My hot take on the official pronunciation of GNOME

I'm not a gnoblin.
I'm not a gnelf.
I'm a gnome. And you've been...
Gnooooommmmmmed!!!

Yohohoho!

I'm not a KDE, I'm not XFCE, I'm not LTQt, I'm not a Hyprland, I'm not a Cinnamon, I'm a Guh-Nome! And you have been Guh-Nomed!

borks your Linux

@ThePicardManeuver https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Gonome

Its pronounced GIF

No it's not

Phonetically it's pronounced "K-D-E-is-superior"

But hey, language is protean. It evolves and flows like a river, daddy-o.

KDE MFs be like, "it's very intuitive." Meanwhile it looks like this:
- You are correct. But you are missing the most important button. Right in the middle of that table there is a big red button that says "autopilot - Manage all these things for me and I can play with a few of those other buttons, or all, or even none, and the rest doesn't have to be touched by the user unless they want to"
Nice, so I can read all I want on keto?

If you add an "e" after the "G" then all of a sudden it's Science!

I thought it was either gnome (as in garden gnome) or genome (as in genetics).
What the fuck is a guhnome
- Wouldn't you like to guhnome
You've blinded me!

Jnome, like gif.

that's evil gnome, if written in Java
If gif is pronounced gif, then gnome should be pronounced gnome
- Gi gives the g a j sound. Like gist, gibberish, giraffe, giant do at least that one is easy to pick up on.
- Like the peanut butter?

It would seem gnome is the correct pronunciation. GNU naming conventions are a pipe dream.

This only makes sense to me because my aunt worked on guh-noo.

this is like the dude who invented GIF thinking everyone was going to call it "jiff". it ain't happening, broski.

The G stands for Jraphics
- So, out of curiosity, how would you pronounce CHiPs?
- jay-pheg
- The format was originally designed to interchange animated palettised depictions of giraffes, so Giraffic Interchange Format made sense. They just changed the acronym when they realised that by storing different colours in the palette, you could depict things other than giraffes.
- No, it stands for Jira.
- Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!
- That or Giraffe Interchange Format
- say the letters individually. Then do it again faster. Then again faster still. Once it becomes a single syllable instead of three, then you will have arrived at the correct pronunciation.
- Welcome to... Jraphic Park!
It is called jiff tho?
- That's why you had to spell it wrong in order to communicate that.
- yes, the J comes from Jraphics
- Jif is a peanut butter brand
- not any more than gnome is called guh-nome.
It's pronounced gif
- And this is why Sonic and Shadow never sit down together for thanksgiving
What about HiFi though? The Fi comes from fidelity, yet it's pronounced like the fi in finite.
English is weird
- You can start pronouncing it correctly. There are so many English accents, why not have one that pronounces words how they should be pronounced?
It's obviously pronounced "jif" just like giraffe.
I have always pronounced git as get (mostly because of accent) bit I watched a video the other day, and they pronounced it as Jit and my whole world fell apart. Was I pronouncing it wrong? Are they dumb? Was this secretly a gif jiff issue?
- I have to deal with rej-ex (regex) and red-diss (Redis) at work a lot.
https://youtu.be/bmqy-Sp0txY
ZHAIF 4 LAIF!
:)
- I miss Idea Channel a lot.
Except of course we did then and we do now. Too bad none of you ever looked at how G can be pronounced.
- I understand that the letter G can make that sound. I am still saying, however, that the overwhelming vast majority of people pronounce it "gif" as in gift, and not "jiff" as in we're not calling it that. stomp your feet as you will, it's not gonna change anything.
What? The creator of GIF has made it very clear it is not pronounced Jiff.
Hey, not everyone was born to be a king.

Linux/opensource naming can be the wildest stuff.

Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:

One does not learn English the language, one simply memorises it
The G is silent in English words starting with gn. Gnarly gnats is pronounced narly nats.
There's not a lot of those words anyway
Gnu and gnome are exceptions only when used to describe the software. The gnu animal and the mythical gnome creature are pronounced with silent gs.
- It's even more confusing because in my native language (Dutch), we have those words too ( gnoe and gnoom ), and we do pronounce the g.
  Of course, no Dutch speaker would ever miss the opportunity to pronounce a g :)
The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules -- or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There's simply no making sense of it.
For example, in many British English dialects, the "a" in "can" and the one in "can't" are pronounced completely differently, despite "can't" being a contraction of "can not". It's literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There's no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.
- Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it. Well that is how dialects work
- But a can of something?

I don't know if I've had to say Gnome out loud before to another human person. I would go with the garden variety gnome myself.

For some reason I assumed it was G-NOME

If they'd wanted us to call Itchio Itch, they shouldn't have called it Itchio.

Similarly, if they'd wanted us to call Gnome Ganome, they shouldn't have called it Gnome.

Maybe English should just get rid of the stupid "the first consonant is silent when two consonants form the beginning of a word" rule tbf.
It's a skill issue to mispronounce loan words (like gnome, pterodactyl or psychology).
- English is a hideous mongrel of a language.
- Snail, small, three, press, change. I could keep going.
  I've never heard of that rule. There are a few combos that are basically always that way though: pt, gn, and kn come to mind.
- English is a mix and match of a bunch of other languages
- If you don’t pronounce the p in pterodactyl or psychiatrist then lose my number

You just got gnomed!

was looking exactly for this

People who say guh -nome are the same sick psychos who pronounce GIF "Jiff".

Knice to meat you
- Found the KDE user!
or Jiraffe, Giraffe.
So all French people
- French people are definitely psychos so that makes sense
As a non-native english speaker who thought I had finally grasped the english language can confirm I, in fact, hadn’t (I pronounce gnome as “guhnome” also as in “garden guhnome”, I had no idea)
- How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a 'g' but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

I use KDE because I never want to have to worry about how to pronounce it. There is no ambiguity with KDE, it's just K D E

It's pronounced kiddy.
Just KDEing..
- My wife works at a bakery that uses an ordering system called FreshKDS (kitchen display system in case you’re wondering). She always calls it fresh kids.
- We pronounce it Katie.
- No, it's pronounced "Katie!" /s
  But seriously, it almost is pronounced "Katie."
Guess I’ll pronounce it Kh Duh from now on!
I am still thoroughly confused whether I should call it KDE or Plasma or Plasma Desktop. Like, what is the difference?
- KDE is the author, Plasma is the application. There is ambiguity since they don't make more than one desktop environment - so all are good.
And it isn't a tablet ui.
Now pronounce Qt.
- Officially Cute, but for me it will always be cutie
- Well, that's easy. That must be "Kut", which, not surprisingly means cunt in Dutch.
I use, and love, KDE, but this is not one of the reasons I use it... What

If it makes anyone feel better, I watched a coworker write “sequel” in her notes while I was talking about SQL.

Nginx should be pronounced ŋiŋks and rhyme with sphinx

I can't even begin to know how to pronounce Nginx.
- Engine X. I think.
- Engine X.
- en-jinx
- For those curious - it's engine-x.
- oh just get caught in your own zipper and you will nginx correctly

What's the story behind /etc/ as /etsy/?

I always saw it as "et cetera", so the "et" came naturally to me
I always read it as "et-c" to get that pronunciation

I call it Ubuntu.

I feel like if I’m pronouncing any Linux package for the first time, there’s some tongue-in-cheek “um, actually” trap hidden just around the corner for some self-righteous geek to correct you with a big smirk on their face because they get to feel smarter, which I used to be guilty of, but try to cut back on as much as I can these days.

It’s a fun joke at first, but I kind of got tired of it after a while, and just decided that politely educating in context and ignoring it otherwise feels way nicer.

I’ve never met anyone who took this seriously in real life. Like they know what you mean and will joke about the pronunciation. But I read a lot more about these holy wars online.

