The pronunciation of some computer-related words varies somewhat from nation to nation and region to region. The Jargon File has some interesting things to say about Commonwealth Hackish vs. USA Hackish. The local pronunciations in my workplace (in Massachusetts) differ somewhat from M. Hal0's above:
- .cshrc is spelled out. The shell itself is pronounced "C shell", not "kush" or "C S H".
- FAQ, too, is spelled out, as is RTFAQ.
- GIF is pronounced with the hard G of "give", not the soft G of "giraffe".
- The final consonant of LaTeX and TeX is a guttural fricative, like the "ch" of "Bach" and "loch". The former may be "lay-tekh" or "lah-tekh", depending on the speaker.
- stdio.h is pronounced "standard I O dot H".
- URL is spelled out, or pronounced "Web address", since nobody outside of W3C is quite sure of the distinction between URLs, URIs, and URNs.
- Netscape Communicator is pronounced "Netscape", so as to distinguish it from the open-source project pronounced "Mozilla".
- SQL is always spelled out.
- DEC is pronounced "Compaq", much to the dismay of our sole remaining vaxherd.
There are much more confusing ones in the
vocabulary of Unix. Consider
strncpy, which must be clearly distinguished from
strcpy. Consider
vipw,
wget,
uz -- or
ncftp, whose author pronounces it "nik F T P". The language of computing, and particularly the language of literate Unix, is most strongly a written one, and concomitantly not terribly easy to speak.