The word analysis can be challenging in a number of languages (I remember a few incidents from my first university course on Mathematical analysis). This post is motivated by two occurrences of the same mistake in the last month at work. As with many other English words, the pronunciation of the noun (analysis) differs significantly
Everybody is talking about machine learning these days, but quite a few of those people pronounce the word machine incorrectly. From way in the past (that is, my youth), I also remember friends making the same mistake when talking about the band Rage against the Machine. The incorrect pronunciation of machine that you can often
After having witnessed the same mistake on several occasions in recent weeks, I thought I’d write a post about asterisks.* The mistake I heard was an incorrect pronunciation of asterisk, the typographical name of the symbol “*”. It was pronounced as if it were spelled asteriks (that is, [ˈæstərɪks] instead of [ˈæstərɪsk]). Of course, asterisk
While attending a virtual conference on the topic of machine learning, I witnessed several speakers (non-native with respect to English) use phrases similar to Our code is available online, please check it! Asking the audience to check their code is almost certainly not what the authors had in mind, since this would imply that there
While listening to an online lecture about software engineering presented by a German, I noticed a systematic, incorrect pronunciation of the words notify and notification. The correct pronunciations are readily found online, for example in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary: notify: [ˈnəʊtɪfaɪ] (BE), [ˈnoʊtɪfaɪ] (AE) | listen here notification: [ˌnəʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (BE), [ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (AE) | listen here
In a physics paper I recently read for work, the German authors mixed up the words exhaustive and exhausting. Contrary to good scientific practice, I will not provide a reference in order to give them some anonymity. The sentence that made me chuckle and motivated this post was “For exhausting discussions concerning the […] methods
This week’s seminar speaker (German, but currently working in the US) made several interesting pronunciation mistakes. Most notably, he kept pronouncing the verb interpret so incorrectly that I did not even recognize it immediately. To understand what went wrong, we best look at the phonetic spelling. The are actually several pronunciations of interpret that are
At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary
A python is not just a rather dangerous looking animal. It also gave the name to a very powerful and popular programming language — Python. Having heard different people pronounce Python in different ways, I decided to look up its pronunciation. This is what I found. In British English, Python is pronounced as [ˈpaɪθən], whereas
I find the incorrect pronunciation of the word parameter in English (and of Parameter in German) both annoying and fascinating. Remarkably, the mistake is made both by professionals who use it almost every day, and people who haven’t used the word parameter since they distanced themselves from mathematics after high school. The OED gives the