There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)

While on the subject, this is why you may see et cetera abbreviated as etc and &c. And if you think of the latter as "et c" you have a popular website Etsy that sells et cetera.

I really wanted to believe that was Etsy's etymology, but alas it is not:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/04/22/website.name.origins.mf...

(Not sure if that's what you were implying, clever idea though.)

I wish that page had mentioned that Bing is derived from "Bing is not Google" ... even if it isn't true ;-)

Thanks for finding an actual source on this!

I've had so many people tell me there wasn't a directory called /etsy when I tell them to cd to /etc.

You actually say it like etsy? I've always said something like "et-k" or just etcetera in full.

Not OP but I always say "etsy", and "etsy-d" for etcd. I have never explored if these are correct pronunciations or not...

I have also always pronounced /etc as "etsy". I'm always thrown off when people say "ee tee see" or "etcetera", but that's pretty rare in my experience.

The people who pronounce /usr as "you ess are" instead of "user" kind of drive me crazy though.

I almost always have to say "you ess are" because while many people I talk to confuse etc and etsy, nearly everyone tries to type "/user" when I tell them to go to "forward slash user". Even people who should know better.

Interesting. I wonder if the "forward slash" bit is making people start thinking literally rather than making associations to what they already know?

If I'm talking about a common system location, I don't even mention the slashes, e.g. "user bin", "etsy init dot dee", "var log httpd" and so on. If someone started off telling me to go to, say, "forward slash user forward slash library" I would just start transcribing /user/library, assuming it was something nonstandard. For /usr/lib, I'd expect to just hear "go to user lib".

yeah, sometimes it actually is spelled user though. Like I think Macs have /usr as well as /User dirs in the root.

I've always called /etc "etss", /usr "user", /tmp "temp", /var "varr" (like a pirate would I guess), and /dev "dev".

Then again, I never liked "scuzzy" for SCSI, it felt awkward in conversation even with other techies. It grew on me about the time the protocol was dying out.

Also..."gif" as in "gift" or "jif" as in the peanut butter? ;-)

I came of age in IT around 2005/2006, and it took me a really long time to connect the "scuzzy" people were talking about with SCSI as written. I always kinda liked the pronunciation though, once I figured out what it was referring to.

GIF as in gift, and all the other root-level directories you named, I'm on the same page as you.

My high school graduation present in 1995 was a TI TravelMate 4000M laptop computer. It had no built in CD-ROM drive (I don't think any laptop did until the late 90s) but it had a full size SCSI port on the back. I promptly went to the local electronics superstore and asked for a "Ess See Ess Eye" external CD-ROM drive. The clerk looked at me like I was smoking something, then said "Oh, you mean a 'scuzzy' drive, sure we've got those!" I distinctly remember thinking at first the guy must not be proud of his product lineup. A few moments later the acronym and his pronunciation clicked and I felt really embarrassed.

I've never been able to say "scuzzy". My grandparents used that word to mean trashy or dirty people, and I've never been able to use it in a professional context.

"gif" as in the Dutch word for poison, with the hard "g".

/usr may be pronounced "user" for convenience, but it was conceived as "Unix System Resources directory", not "user directory".

I believe that's a backronym.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/usr....

In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) are. The name hasn't changed, but it's meaning has narrowed and lengthened from "everything user related" to "user usable programs and data". As such, some people may now refer to this directory as meaning 'User System Resources' and not 'user' as was originally intended.

I like "oo-zer" which is both easier to say and less confusable with "user".

In ye olden days oft UNIX, users home directorys lived in /usr/username.

It always surprises me a little when I 'ls /' and /etc is up the top rather than at the very end. Mentally i've always placed 'etc' at the end, from 'et cetera'/'so on and so forth'/'misc'/'appendix'...

Americans often say "ect" (spelled out †). As a Dutch person (when talking in Dutch we say this as "etc" (eat tea sea) or "et cetera") it is very hard for me to not do the lord's work and correct them. And I guess it works if you abbreviate it as Et CeTera.

† edited to add that it's spelled out

I'm pretty sure I have never encountered "ect" from any person of any nationality.

I've heard people say "ek cetera" quite a bit.

I've always heard it pronounced incorrectly as "ek setra". And now I'm wondering if it's unusual to pronounce the last word with all three syllables, as I do...

