Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Name Update: Renan System pro and con

I've been referring to the software as the "Renan System" for the past few months. The connection to Julia Brumfield's community works well, and Google returns essentially nothing for it. The name is both generic and unique, so I registered renansystem.com.

There's just one problem: nobody can pronounce it.

The unincorporated community of Renan, Virginia is pronounced /REE nan/ by the locals, which occasionally gets them some kidding. I now understand why they say it that way - it's just about the only way to anglicize the word. /ray NAW/ is hard to say even if you don't attempt the voiced velar fricative or nasalized vowel. Since the majority of my hypothetical users will encounter the word in print alone, I have no idea how the pronunciation would settle out.

So unless there's some standard for saying "Renan" that I'm just missing, I'll have to start my name search again.

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