Making a fork of GNOME called GGNOME fr

lol

That's the whole gimmick behind GNU projects... You pronounce the G. Because that's how you pronounce GNU.

It's pronounced gee-nome, right?

Everyone knows the true pronunciation is ñom!

I thought it was foot for a long time.

I thought it was KDE

Meanwhile GIMP out here going "Yup, you got it right."

GIMP is actually pronounced guh-imp
- Jimp - like Jamesp.
- Guh-asp!
"What image editing program do you use?"
- I used paint(dot)net back when I still used Windows. After making the full switch to linux, I now use Krita, and have GIMP installed because it handles certain file types better than Krita. I cannot begin to describe my hatred over GIMP and how it's a necessary evil in the world of image editing for anything that isn't png, jpg, or webm.
- paint.net

Today I’m learning this and now I learn GNU is supposed to be pronounced “guh-NEW”

Obviously... since their logo and spelling is the same as the animal... pronounced "noo".
- Fuck it, it's jee en you

ñom

Real Gs pronounces Gnow-Em-Ee

I pronounce it nom just to annoy everyone :3

And then I’m out there pronouncing it G-Nome…

I was hoping I wasn’t alone. I pronounced it genome for years before some neck beard took me to task for it. They also were mad at me for pronouncing CentOS like DOS (centahs rather than cent oh ess).
- I also used to pronounce Gnome this way.
  I’ll add I used to say “deb eye ann”, for Debian
  And used to say “uh lie us”, for alias
  I didn’t have a lot of people to talk about Linux with lol

I think the real reason it's pronounced Guh-nome, is because there are no silent letters in acronyms.

It's similar to the reason why SQL sounds like ess-cue-ell instead of a version of he word sickle that sounds like there was a submarine imploding in your mouth.
Singular letters are important in acronyms and always pronounced distinctively. And if they're vocally strung together, that's still distinctive.

I've always heard SQL pronounced as "sequel."
- I am a self-taught CS guy, I and many others who didn't hear it spoken default to "ess-cue-el"
- Yes, but that is, from a certain linguistic perspective, mispronouced. That was it's literal name as an acronym at one point though.
Three letter acronyms are the most I am willing to pronounce separately. More than that - if it doesn't have an obvious correct pronounciation, maybe the author should've used their brain instead of some dumb not so straightforward pronounciation.
- The ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC (the american agency) is not pleased.
- counterpoint, RTFM 🤷

The G isn't silent but there is definitively no vowel between G and N.

So baffling so many of you cannot pronounce Gn with a non-silent G (or Kn with a non-silent K). Both Gnome and GNU are pronounced almost like the equivalent German words:

Ok buddy for that I'm naming my next distro Squirrel
Knome or go home

it's pronounced david

guh-new is not unix folks...

English had the g sound until people got lazy and skipped it. So...

Every time i hit that pronunciation my brain flies straight to G'home g'nomes

Yeah, well, you're going to have to take that up with the Colonel.

JIMP or GIMP?

Zhimp

I have absolutely no idea how "Linux" is supposed to be pronounced. True story.

linu as in Linus Torvalds.
X as in unix
from the horse's (penguin's?) mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfHm6R5le0
- ...so, "Lie-Nux"?
Here’s a helpful mnemonic: “Jet Li got eczema from radiation poisoning”
Li - as in Jet Li
nu - as in nuculer radiation
x - as in eczema
Li-nu-x
edit: spacing
I pronounce it the usual way, but in the back of my mind (I keep forgetting to look into it), I've wondered if the "I" was originally intended to be pronounced like "Linus".
- In early versions of Linux when manually setting up your sound card, Redhat came with a test audio clip of Linus Torvolds saying “I province Linux as Linux”. Even though it is named after him he did not pronounce it like his name: Ly-nix.
It's pronounced like this

When I got into Linux I didn't know how gnome was pronounced (either the DE or the ornament), so I just stuck with it.