On Monday, June 22, 2015 at 12:22:27 PM UTC-4, Will Parsons wrote:
> On Monday, 22 Jun 2015 11:52 AM -0400, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> > On 2015-06-22 17:11:13 +0200, Will Parsons <va...@nodomain.invalid> said:
> >> On Monday, 22 Jun 2015 8:52 AM -0400, Whiskers wrote:
> >>> On 2015-06-22, Adam Funk <
a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >>>> From the Devuan GNU/Linux page:
> >>>> Our project is called Devuan ⁽™⁾.
> >>>> Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like
> >>>> "DevOne" in English.
> >>>>
https://devuan.org/
> >> To me, an Italian pronunciation of "devuan" isn't "DevOne".
> > No, but what on earth pronunciation is "DevOne" supposed to represent?
> > It doesn't look much like an Italian word to me anyway. Looking at the
> > Italian Wikipedia page about Berlusconi, "ua" occurs mainly in words
> > like "quattro" and in words like "sua", together with a few others like
> > "situazione", but I can't find any examples of "vua". Apart from very
> > common short words like "con", "in" and "un" it also seems very unusual
> > for a word to end in n.
> > I wonder if they're thinking of Spanish, in which words ending in "uan"
> > are not too common either (apart from the name Juan), but when they
> > occur it's pronounced more or less (for people with a tin ear, the sort
> > of people who can't hear any difference between English "dome" and
> > German "Dom") like the English word "one".
A British tin ear that can't hear the difference between AmE [ow] and BrE
[@U] has no business complaining about others' interpretations of unfamiliar
orthographies.
> >>> How long, I wonder, before the usual pronunciation is the English
> >>> rendition of the spelling - de view-an
> >> As soon as possible, let's hope.
Are you expecting it to be a big seller?
> > Do we need the word at all, however pronounced or spelt?
>
> It's a fork of Debian (GNU/Linux), so the name is intended to reflect
> that. I just think it's unfortunate that a name was chosen where one
> has to be clued in to using an unnatural/irregular pronunciaton.
[wan] is how the English word "one" would be pronounced by an Italian-speaker
who hadn't made a very close study of English phonetics. [wan] would be spelled
<uan> in Italian, as it is in words like <quanto> (setting aside questions
of whether [kw] should be considered a sequence of two phonemes, or inherits
a labiovelar phoneme from Latin). The marketers attempted internationalization.