The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv.

The great thing about language is that you can just change things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv or archive, latex or laytek.

They did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.

So it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTeχ. Make sure you type it properly i guess.

I'm not sure why you're telling me that. I didn't spell it either way.

It's a capital Chi.

Eh - the name is a bit of fun. Its fun to form communities with in-jokes and tribal knowledge and silly names. It doesn't hurt anyone. Lets not sacrifice everything joyous at the altar of being friendly to noobs.

Is arXiv not pronounced the same as "archive"? I agree with you about LaTeX but arXiv seems like an obvious allusion to "archive"?

Well it does lack that final -e of archive, and—fun fact!—like LaTeX which I know as ['la:teç], arXiv could plausibly be pronounced [ar'çi:f] in German although I've never heard anyone pronounce that name. So why is it arXiv not at least arXive with an -e?

Because they're trying to be quirky I guess, but it is still unmistakably a weird spelling of "archive" (especially given the context).

in both arXiv and LaTeX, X is greek(chi).

Another fun trivia:

The "La" in latex is Leslie Lamport. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/

This is incorrect. In his book on LaTeX, Leslie Lamport specifically says that he does not care how you pronounce it. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_...)

Knuth, on the other hand, has a whole rationale on why it’s pronounced “tech”. (“Your keyboard should become slightly moist”, iirc).

> it's pronounced "lay-tek"

Or “lah-tek”, the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to address which, if either is preferred. And I think Leslie Lamport said that he didn’t want to impose any particular pronunciation.

I've always pronounced it lah-tech, with the guttural ch from the Greek chi, which is what the X represents.

This is accurate.

Voiceless velar fricative X or you're doing it wrong.

From a linguist's point of view this is a perfect example of the chaos that ensues when people try to say how things are pronounced without describing the speech sounds using standard vocabulary.

Here are the inept pronunciation instructions on the LaTeX project website:

> «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht»)

The pronunciation of the 'ch' in 'blech' isn't really standardized, so that's not much help. If we go by the German pronunciation of Brecht then the sound should be [ç], i.e. a voiceless palatal fricative. But this seems to be a mistake, as Knuth intended the X in TeX to be [x], i.e. a voiceless velar fricative. In German, [ç] is an allophone of /x/ (conditioned by the preceding vowel), but they are distinct sounds, and Knuth's directions for the pronunciation of TeX unambiguously specify [x]. It seems unlikely that this difference between the X in LaTeX and the X in TeX is intentional, so maybe this was a confused attempt to identify the [x] sound.

Really then, it's anyone's guess how LaTeX is supposed to be pronounced, since no-one with authority to specify has bothered to look up the IPA symbols for the relevant speech sounds. But IMO while [leɪtɛk] is a perfectly common and acceptable pronunciation, it can only really be understood as an anglicization of [leɪtɛx] rather than the canonical pronunciation.