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Is there a way to contribute to sqlite.org/documentation?
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Is there a way to contribute to sqlite.org/documentation?

(1) By Anmol Sethi (nhooyr) on 2020-12-14 09:36:08 [link] [source]

Is there a way to contribute to the sqlite.org documentation?

I noticed some typos in https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html that I wanted to fix.

:s/ an SQLite database/ a SQLite database/g

(2) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2020-12-14 09:47:54 in reply to 1 [source]

:s/ an SQLite database/ a SQLite database/g

It's been my experience that most native English speakers say/write "an" when the word after it starts with an "ess" sound, as in the case of acronyms which start with S. When pronouncing SQL like "sequel" they'll normally say "a sequel server" or "a SOCKS server," but when spelling out the acronym they tend to say "an S.Q.L. server" or "an S.O.C.K.S. server." SQLite is typically pronounced Ess-Queue-Light, so i'd argue that "an" is the more conventional way to say it.

Whether that's pedantically correct or not, i cannot say, but it's how most native speakers speak/write.

(3) By Anmol Sethi (nhooyr) on 2020-12-14 09:57:08 in reply to 2 [link] [source]

Appreciate the quick response. My bad, I was pronouncing SQLite as "See-Queue-Ell-ight" but "Ess-Queue-Light" makes much more sense.

(4) By Ryan Smith (cuz) on 2020-12-14 10:26:01 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

I noticed some typos in https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html that I wanted to fix.

Firstly to your question, some very staunch grammar hawkeyes on here correct documentation errors all the time, you are welcome to post any needed corrections right here, it often will be fixed within the day.

Secondly, that use of "an" is perfectly correct.

The English rule is that a word starting with a vowel sound (not necessarily a vowel) gets the "an" rather than the "a" (I will spare everyone a dissertation on why that is, but it's easy to look up).

That means words like "Hour" and "Yttrium" gets the "an" even though they do not start with strictly a vowel but have a vowel sound, similarly some vowel-starting words like "Union" (starting with j sound same as Yellow) also gets an "a" rather than an "an", etc.

Which brings us to acronyms. Typically if an acronym (or even just a letter) is pronounced by wording it's name (M = Emm, S = Ess, and others like F, L, N, R, X) all gets an "an", whereas other letter names like B, C, D, U, Z all do not start with a vowel sound and so only gets the "a".

So far so easy, but then we get to specifically "SQL", it's a little bit more tricky because the phenomenon called "SQL" is often pronounced two different ways by people, both of them acceptable pronunciations: some say "Ess-Queue-Ell" and others say "Sequel".

Sounding out those words makes it obvious that one should get an "a" and one should get an "an".

Thus, it is not only "acceptable" linguistically to use both, I propose that it is very helpful to let the reader know which pronunciation the writer is intending when they write "SQL" in a sentence.

(5) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2020-12-14 10:31:10 in reply to 3 [link] [source]

My bad, I was pronouncing SQLite as "See-Queue-Ell-ight" but "Ess-Queue-Light" makes much more sense.

Your pronunciation isn't necessarily wrong. There's a long post about it on Stack Exchange, including references to a few videos from Richard (the guy who chose the name):

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431329/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-sqlite

Here's a quote from one of the responses:

Edit: According to your edit the creator of SQLite pronounces it as "Ess-Cue-El-Eye". I don't think that's how he actually pronounces it, he's just talking fast and sloppy. He pronounces it (in my ears at least) as "Ess-Cue-El-ite". And later in that presentation he explicitly says that he doesn't care how you pronounce it.

Similarly, myself and most people i've spoken with about libqt pronounce it as "lib-queue-tee," but the Qt developers i saw speak at a conference all pronounced it "lib-cute."

Shrug.