The "i" in Linux and Linus have different pronunciations even when they shouldn't.

Well, ackshually...
tl;dw: the Swedish and Finnish pronunciations use the same "i" as "Linux", but Torvalds doesn't care if people use the English one.
- I first started using Linux in 1995 (I think it was kernel 1.2 or something), and this was being argued over (or at least discussed) even back then. The conclusion was that Leenus doesn’t care how you pronounce Leenux.
  
  And he pronounces it Leenooks
- That was very enlightening, the Spanish pronunciation is actually more close to that than the English one, so I feel very validated as an Spanish speaker. Thank you. Also didn't knew that he wasn't from an English speaking country.
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Except it doesn't in Finnish, where Linus Torvald is from. Linus and Linux is pronounced the same except for the final consonant.
- So his name is really Lin-us and not Line-us?
  
  I believe I saw a youtube clip of him saying his name and Linux that way, yes.
  
  Yes.
  Source: I'm Norwegian but I used to know an irate IT finn named Linus. A separate irate IT finn named Linus, that is.
  
  I think it would be Line-us and Line-ux.
- I'm Italian and I pronounce both "i"s in the same way. Why is English so strange?
  
  In this particular instance, the Great Vowel Shift is to blame. What caused that is up for debate.
  In general, English is so strange because it's a mongrel language, incorporating words from a variety of other different languages.
  
  Blame the French.
- Definitive proof: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/english.wav
- "Hello, this is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce 'Linux' as 'Linux'."
  So yeah, he pronounces 'Linus' like 'LEE-noose', and 'Linux' like 'LEE-nooks'. (Roughly, anyway. It should get the point across for most English speakers, I'm not at a computer to do a more-correct IPA transcription right now.)
  
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- Correction: Even though he's Finnish, his primary language is Swedish

The real debate is whether it's sudo or sudo.
I know it means "super user do" so should be pronounced "sue doo", but it just grates on my ear. To me it will always be "Sue dough"
- akshully
  It's "substitute user do", and defaults to root
  IIRC
  
  So it should be pronounced "suh doo"?
  I'll have fun annoying people with this pronunciation, thanks!
  
  If you need to start with ackshully, then you don't need to comment
- It's really confusing because "pseudo" pronounce the same way, means not real. So it's like you only kind of have admin access but really there's a lot of systems you can't change. Except that's not the case, and you have full access.
  
  Yeah but you're not really root, you just have permission to run things as root ;)
  That's my flimsy justification for pronouncing it like pseudo, anyway.
- I have no source to back this up so maybe I came up with this in my own reality, but I thought it was related to, pseudo = pretended.
- Ah, yeah, that fucked me up too few months ago, there are several videos on the subject. I think it's a problem with words that are created as written first, and then got pronounced, in second place, like most tech lingo. As a non-native speaker those are always the hardest to speak correctly, and even english has no real consensus.
  
  I'd like to introduce you to "GIF"
  
  Yeah, and the ongoing debate of how to pronounce Godot - even the developers don't seem to know
  
  Like SQL. It took me a bit time to learn that the one from MS is Sequel and the other ones are Es Queue El.

I've heard a lot of people pronounce it "Line-ux" lately. I hope it doesn't blow up into another Gif vs Jif debate.
Edit: and if it was supposed to be pronounced jif it would be spelled "jif", regardless of what Steve Wilhite says.
- There is nothing to debate, Linux is just Linus with an x at the end and should be pronounced as such.
  Though sometimes I wish Linus had claimed it was pronounced laynaxe just to fuck with people. Too bad we already know: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU&pp=ygUpbXkgbmFtZSBpcyBsaW51cyB0b3J2YWxkcyBhbmQgaSBwcm9ub3VuY2U%3D
  
  Y'know the gnome/Guh-nome debate? I intentionally pronounce it Zhnome to fuck with people.
  
  Linux is just Linus with an x at the end and should be pronounced as such.
  Agreed. The Swedish/Finnish pronunciation of Linus is "Lee-nus" and not "Lai-nus", hence the correct pronunciation of Linux is "Lee-nux".
  
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- I started back with kernel 0.12 and called it Line-ucks. I still do and people look at me funny, but it's an old habit and I'm an old dog.
  When Linus released his audio file it was already etched into my brain the other way. I do remember being joking that I'm glad his name wasn't Pinus (like the genus for pine trees) after hearing him say it.
- It used to be Line-UI until programming jargon became woke and wanted "experiences" over "interfaces"
- it's jif. every argument for gif is wrong, and it sounds awkward af, like you got swiped by candlejack mid-wor
  
  Jraphics Interchange Format.
  
