Do you pronounce "Data" as "Day-ta" or "Dah-ta"?

Chainweasel@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 144 points –
121

Day-ta

Ditto

Dih-toe

Die-toe

I pronounce it "data" of course.

Of course! That's the only way to say it, all others are wrong!

Agreed. Does it have two Ts? Then it's not datta which you just instinctively rest as dah-ta

Both, randomly switching between them

Same, and when I catch myself doing that, I wonder why I do it, then move on with life and do it again later.

Annoyingly I go back and forth because whichever pronunciation I’m on sounds worse than when I hear it the other way.

I recently caught myself using both pronunciations in the same sentence.

Both. I am german and I speak a weird amalgamation of british and american english.

Same

Yep, finding myself there, too. Mostly depends on what bit of music/show/media I have listened to/watched most recently :D

It depends on how many ay's and ah's are in my sentence. My mouth seems to natural conform to whatever has more as I speak at 9 million words per minute.

By itself or in short sentences, I default to day-ta, but otherwise I'm exactly the same.

Both. I feel like one of them always tends to fit the conversation better than the other, but which one that is seems to be totally random.

Same with Caribbean. Royal Caribbean and Pirates of the Caribbean both sound wrong if you use the alternate pronunciation.

I flip flop back and forth, I'm not totally sure if there's a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.

My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.

Depends. Do you mean the Android Day-Ta? Or you mean the Information Unit Datah.

I use both. One feels more singular while the other feels more plural though I can't tell you which when you ask me. We have to sneak up on it together.

I have the same issue with "Thuh" and "Thee" for "The."

"The" does have two pronunciations depending on if the word after it starts with a vovel sound or not. It's "Thuh" for consonants and "Thee" for vowels.

No it's not... it's purely emphasis/stress via vowel reduction in English?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_English

It's both things, and subjected to wide variation:

  • | Stressed | Unstressed -|-|- Prevocalic | /ði:/ | /ði/, /ðɪ/, /ð/ Preconsonantal | /ði:/, /ðʌ/ | /ðə/

Source for those pronunciations, Wiktionary.

To complicate it further some varieties merge /ʌ/ and /ə/, or /ɪ/ and /ə/. And I'm not even taking into account varieties using a different consonant, /t θ d f v/.

Ohh nice, that table helps. I felt like something was off about people sometimes using more /ði:/ than what I was taught!

Please, i don't want to be self aware of my accent in my first language.

Also the two pronunciations of "the" noted above are different mouth shapes. "Uh" un butt versus "ee" in jeep.

If were talking about a collection of information..."datta". If we're talking about the worlds' favorite android, his name sounds like "Day-tah".

The latter, just to make everyone else in my organization question themselves. Whether it is correct or not is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the seed of uncertainty that I plant every day.

data.... dad - d + ta

the other way doesn't bother me though... unlike "experiment".
it freaks me out when people throw a "spear" in that word

I sounded out both in my head and now I can't remember.

If it’s well structured then day ta. If it’s more raw then dah ta.

Idk why, why the second way sounds more raw.

I had a HS science teachers in the early 90s who was very insistent that, "day-ta is a name, dah-ta is information." And between Star Trek and The Goonies, that made sense to me.

IMO The sentence you enter dahta into a daytabase is correct to me. Dahta is like unworked mana (pronounced mahna) whereas manah is what you have done or are doing with it and Tomaytos are fresh, tomahtos are what you have done with them.

People who say potahto should be flogged in the village square however... damn heathens.

anything can be a name, and that has no bearing on how you should pronounce anything else.

Sometimes day-ta, but more often da-tuh, with the first a being pronounced like acrobat, the second as a schwa.

It's regional. I grew up in Australia, where it's pronounced as it is in the US: dah-tah. But I now live in the UK, where it's pronounced day-tah.

The same is true of "router", the network device (but not the woodworking tool): rau-tah vs roo-ter.

Working in IT made it a ballache for a while until I remembered to always change my pronunciation for them. 🙄

Lifetime New Yorker, its Day-ta (actually I hear both all the time).

That's a fair point. I shouldn't have generalised your entire country, as it has so many linguistic differences.

Even outside of the whole pop/soda/Coke thing. 😄

Non-native English speaker (Brazilian, whose native language is Brazilian Portuguese): sometimes my pronounce of "Data" sounds like the Portuguese word "Data" ("date" as in date of calendar, IPA: /ˈda.tɐ/), but sometimes the "T" sounds like "R", a specific kind of "R" (I have no English examples on mind, but it's a similar R sound as in "Arauto" ("herald") IPA: /aˈɾaw.to/ or Spanish "Toro" ("bull") IPA: /ˈtoɾo/ )), resulting in something like "Dah-rah"

a specific kind of “R” (I have no English examples on mind

General American rendering of "butter" as [bʌɾɚ] uses it.

Kind of off-topic but "Brazilian Portuguese" is not an actual variety (language or dialect). It's more like a country-based umbrella term, the underlying varieties (like Baiano, Paulistano, etc.) often don't share features with each other but do it with non-Brazilian varieties.

