Lonely Lion

Chris McAvoy likes kites

Django Pronunciation Giant War!

with 6 comments

Oh man, the internet is ABLAZE with Django pronunciation flame wars!

Thanks Ian, for clearing that up. When people mispronounce Django, I suggest one of the following:

1) Say something else about Django, but pronounce it correctly.
2) Carry a print out of Ian’s post in your pocket. When a mispronunciation is heard, “accidentally” drop the paper on the ground. Ask the mis pronouncer to please pick it up. Then encourage them to read it, by pointing at it and winking.
3) Point at the offender, make eye contact with any other developer in the room, and shout loudly, “this ass face just said da-jango.”

That ought to clear that up.

Now to just clear up cache, pronounced “cash,” not “catch.” Jeeeeeeez.

Written by Chris

August 3rd, 2007 at 5:51 am

Posted in Python

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  • phleabo

    This looks like a job for a phonetician (or a computational linguist with some background in phonetics)!

    If the Wikipedia article is to be believed, Django Reinhart’s name is pronounced [dʒɑ̃ŋˌgo Ê€eˈnÉ‘Ê€t]. The [dÊ’] at the beginning is an affricate – a stop followed by a fricative sound. The stop sound [d] is the sound of the letter “d” in English, like at the beginning of the word “dud.” The [Ê’] is the fricative, like the sound at the beginning of the second syllable in the word “pleasure” (in my American pronunciation, at least).

    So, the sound of “dj” at the beginning of “django” should be like the “j” at the beginning of the word “judge.”

  • http://paddy3118.blogspot.com Paddy3118

    Oh, come on now – no-one pronounces cache like that. Please tell me it isn’t so!

    - Paddy. :-)

  • http://kazavoo.com/blog/index.php?/archives/45-Cicada-Prime-for-Chicago.html Brian Ray

    You should post a sound clip.

  • Bob

    Isn’t the pronunciation of django an FAQ item? I remember seeing something about Adrian Holovaty’s pronunciation of the musician’s name /somewhere/ back when it first came out. And – catch? Really? I know I pronounced cache a few times as cachet when I was a kid until my parents corrected me, but how could someone come up with catch?

    The (I-claim-it’s-a-) mispronunciation that really bugs me is SQL as sequel. Like any acronym-to-word conversion it must be intended to be a lazier pronunciation that enunciating each letter individually, but is it really lazier? If it isn’t more work for your mouth it is surely no less work than the individual letters; it just seems so unnatural that it would be the first choice of someone seeking to round-off an acronym. Much more natural-sounding pronunciations would glue the ‘s’ and ‘q’ together right at the beginning, like skull or squeal; even squirrel would be less work. But of course those words don’t have the marketing impact of a word like sequel, which is why I suspect the popular pronunciation is more heavily influenced by vendors seeking a good image than users seeking less work for their tongues.

    Of course SQL’s predecessor was pronounced sequel, though I’m not sure if it’s acronym was SEQL or SEQUEL (Standard English Q[UE]ry Language). But then a newer version came out and the ‘English’ was dropped from its name and the pronunciation as sequel was also dropped to differenciate the new version from the older one (wikipedia also says Sequel was another company’s trademark — at any rate, it stopped being used). So I suppose if one wanted to be really annoying he could pretend to think anyone talking about sequel was referring to a predecessor to SQL which stopped being sold by IBM 20 or 30 years ago.

    As I understand it, the pronunciation of SQL as sequel didn’t start back up until Microsoft needed a catchier name than S-Q-L Server and came up with sequel, though I don’t know if it was chosen with knowledge of and disregard for the deprecation of the pronunciation or was an ‘independent discovery’ (which I still maintain could only be made by a marketing department — anyone interested purely in efficiency would prefer a word like skull). Which might explain why most people who say sequel come from a Windows background.

  • http://phaedrusdeinus.org/ johnnnnnnn

    Bob asked:

    Isn’t the pronunciation of django an FAQ item?

    Well, yes it is:
    http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/faq/#what-does-django-mean-and-how-do-you-pronounce-it

    It includes an audio clip.

    **However**, that very same FAQ entry used to say:

    According to Wikipedia, “Django is pronounced **zhane**-go (with a long ‘a’).”

    Which you can verify by spending ten minutes looking at the online code browser.

    Amusingly enough, it appears as though this FAQ change happened during the merge with the magic removal branch. Not in any patch on that branch, mind you, just in the merge patch. Which is a little fishy. But, hey, there you go.

  • rox0red

    Why couldn’t they just pick a musician without a retardedily spelled name? Try to screw up saying Ozzy server. Or maybe it would be fun to say I develop on Spears. Or it’s slow because Spears is eating all of my cpu.

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