this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Showerthoughts
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English doesn't make sense because it's been influenced by so many other languages. I'm not sure of the etymology of Linux and Linus, but I would guess that they have different roots.
English is such as mess that you actually have spelling contests to prove it. Try that with most other languages, and it’s going to be exciting for all the first graders who just learned the alphabet. Anyone older than that will be bored to death in the contest.
As a kid, I was so confused by (dubbed) cartoons' portrayal of spelling contests as some serious, non-trivial thing. Then I learned English and finally understood.
Yeah, me too. I was like: “dude, you just listen to the sounds, convert them to letters and you’re done. Why is everyone so excited about someone having learned the alphabet. That’s literally first grader stuff.”
Then I realized how bad it really is in English.
I thought of that meme when making my original comment lol
I thought Linux was named after Linus Torvalds, its creator.
Linux Is Not a Unix System
Oh, is that what Linux stands for. But then what does Linux stand for?
No that's what Linus stands for.
If that's the case, maybe he's addressed why they are pronounced differently.
He has. The pronunciation comes from Finnish. How to pronounce it. See how it's similar with the Finnish accent?
He also pronounces the "i" the same in both words. So I guess it's because of his Finnish accent? Hey OP! We have your answer!
He has a strong Swedish accent on how he's pronouncing his own name though
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How to pronounce it.
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They do have different roots.
One is % sudo su –
And the other is Canadian directly. Ask his parents their nationality to find better roots.
Canadian? Are you thinking of another Linus?
I was thinking of the Linus Tech tips dude.
Yeah thought so lol
“English is not a language, it's three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one.”
For more fun, right about the time the printing press came into widespread use and English spelling became standardized, the language was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift.
"Linus" comes from Greek and means "flax." Originally pronounced something like "lee-noose." "Linux" is a combination of Linus' name (the creator of Linux) and "Unix."
That's_ not the cause though, most if not all languages have been influenced by many others. And pronunciation, meaning of words etc drift over time in all of them as well.
Most countries have gone through the process of revising their orthography, changing spelling or even adopting different alphabets to have kind of consistent writing systems for their languages.
None of this has been done in the English language, it uses the most basic Latin alphabet which was made for a very different language (when even many Romance languages directly descending from Latin have adapted it with new letters or diacritics), for example English has a lot of vowel sounds that Latin hadn't and it even went through something called 'the great vowel shift' when changes in some vowel sounds got them closer to others that were 'pushed', these pushed others causing a sort of shuffling in the (finite) vowel space, but spelling didn't reflect most of this.
In fact I think that in some cases the spelling took the more ancient version that matched the pronunciation even less like 'plumb' (don't quote me on this, its from the top of my head)