If you hate this as much as I do, don't listen to Sweet and Tender Hooligan by The Smiths. It's a great song, but the last minute or so is horror.

Yeah, true. To the point where I suppose it's basically standard in a bunch of regional dialects.

I believe it's a common mispronounciation, but I have come across this quite often.

I've lived my whole life in the United States, lived I two very different and distance parts, traveled around the country.

I've never heard this. like ever.

Ok, so our experiences differ. Not a big deal.

I think you may be hearing something else and interpreting it as "ect." I also am from the US and have never once in my entire life heard this.

People spell it e-c-t. I have heard it often. I can't help it that you haven't!

I have - and I distinctly remember doing it myself as a small child and being corrected by my teacher. (I'm English by the way).

I've heard people pronounce it "eck cetera" many, many times, presumably because they've never actually seen the word in print.

I've never heard anyone say "ect", which would imply that they've seen the word but can't read.

It's a common misspelling in America, similar to incorrect uses of your vs you're.

I've never heard an American spell out "etc.", correctly or not, in conversation; I'm having trouble believing that doing so, much less a particular incorrect way of doing it, is common generally among "Americans", though there may be some narrower regional or other subculture in which it is common.

I am American and say "ee tee cee" for /etc.. but this could possibly be because I taught myself computer science online when I was a kid and so never heard people say many of the terms out loud.

Does any other language pronounce "et cetera" with the "hard" C, as it would be said in Latin?

Occasionally, you might encounter a Latin-speaking pedant who says "Kaizar" (this could also be a German :)) and "et ketera", but it isn't the norm in US English anyway.

I don't know Latin (aside from common phrases) but in many Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian) the ‘C’ is only hard when followed by ‘a’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ (referred to as broad vowels in Irish/Gaelic).

How often is often? I've never seen that in my life.

And W is a ligature of 'UU'.

Ancient Greek has an interesting coincidental evolution here in that its specific character for representing `/w/` was, in the classical period, referred to as digamma, literally 'double-gamma', because it looks like two gammas. The sound of digamma follows a similar usage of English 'w'[1], in that it is a 'consonantal doublet' of the Greek upsilon (both upsilon and digamma are derived from the same Phonecian letter, waw). However, the character itself doesn't have the same convenient surface-to-deep mapping, and it ended up as the Latin alphabet 'F'.

If you want to one level deeper, the sound 'F' came to represent is the 'voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means it has a pairing in the pronunciation space with 'V', the 'voiced labiodental fricative'. So Greek 'Digamma' became Latin 'F' in form, which is paired with Latin 'V' which became English 'W' which originally was represented by Greek 'Digamma' in sound.

None of this really means anything, but it tickles my brain.

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[1] Albeit with very different evolutionary paths; English 'w' was used, in part, to allow representation of both Germanic and Latinate words.

Do you know how we ended with the w-g mapping between Germanic languages and French?

- William => Guillaume

- War => Guerre

- Wasp => Guêpe

- Waffle => Gauffre

All of these 'g's are pronounced as in "gas. "gu" makes the 'g' hard in front of vowels that would have made it soft.

It's thought to be part of a larger series of sound shifts that happened as Proto-Germanic branched off from Proto-Indo-European, called Grimm's Law[1]. Romance languages like French (along with other Indo-European languages, like Greek and Sanskrit), as far as we can tell, preserve more closely the original PIE sounds, with Germanic languages being the 'deviants'. It's also the reason why English has 'feather' and Romance languages have 'penna' or some derivative, and there are a bunch of other fun examples of cognates to be had.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law

Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.

«Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.»

It's fun because the myth collection was almost a side effect of the linguistics work: it shouldn't be a surprise that when the Brothers Grimm walked into a small village and asked for the oldest documents the village could find they got a lot of interesting myths and fairy tales in return. There's a bit of dramatic irony that Grimm's Fairy Tales has had such a homogenizing force on the myths since its publication when a lot of the reason for collecting them in the first place for the Grimms was seeking all the little nuances and differences and distinctions between them (including and especially linguistically).

Many thanks :-)

More 'VV', per traditional Latin spelling. 'U' is a relatively new letter.

TL;DR: I personally thing both 'UU' and 'VV' are equally correct, given the history of the Latin alphabet's evolution.

