I always thought those whoe said susa instead of soos are wrong.
Suse stands for “Software und System-Entwicklung” https://linuxiac.com/opensuse/
Edit: Yes, she can still be wrong but then it’s supported by the rest of susa’s staff https://youtu.be/RsME20zXbQI&t=13
Funny except the video’s pronunciation is wrong since it is a German name for a company founded in Germany.
So it’s a joke by suse themself?
English pronunciation seems more like a joke by the makers of the English language itself.
English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There’s bound to be some cruft in the code.
Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it’s the best thing since sliced silicon.
The marketing idiots who published this are Americans. The pronunciation is borderline correct but not quite.
So it’s a joke by suse themself?
No, obviously not.
The joke and the funny song still works, but his pronounciation is simply wrong. He pronounces something like “Susa” with an a.
The correct pronounciatuon of this e goes - as another commenter already said - like the first e in ‘mesmerized’.
You are saying suse publishes a video about how to pronounciate suse with an incorrect pronounciation?
As another German, I can confirm that the “first e in mesmer” way is how Germans would pronounce it. See for example 11seconds into this German video also officially from SUSE’s YouTube channel - a SUSE employee and German native speaker who is moderating a series of talks is using that pronunciation.
It’s just a tiny mistake that most Germans are used to hearing Americans make all the time (see also Porsche which is also not pronounced porsh, nor por-shay, but porsh-eh) and will politely ignore, but since this aims to be an educational video, should be pointed out to be slightly incorrect
That’s great, thx. Hence, in German it’s suse and in English it’s officially susa.
in English it’s officially susa.
LOL so they have just given up :)
At least porsch-ee makes sense given English pronunciation, Susa just sounds random
You largely make it up to them with your “hello together” though!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
11seconds into this German video also officially from SUSE’s YouTube channe
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It’s a schwa, the most common vowel in English.
I have heard that the French have created their very own pronounciation for “computer”.
They say “ordinateur”.
Unless there’s a joke I’m missing, this a weird way to say French simply has a different word with different roots for computer.
a lot of modern German companies have English names
Yeah, but this one isn’t one of them. It is actually an abbreviation of the long-form Software und System-Entwicklung.
But why it isn’t WuSE - Weichware und System Entwicklung
Or better NAP - “Software Aus Nürnbergistan”.
Its not as it is made by SUSE the company. It doesn’t matter what you think.
Nginx. I pronounced it N-Jinx.
I never in a million years would have guessed it was “Engine X”.
Agreed. I blame Crash Bandicoot for this one.
Sounds like Chemical X, the key ingredient to a Powerpuff Girl (besides sugar and spice and everything nice).
so, to summarize:
- German: /suse/ or /zuze/
- English: should be /suse/ but more often /susa/ but definitely not /sus/
AMOGUS!!! AMOGUS!!! SUS-e AMOGUS!
funny, but wrong. The e is pronounced like first e in Mesmerized.
Edit: Spelling
Back in the days when it was first released, I’m sure I read that it should be pronounced “Susie”. That’s the way I’ve always said it.
It’s German, and you’re about as right as anyone trying to say a German word in English can expect to get.
The german low e can be found ≈ the same in “v a cation”
Well ok then. I’ll listen to you as you have superior German skills
Like “X”, who would have thought it was pronounced “Twitter”?
I always pronounce this as the Roman numeral; Twitter is now Ten. Just like those Ten Men films and Simon Cowell’s The Ten Factor.
Close, it’s shitter
What is with Linux projects and confusingly pronounceable names? Even the name “Linux” itself has a fair bit of spoken variation.
Then there’s Ubuntu, and GNOME with the hard G to name a few.
SUSE originated in Germany, where it’s just the normal pronunciation. “Suse” also pre-existed as a nickname for “Susanne” (of course, the company name was derived from an acronym which isn’t used anymore).
The issue comes in when non-Germans, especially English-language natives try to pronounce the word. English pronunciation is incredibly inconsistent. Hence English speakers tend to fail (very confidently) when pronouncing foreign-language words.
(Fwiw, Germans and many others don’t know anything about the silent G in “gnome” and will happily pronounce GNOME the way the project intends without being told. Similar things are true for the I in Linux.)
Do they also pronounce the E? “Guh-no-meh?”
That depends but many people will be familiar with the absolute basics of English pronunciation and likely recognize the word as English too, I think.
