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I recently watched a video of a singer introducing her new equipment, the Miktek CV4 microphone. It dawned on me that the spelling bears resemblance to MiKTeX and I became curious if MiKTeX is an allusion to Miktek. However, I have found no indication that one is named after the other, and in this mailing list, Christian Schenk explained the meaning of MiK in MiKTeX:

mik used to be my login name. It is an acronym for: Micro-kid. Hence the capital K in MiKTeX.

But that leads to a question: the 'i' in Miktek is pronounced like the 'i' in microphone, but according to the about page on the official MiKTeX website, MiKTeX is pronounced mick-tech. If the name is derived from Micro-kid and the TeX program built for Microsoft Windows, wouldn't it be more natural to pronounce MiKTeX as Miktek?

While I'm at it, I remember reading somewhere that TeX is an acronym for Tau Epsilon Chi and the original pronunciation of TeX is tech with the ch sounding like that in loch (not lok). Can someone point me to a source? That would be much appreciated.

Gao
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  • "pronounced tech" depends how you pronounce that, I would assume it is like the first bit of "technical" so not that different to "tek" but I'm sure we have questions already on pronunciation so this is probably a duplicate. The pronunciation reference to loch is in the texbook – David Carlisle Oct 07 '14 at 14:49
  • I've just read the relevant part in texbook, but I'm still a little bit unsure: which one of the two pronunciations of loch is it? http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/loch?s=t&path=/ – Gao Oct 07 '14 at 14:57
  • Recommended pronunciation for a program is down to the author, so only Christian can really answer here. Even then, what people actually do is entirely their own business: there is no reason to assume people will follow the author's request. – Joseph Wright Oct 07 '14 at 15:07
  • I don't intend this question to be a duplicate, but it may be perceived so due to me being greedy and wanting to ask two questions in one post. But my main question concerns the MiK part in MiKTeX, not the TeX part. Anyways, there seems to be no definitive pronunciation to TeX because of the contradicting sources (in both the texbook and the link to duplicate). – Gao Oct 07 '14 at 15:11
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    I never wondered about mik pronounced as mick, because it seemed natural to me. But, my native language is German and, maybe, Christian Schenk also thought mick to be natural since he is also a German... – Thomas F. Sturm Oct 07 '14 at 15:18
  • @JosephWright Is Christian a Stack Exchange user? I thought this question might be of interest to a very limited number of people and it just feels more comfortable to ask here. – Gao Oct 07 '14 at 15:26
  • @GaoWeiwei Not that I know of, no: I was mainly observing that the question is likely not answerable. – Joseph Wright Oct 07 '14 at 15:27

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