Given the subject matter, I'd disagree slightly, but we're getting into obscure territory: 'U' and 'V' were glyphs of the same letter, but the two glyphs ended up being used to represent the vowel and consonant respectively as new letters. 'V' was traditionally the glyph used in writing and carving owing to it being the easier glyph to carve with a chisel. In Roman Rustic caps (as seen in Virgil's writings), the 'V'/'U' was halfway in-between a 'V' and a 'U' in shape.

When I say I disagree, I'm not saying you're wrong, BTW, so much that differentiating between 'U' and 'V' up until the late Middle Ages is difficult, complicated by the fact that the shift from 'UU'/'VV' to 'W' happened over a very long period of time, overlapping, IIRC, with 'U' and 'V' becoming separate letters.

To add some history to your opinion: In English we call it "double-u", whereas in French it is "double-v". It seems even at the time of invention there was a difference of opinion as to which letter w was doubling.

I would argue that w is a ligature of double-v but since the latin v was pronounced like todays u, its pronounced double-u.

Works very well in english and other European languages.

Uuindouu... One cant help but make a w sound.

Vvindovv... Not so much.

Also in Spanish and Italian. And given that these three are all neo-latin languages, unlike English, I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.

> neo-latin

You mean 'Romance': Neo-Latin refers to the revived Latin from the Renaissance era, which is now used as a source of international scientific vocabulary.

> I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.

This is why I wrote what I wrote: the timeline for that doesn't match up. The 'W' ligature came along when 'V' and 'U' were glyphs of the same letter, not separate letters themselves. In fact, 'V'/'U' was generally pronounced when spelling it out the way you would've said 'U' at the time, with the name 'V' got coming later.

In essence: it's equally right to say 'W' came from 'VV' as it is to say it came from 'UU', as they were the same thing up until surprisingly recently, to the extent that 'U' and 'V' weren't differentiated in French until the mid-1700s.

There's also the interesting question of language differences. While a single letter might have been good enough for Latin, Italian, French, etc. German has a stronger need for three, as shifting pronunciation of "v" as a consonant to become practically the same as "f" strangely wastes a letter and requires a new letter (which turned out to be "w") for the old sound. Meanwhile, German also has "u" and "ü" as vowels.

Traditionally, the uppercase was written as 'V' and the lowercase as 'u', though sometimes the lowercase would be written as 'v' at the beginning of a word (compare with 's', which was written as 'ſ' except at the end of a word).

It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.

Traditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case). Following another trend of highlighting certain letters, e.g., the first in a sentence, for example in red ink, eventually majuscules were used for this purpose. Thus, uppercase and lowercase.

Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras.

Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)

And the reason that they are named "uppercase" and "lowercase" is that in the early days of movable type, the majuscule letters were stored in a case above the miniscule letters.

Furthermore, Roman and Italic are two entirely different styles of characters. For highlighting purposes, printers started using Italic within Roman text, and eventually pairs of Roman and Italic fonts became identified with each other, so that now typefaces generally include both of them.

It may also be interesting that these styles of writing characters originally went with different styles of filling a page. Around the first millennium horror vacui reigned the scriptoria and scribes tended to fill the whole of the page with as least of white space as possible. If there was space left at the end of a line or page, the last words were repeated, often framed by "va (...) cat". This style coincided with broken letter styles favoring the similarities in the various character forms.

(We may observe that the upcoming use of white space in writing in order to structure text roughly coincides with the introduction of zero into the number system. We may also observe that the use of zero was already implied by the Roman abacus, but didn't propagate to writing numbers. This may be seen in the context of Roman writing dismissing interpunctuations originally imported from the Greek and eventually also dismissing spaces between words, as it was considered important for a reader to immerse in the text in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning of a paragraph. – Historically, there's been an ongoing discussion whether to favor legibility or rather illegibility in writing and letter forms, which is linked to the question, whether a text should reveal its meaning quickly, or rather resist a cursory reading.)

All of that is correct, but I was thinking more of the Shakespearean era after the modern use of uppercase/lowercase arose but before V and U split into different letters. So back then you had, for example, "love" written as loue.

The way I came to think of it when I studied Latin: V is the consonant version of U, just as J is the consonant version of I.

When you put those vowel sounds next to another vowel (assuming a certain Romance pronunciation similar to modern Spanish or Italian), they tend to make that consonant sound (similar to English W or the consonant version of Y).

Check out NativLang on YouTube I think you'll like it.