The origin of
One day Robin talked to his friend Allen and said, “Hey, can your kurumi access the guitar habu? You help me to download an Uber map, I recently prepared to learn dijiang enough.”
“Oh, you mean Chrome…” (Fictional scene)
Do not know if you have encountered the above situation, due to phonetic mispronunciation, abbreviation misreading, foreign languages and other reasons to miscommunicate, resulting in the Internet environment in many English words are wrong pronunciation. In some cases, spelling is even necessary to understand each other.
To solve this problem, we compiled a list of the Internet’s favorite mispronouns and created a small program called geek Dictionary, which covers four directions: development, design, product and media.
Why is it wrong?
The phonetic symbol misreading
Many times, we are self-righteous about the pronunciation of unfamiliar words and are not willing to look up the correct pronunciation, which is the common reason why most words are mispronounced.
Here are two simple examples.
- Safari, apple’s browser, is pronounced “səˈfɑri” (səˈfɑri).
- Chrome, Google’s browser, is properly pronounced kroʊm and is often pronounced “braised pork rice.”
For these nouns, which are originally common English words, only need to query the original phonetic symbols to correct the pronunciation.
Abbreviations misreading
The question of mispronouncing abbreviations is a little more complicated. Generally divided into acronym, syllable abbreviation, spelling simplification of these three cases.
acronym
JPEG isJoint Imaging expert Group(Joint Photographic Experts GRoup, currently a standard method of lossy compression of images, is also an image format.
The most widely used correct pronunciation is [ˈdʒ ə ɡ ɡ e], but most friends in China will pronounce it as [J-p-g].
Which of these two pronunciations is correct?
There’s not that much rigor in pronouncing these acronyms. Like PNG, another common image format, it stands for Portable Network Graphics. Most people say it separately. In fact, its official pronunciation is [P ɪŋ]. It’s rarely pronounced like that.
For acronyms, we don’t think there’s a problem with either “contractive” or “letter for letter” pronouncements.
Syllable initials
Syllabic abbreviation is a method of intercepting part of a word as an abbreviation, and its pronunciation is also intercepting the original pronunciation of the word.
Our most common example is App, which is a syllabic abbreviation of application, not an acronym. So the correct way to pronounce it is æp, and it’s not APP, it’s APP or APP.
But the more popular [a-p-p] initial pronunciation in China has given it another conventional pronunciation.
Other syllabic abbreviations, such as labor-lab and mathen-math, are also phonetic abbreviations.
Simplified spelling
Spelling simplification is a reduction in writing, but it does not change the way words are read. These abbreviations are usually followed by a dot.
For example, Dr. Is short for Doctor, Co is short for Company, St. Street is short for Street. The correct pronunciation should follow the pronunciation of the original word.
The foreign language
Other words are derived from non-English languages and often have multiple pronunciations.
For example, SUSE (Software und System-Entwicklung) is a German version of the Linux operating System. Although the official pronunciation is’ su-sa ‘, the [ˈsuːsə] (English) and [ˈzuːzə) (German) versions are also popular and do not have an absolute correct pronunciation.
IKEA is also available in ɪˈ ke ːa (Swedish) and aɪ kiː (English).
At the end
We didn’t create geek Dictionary to be a bit of a rigor, nor did we create geek Dictionary to try to correct people’s pronunciation. After all, the purpose of language is to communicate, and it’s not unusual for some words to sound different in different contexts.
It doesn’t really matter how many different pronunciations there are, either. We’ve had fun learning a lot about the history of the Internet while exploring the different pronunciations of these words.
Finally, it should be noted that we are not language majors, and most of the pronunciations of words come from the Internet. If you find the wrong entry, welcome to provide feedback and correction to us, thank you for your support.
One final quiz:
Azure, GNOME, GNU, NULL, ASUS, IasS, Kubernetes, can you pronounce these words correctly?