You, don't correct him/her though. muhahaha

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typodermic/jillican/

Is your classmate French, or Québécois?

an archaic unit of liquid measure, equivalent to a quarter-pint.

I guess British binge drinking is what made that obsolete.

hhp

Interestingly enough, he is from the Netherlands, and I wondered if his pronunciation might have been due to that. Glad I'm saying it correctly!

Tim, you're just opening a can of worms with that one, LOL. ;)

Fill pans with water; Gill Sans with Perpetua. The words rhyme.

an archaic unit of liquid measure, equivalent to a quarter-pint.

I guess British binge drinking is what made that obsolete.

The last time I was in London, they served hard liquor by the gill or half-gill, which made a shot a little stiffer than most you would get in an American bar.

Which is no real surprise: American merchants have been semantically short-changing their customers since before the republic began. “A pint’s a pound the world around”; in Britain, a pound used to be twenty shillings, and so a pint was twenty ounces; in America, a pound is sixteen ounces, so a pint is sixteen ounces. And so it goes with a great many things…

Oh, sorry.
The French still sounds nicer. :-)

Speaking of which, how many people prefer "demi" to "semi"?

hhp

Here is a grab of that "sansserif" entry from the OED:

Now let's look at that first word, "sans". According to the Wiktionary sans comes from Middle English and was borrowed from Old French. By the way, the word sauce also comes from Old French and so does village. I fail to see why any of those words should be given a modern French pronunciation.

Yes, and let’s pronounce “Paris” and “restaurant” à la française while we’re at it. It’s sans as in pans.

Joe, I can accept that - I just can't get myself to do it. Maybe it's because I learned French before English.

hhp

Without the "s" sound at the end, yes.

BTW as a rule I avoid rhyming as much as possible; it's the display typography of language.

hhp

sawnnz

Why do you say so? /ɡilsɑ̃s/ is quite far from /ɡɪlsænz/ (or /ɡɪlsanz/); I don't see what renaming process could apply.

Hey, maybe I'll set up a little online survey of how people pronounce typeface names? Any suggestions? Univers and Poliphilus come to mind.

in deference to its English provenance

?
I don't know what rules apply in general, and what rule applies here but in "Gill sans" the word "sans" cannot be a preposition, it is not in a conjunctive locution and I don't see how it can be considered to be used adverbially. So, what is it to be French? If it is short for "sans-serif" then the sound "s" might be justified, but I am claiming nothing.

Joshua, I would pronounce it the first way with the stress on the ending.

But it is a case of communication, many of the typesetters I have worked with have not known (or needed to know) who designed the typefaces they work with or their provenance, so “correct” pronunciation is often ignored in favour of comprehension.

So, being British, Univers is overwhelmingly Universe (I draw the line at Helvetica Newey though).

You could blame this on the stereotypical British method of speaking to foreigners – speak English slowly and loudly.

Tim

Fascism sucks.

hhp

This reminds me of the GIF vs JIF argument

Me too. The infamous Jraphic Interchange Format ;-)

“Perpetua” is pronounced like “perpetual” except there is no final L and the last vowel is [a] or [ʌ]. How you pronounce the er and tu portions varies by dialect. (Mine is rhotic and I say perPETCHyua, which, yes, I could write out in IPA if you wished.)