←back to thread

Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

(www.takeourword.com)
236 points wizerno | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
Show context
twobitshifter ◴[] No.41895073[source]
Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
replies(4): >>41895179 #>>41895682 #>>41895755 #>>41906311 #
jamesog ◴[] No.41895682[source]
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" :-)
replies(4): >>41896258 #>>41896984 #>>41898169 #>>41898848 #
bbor ◴[] No.41896984[source]
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...

replies(4): >>41897095 #>>41897148 #>>41898866 #>>41899854 #
1. foobarian ◴[] No.41899854[source]
Oh I get it so it's like ä!