Re: Pronunciation of tuple

On 15/08/2024 19:35, Bart wrote:

On 15/08/2024 17:26, James Harris wrote:

The term "tuple" appears a fair bit in programming but its pronunciation is a source of some controversy.
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How do you pronounce "tuple"?

 I don't think I've ever had to say it out loud!
 Working in isolation for some many years, there are probably lots of terms and names that I don't know the pronounciation of. Sometimes a youtube lecture is the first time I hear a technical term spoken aloud.
 (However, I prefer to say 'giga' as though it starts with 'j', even though most say it the other way.)

You and Doc Brown. :-)
So you might have a certain number of jigs of memory? :-o

 

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Like me, are you irritated when people pronounce it 'the wrong way'?
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How can fellow programmers be persuaded to pronounce it 'properly'?
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Correct (IMO) is tu'ple with the first syllable ending in a long u.
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 That sounds about right and how I'd guess it should be said.
 But I typed it into Google Translate, told it to say it, and its pronounciation was 'tupple'.

That's weird.
AIUI Wiktionary allows for both pronunciations, 'tuple' first, then 'tupple' - if the order is meant to mean anything.
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tuple
It's disappointing that there's so obvious a difference of opinion among people such as programmers as I was planning to use tuples (tu'ples) and to call them such. But the dichotomy of pronunciations would make interacting with other programmers unnecessarily irritating. I may have to fall back on the more generic term "group" or suchlike.
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0 - void
1 - single
2 - pair
3 - triple
4 - quadruple
5 - quintuple
6 - sextuple
7 - septuple
8 - octuple
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etc, where the higher numbers end in "tuple".
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leading to
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n - n-tuple
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I would say that the latter ones of those above, 4 to 8, are pronounced with a long u which is, therefore, why there should be a long u in tuple.
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Perhaps people who pronounce it tupple grew up reading comics about supperman. ;-)

  'quintuplet' sounds correct with a short 'u' and weird with a long 'u'.

That sounds correct to me. Contrast it with the spelling 'quintupplet' which looks wrong: the u looks automatically short in quintuplet and so doesn't need the second p to shorten it.
English is often awkward but as a native English speaker I would naturally read
   quin.tu'ple  (long u)
   quin.tup'let (short u)
And, again as a native English speaker, tu'ple would need a doubled-up p to make the u short.
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James Harris