Yggdrasil Network

I get why the name was used but if you start a project that you want to be heavily adopted, please pick a simpler name. The complexity of spelling or pronouncing this for most people creates an actual barrier to adoption. MP3 was easy to say and tell your friends about, Ogg Vorbis was not.

Ogg Vorbis seems very pronounceable to me, and without an obvious wrong way to say it, using an english language perspective.

Yggdrasil is a wild one, though, agreed. Better a unique name than another thing called Gemini or Atom or something, though.

mp3 is easy to say.. in English. "ogg" is much easier. i.e that was not the reason.

No, Fred is right - it would better if it was atom or gemini, that's literally what he is saying.

Yggdrasil - I just had to type the entire word out and even then autocorrect didn't tell me I had a word. I think the Mp3 vs Ogg Vorbis is perfect analogy.

Tbh, I wouldn't use a Scandinavian language word for a global application as it will automatically frustrate any English as a second language users - the words defy practically all rules of English, they frustrate me even as no matter if I can read them, I often have no idea how to pronounce them unless I've already heard them said.

This is one of those words I encountered many times before I first heard it said and actually knew how to say it.

Fred is right 100

I am pretty sure most of the world can figure out how to ponounce yggdrasil much easier than how to pronounce infrastructure or litterature in english.

https://youtu.be/RpCTu2ymqiM?feature=shared

Haha, I just realized I actually have used a Scandinavian word in an app I intended for global use - I just respelled the word so that it made sense in English.

The name wouldn’t necessarily stay if we succeed in our goals and formally specify a protocol, but for now it hasn’t really been much of a barrier in terms of interest or experimental deployments.

Not once they have familiarity with the language at all.

One of your examples has a word within a word, so it's like half pronounced if you can say "structure" which I think difficult to mispronounce.

The English language has the habit of taking perfectly fine Latin words and pronounce them in the most unintuitive way.

Gemini is actually a good example, I rather take Yggdrasil.

To give a contrary opinion I think it's a beautiful world and an excellent gateway to one of our greatest mythologies. "The World Tree" is an aspect of human literary history.

I'm not an ESL so I can only imagine the difficulties but I do not think we should be robbing the world of beauty, history and nuance for the sake of business English. Few English speakers can spell or pronounce it correctly so it even becomes a shared difficulty.

Fun fact: several names of days of the week come from Norse mythology. Look up the names of the months if you want something more modern.

Every kid learning English in my country will pronounce "structure" incorrectly at first, because it's similar to a word (with the same meaning) in my native language, and the correct English pronunciation of -ture doesn't make sense. I've looked up Yggdrassil pronunciation and... it's not surprising and I guessed the pronunciation correctly already?

I have English as my second language and can't think of a single reason why foreign words should frustrate me. On the contrary, I feel like I have an advantage; since English spelling/pronunciation is very messy, coming from a language with more regularity (and just being multilingual in general) probably just makes non-English words feel more natural to me.

One anecdotal example is the name of ‘GNU’. Somewhat often, I see English speakers on the internet mock the name for being difficult or odd to pronounce, and they usually end up explaining it by writing ‘guh-noo’, which somehow clarifies the matter. To me, ‘GNU’ reads naturally, I find the official explanation ‘like “grew” but with an “n”’ very clear, and I can’t fathom how ‘guh-noo’ can feel more clear or comfortable to anyone, because to me it just looks utterly ridiculous. So for deviating from English, I have a hard time seeing a background in other languages as anything but an advantage.

I thought it was an knock-off brand sold on amazon

Or people can just learn to pronounce Yggdrasil. Then again, how does it matter? If anything, an unusual name (relative to Latin languages) is more memorable. If it was called "Dogshit" I'd still use it.

On the other hand I've only seen the Yggdrasil project once 3 or 4 years ago. The weird name and already visited link on my hn feed.. I did a doubletake for maybe 1 second thinking wtf is this and then immediately knew what it was without clicking, in a way that I definitely wouldn't have been able to if the project were named 'Atom.'

I think it's probably too late to change at this point, and changing it would probably not help in the ways you think. Just look at the freenet/hyphanet retroactive name change debacle by the original developer, for example, and how it has caused needless confusion and churn in that community.

>Yggdrassil

Yggdrasil

I've had English as my second language for many decades, most of what I do every day is in English, nearly 100% of what I read is in English, and most of what I watch or listen to is in English. And I have to speak English with all of my customers. English is, in that sense, absolutely as easy as my native language. I dream in English. Still: "Structure" and "literature" are hard to pronounce - or at least I'm sure I don't pronounce those words the way natives do. And that goes for a ton of words where the letters aren't either pronounced, or, alternatively, pronounced differently. But people with English as a second language don't have much problems pronouncing non-English words, like the Old Norse word in question. English is the weird one here, not the other way around.

If it was super successful, would people even need to know what it is (like people don't know what BGP is)?