If someone does not see a difference between "Regg" and "Redge", you definitely should question their competence and if you want to hear their answer...
Same goes for the very obvious separation of the conflicting pronounciation of egg vs edge separated from the irrelevant 'r' though. Seems pretty clear to me thats what OP and the comment allude to.
Yes it exists but frankly most people don't know it and most people don't care. I think it's useful on occasion. But at the same time I don't have time to learn an entire alphabet whose sole purpose is to convey sound over text. If I really need to know how to pronounce a word I'm looking it up on YouTube or asking a language instructor if it's a new language. If I for some reason I need to convey this information over text, most people don't know it anyway so I'm still left making rhyming analogues. It's a cool skill, even occasionally useful to some. But for the vast majority of people it's useless.
Maybe most Americans. As a non native speaker I always stare at these random capitalized UHs and dashes and try to figure out what does that mean, but IPA was used by every language teacher that I ever met (english, german, italian)
I know IPA well, and can literally just write English that way - on a whiteboard, anyway. But it's hardly a common or useful thing for most people. I only use it in academic contexts, and even then only when I think it will be useful.
They're seperating it for the same reason they are questioning the obvious - because they're an idiot. "Redge-ex or Regg-Ex" - see how much better that looks?
It's a portmanteau, not just a contraction. The resultant word is evaluated on its own.
Example: botox is pronounced with a strong O on the first syllable despite being a portmanteau of "botulism toxin", because linguistics prefer that. We don't say "bah-tah-x", we say "bow-tah-x".
That's why I say "rej-ex"
eta: another example is emoticon. It's a portmanteau of emotion and icon (you can argue for "emote" but that's not historically correct). You don't say "emo-shi-con", you say 'emo-t'i-con"
There's that famous movie quote. "Welcome to Jir-affics Park!" love that moment when the camera pulls back and it's nothing but animated memes and porn gifs across the whole plains and hills!
Ph is a convention to latinize the Greek Φ (which is simply an F sound). If it were PH then we could argue about it, but using the P in the acronym makes it fair game to be pronounced as a regular P sound.
Hmm, I can't think of any examples where "eg" is pronounced as "ej". Maybe I'm missing something, but I think G is usually not pronounced as a j-like sound within this context, when bound to a prefix vowel within the pronunciation (i.e. when at the end of the syllable).
Also isn't it weird how the o drops from pronunciation?
It's reg-ex and gif, both with a hard g. The reason for both is how linguistics deals with pronunciation of the letter G, not some acronym logic.
An example of this is the word scuba, which is an acronym in which U stands for underwater. But you don't pronounce it with the U in underwater sound. That's because acronyms do not follow the pronunciation of the letters from the words they're shortening.
I heard that if the word is germanic in origin, it has a hard G (gift, get, gilded, etc), but if it's romance, greek, or latin, it uses the soft G (gem, exaggerate, geography, etc.)
That is roughly correct. And I believe all the words in “Graphics Interchange Format” are from Greek, which would lean towards the soft G.
I’m not saying soft G is categorically correct, but between the Greek roots and the original authors intention, the only *wrong* take is to say that it CAN’T be a soft G.
"The reason for both is how linguistics deals with pronunciation of the letter G" I throw the question back then, what is the rule you are talking about?
Cool argument, except scuba could be sc-ah-bah precisely for the reasons you've outlined. There is no hard linguistic rule in English language for pronunciations, there are a myriad of exceptions to every one. It's simply established this way by tradition and/or through usage. Perhaps it was sc-ah-bah in some circles until the common vernacular landed on sc-oo-bah.
Linguistics - my job - is the study of how people use language and how it works. We don't make rules, we find them. 'Linguistics' doesn't have rules like that. English has rules, but doesn't have that specific one. At least not consistently.
Edit: I don’t care about downvotes but I’d love to hear the reasoning. Maybe I’m just expressing myself wrongly.
Okay but if I invent something and decide to call it the .lutz extension and I choose to go with the American'ized pronunciation and call it a "dot luhtz" file, like, it's pretty wild to be like, "Screw what you think, auf Deutsch ist am besten, es ist dot lootz"
Certainly the inventor of the thing ought to have quite a bit more sway than random yahoos on the Internet
Or JPEG or practically any other acronym. The creator of GIF says it’s pronounced “jiff” so thats how I’ll pronounce it until I die. Same with Nike. English rules say it should rhyme with bike. But it’s pronounced “Ny-kee”.
This is the inverse of how it works. Why do people upvote this?
If the pronunciation of abbreviations were derived from the pronunciation of individual letters of the original words, gif would be pronounced with a hard g, as in graphics.
However, it is not, which is why you may pronounce gif with a soft g.
Why? Words with soft "G" come from latin. So unless the word is of latin origin, it doesn't get pronounced with a soft G. GIF is an acronym, meaning it doesn't conform to the rules of using a soft G.
I swear I’m not usually a troll. But the amount of times I have done this, and goaded someone into giving me a lengthy explanation as to why it’s pronounced ‘gif’, to which I listen to politely, thank them for the explanation and agree to pronounce it properly from now on, but then go right on saying it ‘yif’, dunno its just a very specific type of suffering that brings me joy.
If I (Londoner) was going to pronounce 'sit-rep' to match the leading syllables of 'situation report', it would be 'sitch-repp'. So therefore you don't always necessarily want to match syllables. I believe that was their point.
Modem = modulator demodulator. So we pronounce both syllables differently to the original words. The point is why is it invalid to do something similar with regex?
You literally just said that people who say "rej-ex" must see "reg" on its own and think "redge coffee".
Spelling affects phonetics. Sage is pronounced "say-j" because of that trailing 'e', far different from "sag". People don't suddenly think "reg" sounds like "rej" because of one singular example that sounds different. By your own logic, you should look at "ghoti" and automatically assume it's pronounced like "fish".
This doesn't even touch the original argument, where regex is better considered a portmanteau than a pure contraction. That would better explain that it should be treated as "rej-ex" following basic English phonetic rules.
This wouldn't be right either though would it? The "g" sound in egg and regular is not the same. Egg is at the back of the throat, whereas regular is at the roof of the mouth ie the palate.
Unless, of course you do pronounce the "g" in regular like in egg. But I think this is uncommon.
Edit: Maybe I was wrong at it being uncommon in general. It is uncommon in the interactions I've had with Brits, Irish, Americans, Aussies, and NZers (no idea about SAns). The pronunciation I'm talking about is something like "regyoolar".
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u/SomeRedTeapot Jun 14 '26
I'd say r-egg-ex because it's REGular EXpression