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Pronouce Debian
Posted by CrashBeta on Tue 12 Mar 2013 at 17:47
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o.k my name is Brian now lets just put a r in Debian which would be Debrian o.k wanna pronounce it Correctly drop the R say it without the R DEBIAN "simple" isnt it, that is pronounced Correctly NOT debbie-ann "uggg i hate that" anyway i'm an Ubuntu - Fedora Lover but Debian is up there
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Re: Pronouce Debian
Posted by Anonymous (78.233.xx.xx) on Tue 12 Mar 2013 at 20:09
Well, considering Debian is the contraction of Deborah and Ian, the corre t prononciation is Deb-Ian.

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Re: Pronouce Debian
Posted by mcortese (193.78.xx.xx) on Wed 13 Mar 2013 at 16:55
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Directly from debian.org's About page:
Since many people have asked, Debian is pronounced /'de.bi.ən/.

Incidentally, I wonder why people still use the wrong "tools" to describe pronunciation, as if IPA had never been invented.

I've seen a variety of equally misleading methods to express nuances of pronunciation: adding a dash like in "deb-ian", changing a letter like "debeean", changing whole words like "debbie-ann", using expressions like "short e/long e", etc.

All these attempts share a common flaw: you transfer the problem from "how to pronounce debian" to "how to pronounce deb-ian".

The official Debian FAQ reaches the apex. It states

Deb'-ee-en, with a short e in Deb, and emphasis on the first syllable
mixing all of the above bad practices, plus adding an apostrophe to make it clear where the stress is intended, but ironically getting it wrong because the apostrophe should usually precede the stressed syllabe, not follow it.

I admit I might be biased here, because, not being a native English speaker, I have no idea how I am supposed to correctly pronounce a "short e" or a "long e" or "Ian" (provided there actually is a common agreement on that).

Nevertheless, my original claim stands: why not using the correct tool (IPA) for the job?

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Re: Pronouce Debian
Posted by linulin (188.168.xx.xx) on Sat 16 Mar 2013 at 22:19
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Unfortunately, knowledge of some IPA subset is not universal either. Even dictionaries use different English pronunciation respelling rules, and change them occasionally. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_respelling_for_English .

--
...Bye..Dmitry.

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Re: Pronouce Debian
Posted by mcortese (193.78.xx.xx) on Thu 21 Mar 2013 at 13:23
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Thanks for the link, I found it enlightening. However, while it goes in great depth into explaining how to respell a known pronunciation, it is of no use for parsing words already respelled by others.

What strikes me, is that "debbi-ann" sounds exactly like /'de.bi.ən/ to my ear. So either CrashBeta is genuinely wrong in his pronouncing debian, or he intended a joke that unfortunately didn't arrive to me, lost in some phonological barrier...

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