[R] Is there a canonical way to pronounce CRAN?

[Tom Woolman]

Everyone needs to speak English exactly like I do or else they're doing 
it wrong
  :)

By I pronounce CRAN the same way that I pronounce the first half of 
cranberry.




On 2022-05-04 20:24, Avi Gross via R-help wrote:
> Extended discussion may be a waste but speaking for myself, I found it
> highly enlightening to hear that many had a mental image of an
> alternate way to pronounce CRAN as it so OBVIOUSLY had a natural way
> to pronounce.
> 
> I often cringe when I listen to an audio book in the car and the
> person chosen to narrate gets words not just wrong but very wrong as
> in nobody in any country would likely pronounce it that way!
> 
> TV shows and elsewhere do the same. If someone asked me to check
> if something was on see-ran or even see-are-a-en, it might take me a
> moment to shift gears and realize they meant CRAN. There is no real
> right or wrong way and we see organizations with names hard to
> pronounce like FBI or CIA are often referred to with words like
> Quantico or Langley based on an area they are associated with. People
> like words they can hope to pronounce like the non-existent UNCLE or
> even SMERSH and KAOS.
> 
> I will say it is quite logical if you see C-SPAN as see-span then CPAN
> as C-PAN you might then see CRAN the way you do as C-RAN.
> 
> But consider the many functions and packages in a language like R and
> ask if everyone thinks or pronounces them the way you do? How many
> initially read runif() as run-if until you realized it was a
> distribution of uniform random numbers in R as compared to rnorm() for
> an R version of a normal distribution and thus maybe can be
> pronounced more like r-unif and r-norm. Also, runif is part of a
> related set of functions all having something to do with a uniform
> distribution, dunif(), punif() and qunif() so, again, it hints to some
> of a consistent way to speak them aloud. Of course, in written form,
> they speak for themselves. 
> But not everything can or should be pronounced. We do not all speak
> the same languages or the same way. Sometimes spelling things out as
> C-R-A-N is a better way to go albeit if the others pronounce those
> letters differently, you end up like people who think there is a
> Hungarian word for something like vey-tsey to mean toilet when
> it actually is spelled WC as in borrowed from the English Water Closet
> and the way you say W as a letter of the alphabet followed by the way
> you say C as a letter of the alphabet sounds ...
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Lemon <drjimlemon using gmail.com>
> To: Stephen P. Molnar <s.molnar using sbcglobal.net>; r-help mailing list
> <r-help using r-project.org>
> Sent: Wed, May 4, 2022 6:46 pm
> Subject: Re: [R] Is there a canonical way to pronounce CRAN?
> 
> Perhaps not entirely a waste. Shots have been fired over less.
> Allow the neologism 'packronym' to signify the packing of an acronym
> into a pronounceable word.
> (A necessary skill in the public service. If you cannot correctly
> pronounce DFAT, resign yourself to menial labor)
> If we endorse the anglophone packronym we get:
> kræn
> An Italian might lean toward:
> tʃrɑn
> while Spanish (the happiest language, they say) would produce:
> krɛn
> So Babel continues to amuse or enrage us, depending upon our emotional
> disposition.
> I dare not comment upon those who would laboriously spell it out as:
> Charlie Romeo Alfa November
> 
> Jim
> 
> On Thu, May 5, 2022 at 4:05 AM Stephen P. Molnar 
> <s.molnar using sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> Yes, I know that I'm contributing, but what a waste of band width.
> 
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