On Sun, 12 Jan 1997 04:48:23 -0800 (PST),
Jim Dennis <jimd(_at_)starshine(_dot_)org> wrote:
<... old thread about pronounciation of Procmail springing up again ...>
We could certainly defer to the decision of Stephen --
if he chooses to speak up on the issue. Until then I'll
stick with the hard 'c' pronunciation which clearly
dominates the technical experts I'm likely to work and
socialize with.
Well, you might want to be a bit cautious about this attitude -- many
"technical experts" seem to be sadly ignorant about the language they
speak.
But in this case, I'd say they are correct. In English, c is
pronounced soft only before front vowels, i.e. i/e (now look how funny
that came out. Yes, the front vowels in English are i and e. And yes,
there are exceptions to this rule, but as far as I can tell, only in
that some ce- and ci- words are pronounced with a hard c -- primarily
words of non-Latin origin. I guess you could say that the "proc" in
"procmail" is arguably of Latin origin).
Hoping to put an end to this silly thread -- replies by mail, please.
/* era */
Ceilidh and Celt are the only /ke-/ words I could find under "ce" in
my Oxford Dictionary, both apparently of Celtic origin (?). Some
Latin/Greek words have both /se-/ and /ke-/ because the original Greek
pronounciation (and spelling) was with a k [kappa].
--
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