There's a good example of that in your own transcription of the word "arauto" as /a'ɾawto/. You're probably a Sulista speaker*, like me; the others would raise that vowel to /u/, regardless of country because they share vowel raising. (Unless we're counting Galician into the bag, as it doesn't raise /o/ to /u/ either. But Galician is better dealt separately from Portuguese.)

*PR minus "nortchi", SC minus Florianópolis Desterro, northern RS, Registro-SP.

Desculpe-me pela nerdice não requisitada, ma' é que adoro falar de idiomas.

General American rendering of “butter” as [bʌɾɚ] uses it.

Nice example! I couldn't think of "butter", thanks! Indeed, the "tt" sound from "butter".

often don’t share features with each other but do it with non-Brazilian varieties

Exactly.

You’re probably a Sulista speaker*,

I'm "paulista" (Ribeirão Preto) currently living in Minas Gerais (a branch of my family is from Minas). I copied the IPA from Wiktionary focusing on the "R" sounding, but I didn't pay attention to the IPA's ending sound (indeed, sulistas* sound something like "arauTÔ" while, as caipira, I speak something like "aRAUtu").

I should've taken spelling-based transcription errors into account; my bad! (This happens a lot, even among professional linguists.)

Variety-wise odds are that you speak the Caipira dialect, given the region of origin. Or potentially a mixed dialect. Either way it's [i u] all the way in MG, and almost all the way in SP.

English: /'dɑ:tə/ ['dɑ:tʰə]~['dɑ:ʔə]. The first "a" is the same as in "father".

Italian: /'da.ta/ ['dä:ta]. There's only way to read the word anyway.

Portuguese: I don't use it. There's a native equivalent, "dados" /'da.dos/ ['dä.dos] (dado = a piece of data).

English covers hundreds of accents and multiple English speaking countries. There isn't just one pronunciation.

English covers hundreds of accents and multiple English speaking countries. There isn’t just one pronunciation.

I'm listing the variants that I use.

I'm aware that all three languages have heavy internal variation; for example the Portuguese word could be also pronounced as ['dä.ðuʃ], and a lot of N. Italian speakers don't really do the compensatory lengthening that I do.

Dayta - it comes from the Latin word Datum which is pronounced day tum. At least that's what my middle school science teacher would tell us

Your science teacher was wrong, unfortunately. In Classical Latin, datum is pronounced as [ˈd̪ät̪ʊ̃ˑ] "dah-too(m)" and likewise data as [ˈd̪äːt̪ä] "dah-tah."

Not that Latin should really have a say in how we speak English anyhow.

and likewise data as [ˈd̪äːt̪ä] “dah-tah.”

More like [ˈd̪ät̪ä], no long vowel. There's also some disagreements if short /a/ was [ä] or [ɐ], given the symmetry with /e i o u/ as [ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ]. (I can go deeper on this if anyone wants.)

Another thing that people don't often realise, when they say "you should pronounce it like in Latin!", is that Latin /d t/ were different from English/German /d t/. They were considerably less aspirated, and as your transcription shows they were dental.

That's just details though. Your core point (Latin didn't use a diphthong in this word) is 100% correct.

IMO The sentence you enter dahta into a daytabase is correct to me. Dahta is like unworked mana (pronounced mahna) whereas manah is what you have done or are doing with it and Tomaytos are fresh, tomahtos are what you have done with them.

People who say potahto should be flogged in the village square however... damn heathens.

I feel like this thread is missing Australians and Kiwis saying that it's neither /ˈdeɪtə/ nor /ˈdætə/ but actually /ˈdɐːtə/. One of the Australian post docs in the group in which I did my thesis used that last one.

Day-ta. The latter is how Americans pronounce it?

Some do. I say day-ta as do most of the people I've worked with across the US

Almost exclusively day-ta.

I'm a day-ta scientist who grabs raw day-ta from a tay-ta warehouse (using an interface that makes it look like a day-ta base) and manipulates it inside day-ta frames in order to do day-ta analysis. I also design day-ta analytics schemas.

Sometimes, though rarely, that day-ta warehouse holds rah dah-ta, though, and I can't tell you how it got there or why.

It doesn’t matter. Pronounce it either way because it’s acceptable.

Language is fluid and communication is about understanding the intent of what you’re saying. If someone doesn’t know what you mean by pronouncing it either way, then they are being obtuse and need a quick punch in the dongle.

You’re forgetting the third pronunciation, Dat-uh. “Dat,” as in DAT ASS youknowwhatI’msayin

I pronounce it both ways. This sometimes strikes people as odd, but I will use both American and British spellings, units of measurement, and pronunciations depending on what I vibe with at the time.

This is entirely different when I'm speaking in Spanish though, as I'll always use Mexican Spanish pronunciations.

Datorade, because relentless 21st century advertising has put worms in my brain.

I'm always scared of sounding pretentious when I say [d ae dx ax] for some reason, so I generally settle with [d ey dx ax]

Depends on the context. I have day-ta, you have dah-ta. They use dah-ta, and their conclusions are supported by the day-ta. That day-tabase holds lots of day-ta, and that dah-ta sent across the network.

I like to use the linguistic Molotov cocktail of 'Datums' pronounced 'Day tums'