Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?

I believe it officially is pronounced the same as demon. But colloquially I hear a lot of (and sometimes find myself using) “damon”.

I’m in the Matt Damon camp. Always pronounced it that way, never really gave it much thought. Just seems “right” to me.

It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)

I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very much in the minority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon

I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.

And now we can perhaps hash out whether the `lib` in `/usr/lib` is pronounced with a long or short 'i'. I hope I'm not the only one who pronounced it the first way with no real thought, and never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.

because it's spelled encyclopedia

Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.

US English spells it as encyclopedia, British English spells it as encyclopaedia.

I've been pronouncing it with the short 'i' for 30 years, but mainly, possibly only, in my head.

In 1998 I started a new job, and my boss pronounced "URL" as "earl". That threw me for a loop, had to fight my way through our first conversation before I figured out what he was saying.

I pronounce API as "appy", which sometimes draws quizzical looks (people think I'm using next-level cutesy slang for "application"). But I never could do the "earl" thing. Or "sequel".

I have always pronounced lib like the word liberal.

I was mind-blown the first time I heard someone pronounce etc as "et-see".

et-see rolls off the tongue so much better than ee-tee-see that it makes perfect sense now.

> Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'?

Yep, that's what I meant to say with:

> … never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation.

But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it to be clear what I was saying.

> Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.

Oh, shoot, even after I noticed the logical pronunciation of "lib" (long 'i') it never occurred to me that the same applied to "bin". I guess I just can't say any paths out loud any more.

Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit!

  The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift.
  When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3...

Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...

Hard agree. It's an archaic word, it seems a shame not to revel in that fact whenever you use it! I've been using "automata" a lot recently, and that's another one that is just more fun the unusual way. Also it helps that it's clear either way -- no one will be confused upon hearing "daymon" even if they're not used to it, unlike "etsee", "user-slash-libe", "user-slash-bine". Or, god forbid, "oo-zir slash"...

Perhaps the difference for you is that "bin" is already an English word with an official pronunciation.

Personally, I also use short-i for "lib," because I tend to pronounce shortenings of text as if they were words themselves.

Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"?

Also, for those who try to pronounce everything rather than spell them out, where does it end?

I now have a newly discovered, morbid interest in how such folks say path elements like "selinux", "httpd", and "pgsql"...

"Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic".

The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.

Hmm, I'm a Californian and I pronounce daemon as demon, understanding the first vowel as the same vowel as for Aesop. Indistinguishable from the vowel in "beam" and "niece".

But I pronounce the first vowel in aesthetic differently. For me, it's somewhat in between the vowels in "bed" and "bad" but closer to the former.

Don't let MAGA hear you... they'll start banning and burning linux boxes.

> that's what I meant to say

Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep' vs 'bip'.

…TIL how to pronounce “Aesop”! Thanks for saving me eventual embarrassment - now I know why other people don’t mix up Aesop Rock and ASAP Rocky!

As a fellow Californian, I’d say we have authority anyway - I was taught in school that Ohio has the least specialized dialect, but that’s based on newscasters and such. The 21st century is the Californian century!

…that is, assuming Brussels’ English is out of the running, I suppose ;)

Yes. Daemon is just the archaic spelling of demon. The ae is a vowel sound that didn't survive to modern times. The word was NEVER pronounced "damon." To my knowledge.

The original pronunciation of ae/æ in words originating from Latin or Greek is basically like "I". As usual, English molded it into something else in many cases, which is why we write "demon" these days. But if you insist of "daemon", then it really ought to be pronounced like the original Greek δαίμων.

The letter "æ" as used in Old English does indeed correspond to /æ/, but we don't use that letter (or even digraph) for this purpose anymore. In all the words where it is still occasionally used, it corresponds not to Old English "æ", but to Latin "ae", which is [ae̯].

Oh I get it so it's like ä!

I've pronounced it as `etcet` as short for `et cetera`. But that's probably my Australian habit of shortening everything.

> Do you pronounce the vowel in /var as in "bar" or as in "bare"?

Ha, they're everywhere!

Dae-mon, ah-ah-aah.