I’m talking mainly about pronunciation of technical or jargon terms used in a profession, where different people, equally experienced in the area, disagree about the pronunciation. As anti-examples, in my experience in software engineering, “URL” is always pronounced “you-are-ell”, not “earl”. “OS” is “oh-ess”, not “awss”, but “MS-DOS” is “em-ess-dawss”. “80486” is (was) always pronounced “eighty-(pause)-four-eighty-six”, not “eight-oh-four-eight-six” or any other variant.
On the other hand, there is no clear agreement on “SQL”. Some database engineers says “ess-kyu-ell” and other equally experienced ones say “sequel”. “GIF” might be another example, although in my experience, the pronunciation with the hard G is more common among professionals.
What are some other examples of this latter situation? They don’t have to be related to computer technology of course, they could be terms from plumbing, auto repair, architecture or any other field with its own jargon.
You’d think from the military I’d have examples, but can’t think of one now.
There’s a reason for GIF being tough, though.
In English, there’s a rule that a G before an I is a soft G (giraffe, gin, giant), but this is an acronym, and the G stands for “graphic,” a hard G. Generally, in acronyms, letters are pronounced as they are in the word from which they are derived.
That’s why “DOS” isn’t pronounced like the Spanish word for two, or with a voiced S, even though a single S at the end of a word is often pronounced like a Z in English-- not always, but often enough that if you saw “dos,” in lowercase, you’d pronounce it “dooz”; cf. “Dos and don’ts.”
Since you’re looking at technical terms, I’ll throw in one from biology: apoptosis. There is no consensus on whether the second p is silent, and variation on syllable emphasis.
I’m guessing that pronunciation of Gilbert comes from another language. Loan words violate rules all the time. I love the verb “filet” in English, when it gets conjugated, or inflected for time: “filets”; “fileted.”
There’s also a rule in English that a G is soft before an E (gestation, general-- “guess” has the U just to make the G hard). Notorious exception is the loan word “Gestapo,” which I recently heard a 19-yr-old college student, who had seen it written but never heard it, pronounce with a soft G. I, unfortunately, laughed before I could stop myself. Felt very bad about it. She wasn’t dumb, and was clear on what the word meant. She’d just never heard it, and textbooks don’t have foot- or paranthetical notes on pronunciation, although seems like it’s time.
We’re probably saying the same thing: /dɔːs/. I was trying to avoid IPA because some people get freaked out about it. Oh, also, my dialect doesn’t have the COT-CAUGHT merger, so those are two different sounds for me. There could be some confusion if those sounds are not distinguished in your dialect.
I was at a meeting once where two of us were native New Yorkers, and three were from the midwest. We were discussing two clients, one a man named Don, and the other a woman named Dawn.
When either of us NYers referred to them, we just used the first names-- no confusion at all. But the midwesterners had to refer to them by first and last name.
Are you asking about words where the experts actually disagree about which pronunciation is correct or are you including words that have more than one correct pronunciation like “the” or “either”?
There’s also a Hebrew girls name Aron. Completely different name from Aaron in Hebrew.
Oh, and John and Jonathan are Angicized version of two different (albeit, similar, but still distinct) Hebrew names, that each have three syllables. My son’s name on his US birth certificate is John, but his certificate for his bris and bar mitzvah have his 3-syllable Hebrew name.
I’m amused when gentiles create spelling mash-ups, and name boys things like Johnathan.
