pronunciation question - gaim

[Deviant Ollam]

quick question... a conversation (spoken as opposed to typed) with some assocaites today raised my curiousity about something. The open source instant messenger client most popular among basically everyone i know is gaim. (by the way, if you use the AOL instant messenger network and aren't using gaim there may very well be something wrong with you. the lack of bullshit bloat and the included added features alone are worth making the switch, but completely blowing everything else out of the water is the encryption plugin. you guys have heard the pretty much an accepted rumor that AOL now logs 100% of all IM traffic, right?)

anyway, i've heard the name of this IM appliation pronounced two ways... /gee - aim/ and the one-syllable /game/. which do you think is right? (i started out by saying the two-syllable pronunciation but switched when i realized that almost all other open source apps who borrow the leading "g" from GNU are pronounced as if it's part of the word, not a separate sounding letter.)

[Second]

I say game probably because it's all lower-case. If it was something like G-aim, then maybe I'd go with gee-aim.

One feature I like about it is "pounce" where it automatically sends a message to a user when they sign on.

[AlxRogan]

Another multi-messenger option is kopete. One of the nice things that kopete can do is offer encryption across multiple plaftorms that is tied to GPG keys. There is definitely more upkeep in managing keys than the gaim-encryption model, but if you have a full selection of gpg keys from your contact list, you may want to look at this.

That being said, gaim-encryption is fantastic. I started using it a couple of years ago, and have convinced about 80% of my regular contacts to use it with no problems, windows, linux, and unix alike.

[Floydr47]

I pronouce it "game" simply becase I like saying to people "I got gaim"...

[Thorn]

quick question... a conversation (spoken as opposed to typed) with some assocaites today raised my curiousity about something. The open source instant messenger client most popular among basically everyone i know is gaim. (by the way, if you use the AOL instant messenger network and aren't using gaim there may very well be something wrong with you. the lack of bullshit bloat and the included added features alone are worth making the switch, but completely blowing everything else out of the water is the encryption plugin. you guys have heard the pretty much an accepted rumor that AOL now logs 100% of all IM traffic, right?)

anyway, i've heard the name of this IM appliation pronounced two ways... /gee - aim/ and the one-syllable /game/. which do you think is right? (i started out by saying the two-syllable pronunciation but switched when i realized that almost all other open source apps who borrow the leading "g" from GNU are pronounced as if it's part of the word, not a separate sounding letter.)

For me it's "game."

Of course, I'm probably not the best judge. I still haven't figured out how to pronounce the last name of your handle. Is it a long O and a short a (O'lam), a short o and a short a (awlam) a soft o and a soft a (olim) or some other combination?

Here's another: SQL. Is it "Ess-Kue-Ell" or "sequel"?

An aside: A friend and client is a retired professer of linguistics. She recently showed me monograph by one of her peers that showed English speakers will generally pronounce three letter initials (e.g. FBI, NSA, CIA) as seperate letters, while four or more are usually pronounced as a word. (e.g. NASA, SANS). It was something I've not noticed before, but is seems to be true for the most part.

[allentrace]

For me it's "game."

Of course, I'm probably not the best judge. I still haven't figured out how to pronounce the last name of your handle. Is it a long O and a short a (O'lam), a short o and a short a (awlam) a soft o and a soft a (olim) or some other combination?

Here's another: SQL. Is it "Ess-Kue-Ell" or "sequel"?

An aside: A friend and client is a retired professer of liguistics. She recently showed me monograph by one of her peers that showed English speakers will generally pronounce three letter initials (e.g. FBI, NSA, CIA) as seperate letters, while four or more are usually pronounced as a word. (e.g. NASA, SANS). It was something I've not noticed before, but is seems to be true for the most part.

I know Ollam is an Irish name of a famous King of Ireland before Edward 1st (Longshanks) took the throne of Ireland and Scotland as his own. And in between Celtic and Welsh I would say those two are the hardest words to pronounce or say.

[Deviant Ollam]

I still haven't figured out how to pronounce the last name of your handle.

ah yes, most people do not get it right. i chose it for it's esoteric appeal but the obscurity makes for some interesting pronunciations.

I know Ollam is an Irish name...

allentrace is correct with respect to the name having Irish/Celtic origins. what i've understood from my reading is the following... most people are familiar with the Druids of celtic/highland religious tradition, but nearly everyone is not aware that (like many systems of faith) there were many subtle levels of progress toward a state of enlightenment/holiness/etc. the paramount role that one could have in Celtic faith was that of Druid (often noted by a number of years of learning and complete mastery/memorization of the culture's massive canon of narrative poems) but there were other rungs on the ladder leading to that point of esteem and knowledge. one of the stages on the path to the peak was "Ollam." I am unfamiliar with the full compliment of learning ranks and have never seen a complete list, but i believe that those who were Ollams (Ollam is also spelled Ollamh in certain texts i've read) had mastered most but not all of the Celtic poetry and had a number of years of study and devout living under their belts. Much of their time was spent traveling, teaching, interacting with others, and continuing to learn. That appeals to me... the notion of an academic whose mind has been opened but who is still wandering on a path toward salvation and enlightenment, willing to admit that there is still plenty he does not know and wishes to seek.

