"tkinter"

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:

> On Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:01:30 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>
> > [“Tkinter” is] not an English word. Yet we are still called upon to
> > pronounce it.
>
> This is the first time I've heard an English language jargon word
> described as "not English". If it is not English, what is it?
> […]
> That makes it as English as any other jargon used by English speakers.

Yes, I agree. “Tkinter” is as English-language as “lxml”. That is, you
can trace its roots to English-language words; but *as a word* it is not
English language, it is an abbreviation jargon term that was created in
writing, not speech. So its pronunciation follows very different rules
from English-language words.

Such as, you would be ill advised to try blurting it out as one or two
syllables. It's not an English-language word.

The sense in which I mean “not an English-language word” here, is the
same sense as “English-language” in your “very little precedent for
spelling out the letters when pronouncing English-language words”. That
is true for English-language words, but the precedent for those words
doesn't necessarily apply when we're trying to pronounce an initialism
jargon word born in writing and not speech.

> On the other hand... there are initialisms which are never, or hardly
> ever, spelled out letter by letter either. I don't know anyone who
> spells out "N S W" for NSW (New South Wales), or "Q L D" for
> Queensland, for example. They always expand the acronym and pronounce
> the full words.

Which is another way of saying, those people don't attempt to pronounce
“NSW’ or “Qld” as words. They pronounce something else instead, not even
attempting to pronounce those initialisms.

And I do the same. I don't usually try to pronounce the words “NSW” or
“Qld”, unless I'm trying very hard to distinguish the words from which
they're abbreviated versus the particular spelling I mean. In other
words, when I'm trying to convey a particular term that is not typically
intended for speech.

So that would only be relevant to the discussion about “Tkinter”
pronunciation, if you were advocating that nobody should even attempt to
pronounce that and should instead always replace it in speech with the
phrase “Tool kit interface”, with no regard for conveying the particular
spelling “Tkinter”.

Are you advocating that? If not, I don't see the relevance of “NSW” or
“Qld” in this context.

-- 
 \     “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, |
  `\                               neat, and wrong.” —Henry L. Mencken |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney