If you're supposed to pronounce it based on the original word instead of how the person who invented it says it, then I'd like to see giff crusaders take on everyone's terrible pronunciation of words like SCUBA (the U stands for underwater, so should be UH not EW) and NASA (the first A stands for aeronautics so should be pronounced Nair-sa).

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Don't worry, I was being 100% facetious! After all, γ is generally believed to have been a hard /g/ in Ancient Greek, which is the version of Greek that "graphic" is based on and is CLEARLY the wrong way to say gif :D

Kinda sorta un-jerking (but not really) for a moment, I don't think that I'd include the rhotic in your hypothetical pronunciation in NASA and thus would say /neæ.sə/ over /neɚ.sə/. I also don't palatalize the U in SCUBA (/sku:.bə/, not /sk^(j)u:bə/), but I suspect that's just a dialectical difference.

Edit: I just saw your NZ lemmy instance name and now I understand the vowel choices. Cheers!

[–] WhyIDie@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would definitely pronounce it NÆSA and see how long I can go before someone brings it up