  People know what a GIF is. So I use GIF. It's worked out fine so far.

I’ve always pronounced it Linux. Who pronounces it another way?
- No, it's pronounced Linux
  
  The first time I heard it it was pronounced Linux
  
  You're both wrong, it's pronounced Linux
- I've always pronounced it as "Linux". And then, one day I heard it from a native English speaker pronouncing it as "Linix", and I still keep hearing that everywhere, but I just cannot fix my brain anymore. To me it always remains "Linux".

English doesn't make sense because it's been influenced by so many other languages. I'm not sure of the etymology of Linux and Linus, but I would guess that they have different roots.
- English is such as mess that you actually have spelling contests to prove it. Try that with most other languages, and it’s going to be exciting for all the first graders who just learned the alphabet. Anyone older than that will be bored to death in the contest.
  
  I thought of that meme when making my original comment lol
- I thought Linux was named after Linus Torvalds, its creator.
  
  Linux Is Not a Unix System
  
  If that's the case, maybe he's addressed why they are pronounced differently.
- They do have different roots.
  One is % sudo su –
  And the other is Canadian directly. Ask his parents their nationality to find better roots.
  
  Canadian? Are you thinking of another Linus?
- “English is not a language, it's three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one.”
  For more fun, right about the time the printing press came into widespread use and English spelling became standardized, the language was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift.
- That's not the cause though, most if not all languages have been influenced by many others. And pronunciation, meaning of words etc drift over time in all of them as well.
  Most countries have gone through the process of revising their orthography, changing spelling or even adopting different alphabets to have kind of consistent writing systems for their languages.
  None of this has been done in the English language, it uses the most basic Latin alphabet which was made for a very different language (when even many Romance languages directly descending from Latin have adapted it with new letters or diacritics), for example English has a lot of vowel sounds that Latin hadn't and it even went through something called 'the great vowel shift' when changes in some vowel sounds got them closer to others that were 'pushed', these pushed others causing a sort of shuffling in the (finite) vowel space, but spelling didn't reflect most of this.
  In fact I think that in some cases the spelling took the more ancient version that matched the pronunciation even less like 'plumb' (don't quote me on this, its from the top of my head)
- "Linus" comes from Greek and means "flax." Originally pronounced something like "lee-noose." "Linux" is a combination of Linus' name (the creator of Linux) and "Unix."

In english maybe
- in spanish quizás
  
  En español es bastante consistente de hecho, y gracias a un comentario en este post me enteré de que estamos más cerca de la pronunciación original que el inglés, muy interesante.

You don't pronounce it "line-ux?"
- No, I pronounce them Lee-nukes and Lee-noose.
- Lie nucks
  
  Over on the far right we use Truth Chucks. None of that Antarctic communist bs.
- "Line-oh" like its French
- Bro... do people unironically say it the other way?

Well he named it, didn't he? It's his own pronunciations.
- Actually, he didn't even name it that way, though he did later dictate how it should be pronounced before demonstrating that pronunciation with a completely different pronunciation.
  Ari Lemmke, Torvalds' coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name, so he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds.[58] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux".
  According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds,[11] the word "Linux" should be pronounced (/ˈlɪnʊks/ ⓘ LIN-uuks) with a short 'i' as in 'print' and 'u' as in 'put'. To further demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code.[59] However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ (LEEN-uuks) with a short but close front unrounded vowel, instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post.
  
  Dammit he's a Finnish nerd, not a linguist.

Quick recap.
So, Linux is Linux because a set of events that lead to it being named after Linus.
It wasn't uncommon at this time for Unix systems to be named after their relevant creator or platform like this. HP-UX, PC-UX A/UX etc.
Linux would probably be seen as LIN-UX or LIN/UX, it may not seeing as Linux is not Unix, but that's just speculation.
Linux in its proper reading would be Linus Unix, but that doesn't make any sense Linux is Unix-like, but it was made in a vacuum without access to Unix source or even Unix systems at all near the beginning.
- Interesting! Do you happen to know where the -UX suffix convention came from?
  
  UniX, apparently

It's the same in Swedish so I never realized it's pronounced differently

Thats a real Tough trough though is really gets wound around the wound

English Language
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Back in like the mid/late-90s, there was a horribly compressed .wav going around the internet of what was supposedly a heavily accented Linus Torvalds saying “Helo my name is Linus Torcalds and I pronounce “Linux” as “Linux”, that’s “Linux”.
I know, because I’ve listened to that .wav a million times. And I still think he said “LEE^^uh -nux”.

https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU?si=SaIr0QrRuu6EaClG
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Yeah, english doesn't make a whole lot of sense
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