Daemon? Demon?
 

In Philip Pullman's fantasy epic His Dark Materials, every character is accompanied by an animal familiar called a daemon, which represents that person's soul. Although he uses this spelling, which is Latin and should therefore be pronounced "daimon"/"dymon", his preferred pronunciation is "demon". Maybe that's just a dig at the Christian Church, which he hates. But it got me thinking.

I have always thought of background daemon processes in Linux as being pronounced in the Latin or Greek way, but that may be because I did Latin at school. In those days, you needed O-level Latin to get into the best universities. I doubt if many people study it today outside the public school system. So do people on this forum say "dymon" or "demon"?

I pronounce it dee-mon, so I'm assuming this correlates to demon.

Hey, could be worse, I used to work with a person who persistently tried to pronounce Linux as Leenux.

I too needed Latin for university admission — it took me three attempts to get that O level! Since the syllabus had changed before the third attempt, I got to read a lot of Latin.

Latin words borrowed into English are traditionally pronounced as English: you don't pronounce Caesar as Kysar (I hope, but one never knows these days). So, daemon = demon. Greek is different, as most Greek words used in English are "quoted" rather than "adopted" — hence daimon is "dymone".

day-min

Me, I pronounce it day-mon.

I would pronounce all three in both ways depending upon context.
I forget is it, really, dæmon anyhow?

No. What would mean the A is pronounced like the A in apple.

This is how I pronounce it as well.

well, yes ans no whioch is why this thread is here?
The ligature would, far as I can tell, be pronounced like the letter combination eas at the time?

I'm another day-mon sayer.

I say Li-nooks (vaguely European accent) to fit in with almost everybody else, but still maintain that the correct pronounciation in English is Lie-nux because (1) it rhymes Linus (in English) and (2) it has a long vowel followed by a short vowel to mimic the English pronounciation of Unix.

I wouldn't have posted about this except that there aren't any kids on my lawn to yell at.

Day mon here too.

this

Hazel we need this option in the poll. :)

I'm with Fatmac: day-mon.

How do I change the poll? There doesn't seem to be a tool for that.

Dymon, in finnish it sounds like demon.