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by jeppz 2529 days ago
I'm not a big fan of names that when you say out loud others don't know which one you mean.
4 comments

This is only because you like to talk to other people. Once you settle for a remote life-style, where you communicate through Slack and GitHub, this is problem goes away. #sarcasm #irony :)
This made me curious: in what accents of English are JSON (J-SON) and Jeison pronounced the same? To answer questions like this (as I'm not a linguist) I first turn to "lexical sets" ([1], [2]) but there I find the related vowel only in the "FACE" set, marked /eɪ/ in both RP and GenAm, with examples "tape, cake, raid, veil, steak, day" not all of which I pronounce with the same vowel. Searching further on the page revealed it's known as the pane-pain merger [3], which says that they are pronounced the same in "most dialects of English":

> In the vast majority of Modern English accents the vowels have been merged; whether the outcome is monophthongal or diphthongal depends on the accent. But in a few regional accents, including some in East Anglia, South Wales, and even Newfoundland, the merger has not gone through (at least not completely), so that pairs like pane/pain are distinct.

And indeed just as in those accents, in my Indian accent too (influenced by spelling pronunciation [4] no doubt, and of course the fact that the distinct vowels exist in the phonemic inventory of Indian languages), I distinguish between the

* /ɛː/ vowel: face, tape, cake, steak, plane, lane, late, pane (and in the context here, JSON)

* /ɛɪ/ vowel: raid, veil, rain, maid, rein, pain (and in the context here, Jeison)

(Wikipedia lists day/play/they with the latter for those accents, but in mine they go with the former.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_set&oldid...

[2]: https://www.uni-due.de/SVE/SNDS_ENG_WhatAreLexicalSets.htm

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phonological_hist...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spelling_pronunci...

As a native American English speaker, I had no idea that there was a distinction!

(Also, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AAl is interesting, because its diphthongal glide in accents like mine is much more pronounced than that in e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AA ... human speech is so hard to parameterize!)

Interesting! It's the first time I learn about the pane-pain merger.

JSON: /dʒeːsən/

Jeison: /dʒɛisən/ or /dʒæɪsən/

Going further off-topic, I wonder if there's an online tool where I can input IPA symbols and listen to it?

Agreed. Cute, but often annoying. I suspect I'd end up pronouncing this library's name as "Jay eee aye sonn".
Just pronounce it similar to how "crap" sounds in German. I don't mean to undermine the quality of this library but after using Clojure and EDN for a while, I honestly think the proper way to pronounce JSON is "scheissen". :)