suzmccarth wrote:

> I am wondering how to pronounce the following - mozilla, png and
> gif.
>
> I once thought that mozilla rhymed with godzilla but was corrected.
> However, I have recently seen it transliterated into Tamil as
> [modjilla] so I assume that came from /mod-zil-a/, not /mo-zil-a/.
>
> Is it even realistic to expect internet terms to have a fixed
> pronunciation since these terms are often learned in a text only
> environment?

You mean a standard pronunciation across *different* languages?

Of course not! I wouldn't expect that for *any* term, regardless of Internet
or text-only communication.

For example, English and Italian share lots of words, because both languages
loaned wildly from each other, but these words are pronounced very
differently in the two languages; e.g., the Italian for "software" and
"hardware" is ['sOftwer] and ['ardwer]. A word that I found in lots of
languages is "hotel", but I don't think I found any two languages sharing
exactly the same pronunciation for the term.

--
Marco