comment lol
I thought Linux was named after Linus Torvalds, its creator.
Linux Is Not a Unix System
Oh, is that what Linux stands for. But then what does Linux stand for?
No that’s what Linus stands for.
If that’s the case, maybe he’s addressed why they are pronounced differently.
He has. The pronunciation comes from Finnish. How to pronounce it. See how it’s similar with the Finnish accent?
He also pronounces the “i” the same in both words. So I guess it’s because of his Finnish accent? Hey OP! We have your answer!
He has a strong Swedish accent on how he’s pronouncing his own name though
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They do have different roots.
One is % sudo su –
And the other is Canadian directly. Ask his parents their nationality to find better roots.
Canadian? Are you thinking of another Linus?
I was thinking of the Linus Tech tips dude.
Yeah thought so lol
“English is not a language, it’s three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one.”
For more fun, right about the time the printing press came into widespread use and English spelling became standardized, the language was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift.
That’s_ not the cause though, most if not all languages have been influenced by many others. And pronunciation, meaning of words etc drift over time in all of them as well.
Most countries have gone through the process of revising their orthography, changing spelling or even adopting different alphabets to have kind of consistent writing systems for their languages.
None of this has been done in the English language, it uses the most basic Latin alphabet which was made for a very different language (when even many Romance languages directly descending from Latin have adapted it with new letters or diacritics), for example English has a lot of vowel sounds that Latin hadn’t and it even went through something called ‘the great vowel shift’ when changes in some vowel sounds got them closer to others that were ‘pushed’, these pushed others causing a sort of shuffling in the (finite) vowel space, but spelling didn’t reflect most of this.
In fact I think that in some cases the spelling took the more ancient version that matched the pronunciation even less like ‘plumb’ (don’t quote me on this, its from the top of my head)
I’ve always pronounced it Linux. Who pronounces is other way?
No, it’s pronounced Linux
The first time I heard it it was pronounced Linux
In english maybe
in spanish quizás
En español es bastante consistente de hecho, y gracias a un comentario en este post me enteré de que estamos más cerca de la pronunciación original que el inglés, muy interesante.
Well he named it, didn’t he? It’s his own pronunciations.
Actually, he didn’t even name it that way, though he did later dictate how it should be pronounced before demonstrating that pronunciation with a completely different pronunciation.
Ari Lemmke, Torvalds’ coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that “Freax” was a good name, so he named the project “Linux” on the server without consulting Torvalds.[58] Later, however, Torvalds consented to “Linux”.
According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds,[11] the word “Linux” should be pronounced (/ˈlɪnʊks/ ⓘ LIN-uuks) with a short ‘i’ as in ‘print’ and ‘u’ as in ‘put’. To further demonstrate how the word “Linux” should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code.[59] However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ (LEEN-uuks) with a short but close front unrounded vowel, instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post.
Dammit he’s a Finnish nerd, not a linguist.
Quick recap.
So, Linux is Linux because a set of events that lead to it being named after Linus.
It wasn’t uncommon at this time for Unix systems to be named after their relevant creator or platform like this. HP-UX, PC-UX A/UX etc.
Linux would probably be seen as LIN-UX or LIN/UX, it may not seeing as Linux is not Unix, but that’s just speculation.
Linux in its proper reading would be Linus Unix, but that doesn’t make any sense Linux is Unix-like, but it was made in a vacuum without access to Unix source or even Unix systems at all near the beginning.
Interesting! Do you happen to know where the -UX suffix convention came from?
UniX, apparently
You don’t pronounce it “line-ux?”
No, I pronounce them Lee-nukes and Lee-noose.
Bro… do people unironically say it the other way?
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Thats a real Tough trough though is really gets wound around the wound
Back in like the mid/late-90s, there was a horribly compressed .wav going around the internet of what was supposedly a heavily accented Linus Torvalds saying “Helo my name is Linus Torcalds and I pronounce “Linux” as “Linux”, that’s “Linux”.
I know, because I’ve listened to that .wav a million times. And I still think he said “LEE^^uh -nux”.
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Yeah, english doesn’t make a whole lot of sense
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