DAEMON (day'mun, dee'mun) [archaic form of "demon", which has slightly different connotations (q.v.)] n. A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, writing a file on the lpt spooler's directory will invoke the spooling daemon, which prints the file. The advantage is that programs which want (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the lpt. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals. Usage: DAEMON and DEMON (q.v.) are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. DAEMON was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it dee'mon) and used it to refer to what is now called a DRAGON or PHANTOM (q.v.). The meaning and pronunciation have drifted, and we think this glossary reflects current usage.
Exhibit A: "Daemon" is just an archaic spelling of "demon" and we already have a common pronunciation for that.
Exhibit B: In Old English, "æ" was a vowel that did not survive to modern English. There is no direct equivalent sound or letter for it today. Other words that contiained æ have generally taken the long E pronunciation instead, e.g. encylopaedia -> encyclopedia and aether -> ether.
So people can say what they want but in my opinion, the "dee-mon" pronunciation is the most correct. :)
While it's true that today we would pronounce de- and dae- each as /dee/ without differentiation, TFA points out an interesting notion:
> By the late 16th century, the general supernatural meaning was being distinguished with the spelling daemon, while the evil meaning remained with demon.
Given that both spellings were used simultaneously back then for the goal of differentiation that transcends mere archaic-vs-modern, I have to wonder if there was verbal differentiation accompanying it as well. I suppose this depends on a more precise estimate of æ's deprecation through the transition from Old to Middle to Early Modern to Modern English (specifically, whether its original /æ/ [0] sound persisted into Early Modern or was already /ee/ by then).
[0] Which, confusingly, has several possibilities [1]. Since we're talking about the 16th century though, we might go with the sound it also represents in IPA, as in ash, fan, happy, last, etc. although I can't say I've ever heard anyone utter /dam ən/...
According to Wikipedia: “Ä occurs as an independent letter in Finnish, Swedish, Skolt Sami, Karelian, Estonian, Luxembourgish, North Frisian, Saterlandic, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Rotuman, Slovak, Tatar, Gagauz, German, and Turkmen”
Æ is, according to Wikipedia, used in Latin, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Ossetic, Kawésqar, and Yaghan. (It is not used in French or English except in loanwords from Latin.)
In the audiobook for Daniel Suarez's Daemon, Jeff Gurner pronounces it dee-mun. I changed the way I pronounced it after listening to that book. Most people I know pronounce it day-mun, though.
I'm listening to it now. Quite clever, and a real page-turner! The writing and story-telling are awkward, and its plot holes are numerous, but fun concept for the Hacker News crowd.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, the answer is closer than you think ;)
Whoever it was that decided “simplified” spellings were an improvement didn’t take into account how difficult they’d make pronunciation. I often hear highly educated Americans coming up with very strange ways to pronounce words, well beyond the normal realms of accent and variation, that are clearly the product of this. English spelling is bad enough but cutting out the hints to a word’s origin makes things worse, not better.
In seriousness it's pronounced DEE-mon, but you'll never get consensus on this, so best just to say it the way you want to say it and leave it alone when someone else says it differently.
Oddly, no strong feelings about those, but I am a my-ess-queue-el person. I can't claim to be consistent, but filling in vowel-less acronyms feels wrong. I think that's the difference - ctrl and fn are abbreviations, not acronyms. That might be the first time I've expressed it that way, actually. TIL, chiefly about my own thought processes.
I do believe SQL is not an acronym, but an initialism, precisely when it's spoken as you say it: initials rather than a word. It's when the string of letters is pronounced as a word that "acronym" is accurate. So SQL is either, and thus both...
But yeah, the filling in is odd unless, as in the case of ctl/ctrl, knowledge of the original guides us into lossless compression.
Is that a typo? If not then I see how those would be pronounced the same, but daemon in American English would usually be pronounced "Day-mon". This also helps to distinguish between the long running process and an evil entity, which is good when talking to less technically minded folks.
Day-muhn?
My colleagues all seem to say it differently, and I’ve always been curious which one of us sounds the most foolish.