I cringe to post to a thread with this subject line, but no American mathematician I know would call it "Moe-nad". I think the US math consensus is "Mon - ad", where mon is like the faux-jamaican "Hey, mon", or (more to the point) monoid or monomorphism. Sometimes Dictionaries are only as good as (their current crop of fact-checkers) x (current budget) On Thu, 10 May 2007, Melissa O'Neill wrote:
Although I hate to resort to dictionaries, curiosity got the better of me and I find the following.
According to both Merriam Webster and the OED, monad is indeed pronounced exactly like gonad. BUT, in the UK at least, there is more than way to pronounce gonad, so it doesn't necessarily clarify things.
In the US (according to Merriam Webster), it appears that the correct pronunciation is mō-nad, like joe-nad.
In the UK (according to the OED), it appears that the pronunciation is either mȯ-nad, like gone-bad (i.e., with an "o" sound like the "o" in lot or pot), or mō-nad, like joe-nad.
So, from this information, we can conclude that to be truly international, go with the long O sound, and to sound more English, use the short o sound.
Melissa.
P.S. See http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/pronsymbols.html for the meanings of the phonetic symbols "ō" and "ȯ". (Assuming they make it through email, etc., which is probably unlikely, but we'll see.)
_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe