I hope no one would take this personally… . My intentions are clean and clear. This is not a cynical or trolling post.
I’ve recently committed myself to Yii. I was acquainted with it a year or so ago and I liked it a lot. Its only now that I left my job and starting to navigate my own career by freelancing using Yii, diving into it. Its the coding style, the conventions (and convention over configuration approach), the OO nature of it and lots of other things. I truly think its fast, secure and professional.
Yet, when I need to name, coin the framework I’m describing this is where the conversation hits its first obstacle. “Yi” is not easily pronounced and not easily spelled. It needs extra emphasys on the “ii” part of the name, making is awkward and funny to sound. Sure there are mother tongue implications and my mother tongue is not English. Yet, I guess the difficulty in pronouncing the framework name and talking about it verbally is not only unique to Hebrew native speakers like myself. Opinions from others are of course welcomed.
I think that if a rename to the framework will be done there’s a good chance it can slightly be easier to convey the message about Yii.
Yii is so cool - I wish its name was likewise. I have a hunch that its not only me feeling this way. Don’t you think so?
the founder of yii is Chinese(qiang xue) , the pronounce is same as Chinese character "易" ，this character in china is most oldest one ，about 5000 years ago this character existed ， and the meaning of it is closest to "Tao" (道)。in Chinese “易” has many means , such as easy , change , and has some mystery .
actually in china we don’t call yii as ‘yi:’ but Y I I .pronounce it one by one
hehehe may be you should ask the founder qiang for why he named it as “YII”, Yii has triple “E” : Easy ,Efficient ,Extensible , you can also pronounce it as “E”
Check screencasts http://www.yiiframework.com/screencasts/. Jeff managed to pronounce it and since he’s both familiar with Chinese and English I think his version can be considered a reference one.
btw., Yii’s naming and history are very interesting. You can get a little bit more of it here (my vision + some info from Qiang).
Yii is not to pronounce it, but to use it. When I was choosing my first framework the name wasn’t in the criteria list at all (though I like it, Yii sounds funny ).
Interesting. Will check those. Thanks for the links.
I wanted to check the people’s mind about. Kind of like a poll, if you wish. Is there a problem to change a name? I don’t think so. It all depends on the community approach to this. Its not critical in any way but still I wanted to check if others share the same thought as I.
I have no problem with English, besides some accent (that is sometimes mistakenly assumed as German, to the amusement of moi :-). To me, the double ‘i’ in Yii sounds like emphasize which is harder to pronounce. No, not really that hard but those tiny differences are a cause of slow language change over time. I once learned a course in Linguistics and from it I remember that some sounds are harder to pronounce than others. This is nicely reflected in children language which is not as mature as the adult’s one. Children’s talked language shows the hard to pronounce syllables and vowels as they alter them to ‘an easier version’ but I guess this is getting a bit of topic… .
I like the name for its shortness… Especially because the main class is named "Yii" and all static calls through Yii::method() are so short!
Its also interesting what yiqing95 said (to pronounce YII as Y I I).
Finally I find that "yii" is very ease to pronounce, but its hard (if not impossible) for a stranger to recognize how exactly "yii" is written (Could be Ji, Yi, Jie, …)
nope, and apparently its not only me. Indeed its other Hebrew speakers.
