How the heck do you pronounce Compet-n?

I've wondered this for YEARS. Just never got around to asking. :)

Good question.

Com-pet-N

com-PET'n?

COM-pet'n?

I said:

Com-pet-N

That's how I pronouce it.

Com-pete-en

mje said:

com-PET'n?

That's how I pronounce it.

COM-PET-EN

competing?

heh

com-pet-en, with the stress (albeit light) on the last syllable.

Compet (quick pause) N.

heh.
yes, compete-en. just like it looks, it is short for competition.
actually, I'm glad he chose something so unique.. it really helps on the internet to have a unique name... like Grazza or Espi or Assmaster, uh... well, you get the idea.

On a related topic, how is DEMOn pronounced? demo-en?

demo-n?

I pronounce it competition. N is the 'shun' sound in standard business shorthand.

Competition.

I assume it was originally shortened due to some 8-character restriction somewhere.

Opulent said:

heh.
yes, compete-en. just like it looks, it is short for competition.
actually, I'm glad he chose something so unique.. it really helps on the internet to have a unique name... like Grazza or Espi or Assmaster, uh... well, you get the idea.

So you mean it's said like "competing" only without the g on the end, so it's like slang...?

"I'm competin' in the tournament." Like that?

Grazza said:

On a related topic, how is DEMOn pronounced? demo-en?

heh... yes :)
and Arioch is right (of course), but I think most players pronounce Compet-N as 'compete-en'.

I always pronounced it as "Competition".

I sometimes called it Compu-ten.

COMPETITION N!

Just by looking at (one of) the COMPET-N templates you see that its full name is "competition". (It appears in several other .txts that Simon wrote, such as this one (4th paragraph) or this one (3rd paragraph). It was in all likelihood shortened due to restriction of 8 characters. So you should probably pronounce it as if you were saying "competition" but it's chopped off after the first 't'... and then put an 'n' at the end.

This lands us at the pronounciation "com-pet-n". Or you can go with the full name, which is "competition".

Couldn't they have spelt it 'competin' then?

I don't see how; that would be a shorthand for "competing", not "competition"?

Personally I pronounce it "Com-pet-un". As for it being called "Competition", while it may have sort of been called that back when Simon Widlake was running it on the newsgroups, everybody (including Widlake himself, later on) called it "Compet-n", and I'd say that's its name, not just a shortening of "competition" anymore.

Fair enough... I only used the connection to its origin to aid in the pronounciation question...

I emailed Adam_H about it. Perhaps he will shed his modern-day view on it.

mje said:

I emailed Adam_H about it. Perhaps he will shed his modern-day view on it.

HAHAHA, he'll probably file your message under //Outlook/COMPET-N/lol/
It is short for 'competition', how you pronounce it is up to you. :)
It has clearly developed into a pseudo-acronym as Jonathan stated... no longer Competition but Compet-N. Like SCUBA or SCSI, there were probably initially lots of pronounciation versions of the acronym, but over time there is only one commonly accepted/used pronounciation.

Thanks mje for pointing me to this thread :) Personally I pronounce as com-pete-en ever since I knew about it. I learned about the "competition" thing much later on when I browsed the templates Kristian mentioned, and my pronounciation already stuck. Istvan (previous admin) says com-pet-n.

By the way, the "official" way to write it is all capitals (COMPET-N). The Compet-N thing is also used, but I dislike it much as the DooM spelling.

DEMOn said:

HAHAHA, he'll probably file your message under //Outlook/COMPET-N/lol/

Heh, I use Pine.