If I hear a YouTuber pronounce it Lynux it immediately makes me skeptical of whatever they have to say
Unless it’s satire of course
I mostly work with people who learned to speak English in India, and most of them say line-ux or lean-ux. I always assumed it was an accent thing. Though there are a million distinct accents in India, and I’m not really well educated on them, so I’m sort of guessing.
I guess Linux projects tend to come from around the world, instead of US boardrooms and marketing desks.
Linux is Finnish, SUSE is German, so is KDE, Ubuntu is South African, GNOME is Mexican (?).
Fun fact, KDE is pronounced “KDE”
Non-acronym initialisms are an exception. I wouldn’t pronounce the letters in German.
I pronounce gnome like it should be pronounced, “gnome”.
It is dumb to pronounce the g
It depends on your view of history.
The G comes from the GNU Project. While GNU is an acronym ( GNU is Not UNIX ), the accepted pronunciation is a hard G ( GUH-noo ).
When the GNOME project was started ( and named ), it too was an acronym where the G was GNU. So, it seems very reasonable to use a hard G.
GNOME is no longer affiliated with GNU and the project has stated that it is no longer an acronym although it is still capitalized. If the G is not GNU, it makes total sense to pronounce it as the mythical creature of the same name which is pronounced as a soft G.
I have not seen anything official on how to say it from the project itself. So, it may be a matter of personal preference at this point.
I use a hard G because that certainly WAS the proper name and I have not seen anything official saying they wanted to change it. They have kept the capitalization.
Thanks for sharing this bit of history. 👍
Linux variation is simply because it was named after a Finnish person but became mainstream in parts of the world that pronounce those letters differently.
There are recordings from the early days where Linus clearly says “I say Linux as LEE-nuhks”. That is consistent with how you say his name in Finland. So, some people seize on that.
More recently, Linus has said that his name is pronounced differently in different languages but that “Linux is always lin-nuhks”.
Based on that, I thinks his latter guidance is correct. It is also basically the way most people in North America say it by default in my experience. This makes sense as Linus now lives in the US.
Ubuntu is an actual African ( Zulu ) word. It has a proper pronunciation.
Damn foreigners with their weird pronunciations.
Like ‘Susie’, which according to the rest of this thread, puts me in the minority
I’ve been using Linux since I was 15 and this is how I’ve always pronounced it.
Same
That dude is totally wrong. SUSE is a german company.
[suse]
- z one
- b oo ze
- z one
- v a cation
SUSE has German origins, but nowadays it is technically a Luxembourgish multinational.
a company based in Luxembourg is practically a German company evading taxes
it could be french too !
The vacation one is a bad example because some people say vuhkation and some say vaykaytion. From the germans I know the E on the end is like uh, like how they say bitte, danke, etc
Bittä und Dankä!
Its from SUSE, the company
It’s wrong nonetheless.
Its not up to you
Is not up to SUSE’s marketing department, most of which is from the US, either. The company has a German origin, had German founders (they’re all out of the company at this point though), and the company name used to be a German acronym. The correct pronunciation is the German one.
(See the update @barbara added. Lisa Sherwell actually took the effort to learn the correct pronunciation. Part of the reason why is that she was actually involved in planning the new German office of SUSE.)
Still doesn’t matter. If the company thinks it should be pronounced “Bob” then it is pronounced Bob.
At the end of the day the company decides these things, not Germans.
sussy
I HATE this video irrationally
There’s plenty of rational reason to hate this video
Kaiser Suse
Remarkably close actually
I have a rule about acronyms: if the spelling makes sense to be said as a word, I follow the English grammatical rules. A word that’s spelled s-u-s-e would be pronounced “soos”, so that’s what I say.
This is why I don’t pronounce GNU as “ga-noo”, it doesn’t make sense as a word. In those cases, I just spell them out.
GNU […] doesn’t make sense as a word
That’s a joke right?
GNU like Gnu, I dont see the problem?
Edit: oh damn english people cant pronounce that?
Well you know how USA citizens (yeah they’re not English but still) pronounce GNOME ? I once heard one pronounce it as NOME like as in Nomen nescio.
Well, “nome”, with a silent G is the correct pronunciation of “gnome”, as in e.g. “garden gnome”.
From the UK I learned it as nome, but the gn is sounded like ng in ing endings rather than n like no. the difference is slight. n As in no is front of tongue on teeth and (g)ng is a back of the throat and nasal NG sound. When I hear people pronounce as two syllables guh-nome it sounds weird.
Is it supposed to sound like an airplane noise?