As for pronunciation, it would translate phonetically to modern English almost as /oh-lahf/ or /oh-lahv/ (somewhere in between an "F" and a "V" sound at the very end. it would have no "M" sound at all.)

Here's another: SQL. Is it "Ess-Kue-Ell" or "sequel"?

see, that's one where i switch interchangably. never really thought about the fact that one way could be more correct. i guess i tend to pronounce it "sequel" when speaking as part of a larger title... like "i could deploy a SQL server to handle that user list" but at the end of a sentence or in short phrases, i'll typically call out the letters... "we could do that with SQL."

An aside: A friend and client is a retired professer of liguistics. She recently showed me monograph by one of her peers that showed English speakers will generally pronounce three letter initials (e.g. FBI, NSA, CIA) as seperate letters, while four or more are usually pronounced as a word. (e.g. NASA, SANS). It was something I've not noticed before, but is seems to be true for the most part.

very true. is it perhaps just human laziness or desire for speech efficiency? the one that always makes me laugh is "WWW" since it runs contrary to the human instinct. saying "world wide web" is actually syllabicaly much more efficient than "double-U double-U double-U " which is a real mouthful. most people i know have taken to just saying "dub dub dub" when calling out URLs to someone.

[Thorn]

Well, that clears that up. If I'd known it was Celtic origin, I would have had a clue, but probably still wouldn't have been able to pronounce it correctly. My family is Irish, and I can barely pronounce what our name was before it was anglicized.

[TheCotMan]

When I first used it, I called it, "game."

The present thought on Gaim or gaim is that it is not an acronym.

When it first came out, people refered to it as a GNU AIM Client, but now it is so much more than just AIM-compatible.

ATM, gaim is not an acronym and does not officially "stand" for anything, except maybe "freedom."

[converge]

I actually pronounce it in my head as 'gay-m', probably because I try to convert everyone I see to the opposite side of whatever sexual preference they previously held. Thats what everyone that uses AIM does anyways, right?

[Ridirich]

Correct: All Gaelic words/names are pronounced "hard" Hence "Cat" would be "Kat" instead of "Sat".

The M sounds like a V as well, also correct. I have an irish/manx dictionary somewhere. I am going to google right now to find it. Found it.

That should help somewhat. I had it before, but when I formatted my machine I lost my links.

As for the prounciation of game, I would say it's "Gay-Me" because the user should be using 'Trillian' ;)

[Voltage Spike]

Here's another: SQL. Is it "Ess-Kue-Ell" or "sequel"?

According to the Wikipedia article it is only SQL and not SEQUEL because of a trademark dispute. Even with that knowledge I still say S-Q-L.

[skroo]

Oh, God... Delving back to four years of mandatory instruction in Irish with possibly the worst text on the subject ever written now...

Correct: All Gaelic words/names are pronounced "hard" Hence "Cat" would be "Kat" instead of "Sat".

This depends largely on the position of any modifying letters in relation to the character being modified (and I wish I could remember what this change is called). Basically, taking a word like 'cas' (case), the hard 'c' sound it starts with modifies by taking a 'g' in front - but it's not a hard 'g' sound. For example, in the sentence 'i gcas prainne' ('in case of emergency'), the 'c' sound becomes more of a soft 'gy' - 'gyoss' would probably be the closest English phonetic equivalent. And even this pronounciation only really holds true in Irish gaelic, Scots gaelic having differences in both pronounciation and spelling.

Welsh and Manx shouldn't really be considered in the same group as Scots or Irish gaelic - they are related to them, but are more gallic at their core. Whereas the differences between Scots and Irish gaelic can largely be considered about equivalent to those between American and European English, when compared to Welsh and Manx the gap is more like that between, say, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French.

The M sounds like a V as well, also correct.

Sort of a soft 'vh', 'mmvh' if modified to 'mvh' in the possessive (IIRC).

Dammit, now I'm going to have to go see how good my memory was on all of this. I actually enjoyed learning Irish in school, but it was so poorly-taught (the texts sucked and the teachers were complete and utter idiots) that I never picked it up much beyond the absolute basics. It also doesn't help that the government still does fuck-all to encourage its use as a living language - the focus seems to be more on preservation than use. Yeah, it may not be the international language of commerce, but for fuck's sake, they could at least encourage its use for more than road signs and emergency exit instructions on the bus (which is exactly where I dredged that example up from, incidentally - the 48B from Rathfarnham to City Centre).

[Ridirich]

Haha, Skroo.

Yeh, there are differant dialects, it's true...but I was speaking of the general rule.

[astcell]

How do you pronounce gif?