No. I’ve never seen an english word resembling this type of spelling, so I just say each letter.
To each their own, imo my way reduces the risk of confusion. There’s no way to misinterpret what I mean when I say G-N-U rather than g’nue
Well I’ll be, I humbly stand corrected. I will don the dunce cap for this one
It’s a gnarly spelling.
Don’t let it gnaw away at you too badly.
I add the hard ‘g’ to gnu because saying “new” often sounds confusing in an English context.
e.g. “New Linux”
There are people who don’t say GNU like the animal?
Technically there are initialisms which cannot be pronounced ( letters only ) and acronyms which can be pronounced ( form words ).
So, in general, your rule is a good one. Of course, that does nothing to solve the problem of HOW to pronounce the words when so many different origin cultures are at play. As other have said, SUSE is German. So, is following “English grammatical rules” the right take?
I do not really have an answer. It is not self-evident to me. For Linux, Linus himself seems to have defaulted to US pronunciation. There is some precedent there I suppose.
There are no rules, just loose patterns, and pronunciation is not grammar.
Good rule 😊
So what’s the deal with GNU? When I first saw it, I was sure the G was silent, or formed a dipthong, like gnat or gnocchi or gnaw or gnarly or gnome or just any word starting with gn in English. But IRL, I’ve only heard it pronounced with a hard G, same with Gnome.
Well thats the thing, generally if I see an acronym and have to ask myself how it would be pronounced as a word, by my rule I just spell it out.
For a great example of this (unrelated to FOSS), look at LGBTQIA+. Even though it’s a mouthful to say each letter individually, no one wrestles it into “Leguhbuht’kwia plus”, it just doesn’t make sense and saying it that way would probably ellicit a dead stare from whoever heard it. Unless it’s painfully simple to morph into a word or single syllable, I don’t bother.
I’m not trying to say this is the right way, mind you. It’s just the way that makes the most sense to me.
Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.
LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.
there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.
This always seemed a bit weird to me. In Sweden we do pronounce that as a word. Vipp.
I don’t care. It’s Soos. It’s Ace-SUS, not Ah-soos. It’s I-Key-Ah, not E-Kay-Ah. These are the way everyone around me says these things for as long as I can remember.
That’s about as accurate as if I was adamant that the USA was not pronounced yoo-ess-ey, but ooh-sha, like everyone around me said it for as long as I can remember.
Non-anglophone countries exist, and there are actually more of them with more people than anglophone countries, and most of these projects come from non-anglophone countries.
Non-Anglophone countries are free to exist and are free to pronounce things however they want. I would be looked at as if I had two heads if I pronounced those things like those non-Anglophone countries. It’s about not wanting to be treated like I’m a idiot just for pronouncing things the “proper” way.
You must live with very closed-minded people if people make fun of you just because you pronounce a German company’s name like the German company does. That said, be happy and pronounce stuff as you like, it’s not like it really matters.
I live in a place where people call things whatever they want to call things, and when enough people call that thing by that pronunciation for long enough than it becomes the default pronunciation. Which is exactly the same as where you live.
A name is not like any other word. It is pronounced the way the entity with the name pronounces it. You can’t tell me how my name is pronounced, for example.
To mispronounce a name because you don’t know how it’s pronounced is fine. But to purposefully mispronounce a name after you know it’s wrong… Well if you’re concerned with “not looking like an idiot” then we’ll just say it’s counterproductive.
IKEA in North America pronounces it I-Key-Ah in their commercials. That’s directly from the company itself. If they are OK with accepting the different pronunciation of their own name, then why am I expected to say it the European way? That goes for Suse and Asus as well, since they’ve been called Soos and Ace-sus for years before they decided to “correct” everyone.
“they’ve been called soos” is not the same as “their name is pronounced soos”. If they state it as an acceptable pronunciation (similar to ikea) then that’s different. They instead released a video telling people how to say it correctly.
They released a joke video, as evident by the singing and the fact the kids still said it “wrong” at the end. I think they are very aware and understand that people will still call them Soos.
I think they are very aware and understand that people will still call them Soos.
And yet it is still an incorrect pronunciation. You can’t dispute that. Just because you will “do what you want to” doesn’t mean it’s right. Own it - you say the word wrong.
And that’s totally fair, in my opinion. Speech has to flow in the language you speak, or you’ll sound like an idiot. As long as people don’t go around claiming to know and teaching others pronunciations for things that they themselves don’t pronounce the way that was intended.
Sue’s-uh
