※ Take my IPA with a grain of salt.

I was recently at my aunt’s watching movies with her kids. My aunt was explaining that the movie in question was filmed in a particularly beautiful part of Norway, and one of the kids said that the picture could’ve been /ɛjæj/. My aunt and I were both confused by what the child had said: I thought, “Is there a place in Norway called Eyei? That’s a weird name. And how would a kid know something so obscure?” for a moment, until the kid repeated and my aunt and I finally understood that the kid was saying the letters “AI” in English with a Norwegian accent. I said that I preferred to call generative machine learning technologies “KI” /koː.iː/ in Norwegian but also think that “AI” /ɑː.iː/ is fine, but that it becomes confusing if you read initialisms in English when you’re speaking Norwegian. I also explained to the kids that I thought that it was a real filming location that had had the colors graded to make it look more beautiful than it actually was, but that this wasn’t strictly the same as AI.

Later on, I wondered what the Norwegian name for computer-generated imagery was — I suspected it was probably just CGI, but I figured I should double check to make sure. So I snuck out my phone to look it up: evidently, you can either call CGI datagenererte bilder (calque, rarer) or, exactly as I suspected, CGI (loan, more common). But when I pronounced the letters in “CGI” as /seːgeː.iː/ my aunt got confused until I repeated again, and then she understood and said, “Oh! You mean /siːdʒɪjæj/.^[1]”

This led to a back and forth where she said, “Well, you don’t pronounce ChatGPT as /tɕætgeːpeːteː/, do you? You say /tɕætdʒiːpɪtiː/.” and I said, “Well, you don’t pronounce USA and ADHD as /jʉː.ɛsɛj/ and /ɛjdiː.ɛjtʂdiː/, do you? You say /ʉː.ɛsɑː/ and /ɑːdəhoːdə/.” and she said, “Fair point.” — I could’ve also mentioned how LOL is generally pronounced /lul/ (NAOB also lists /lɔl/ as a variant pronunciation, though), then there’s OK where I’ve heard both /oːkɛj/ and /uːkoː/, and Norwegian dictionaries list several other variant pronunciations ranging from fully native, to fully English complete with a marginal diphthong, to weirdo hybrid forms where you read the O in Norwegian but the K in English.

Really, I just generally have a pet peeve against loaned acronyms/initialisms from English (or loaned anything from English — initialisms just stand out among the loans because they’re ostensibly “supposed to” stand for something meaningful). But I feel my pet peeve particularly keenly when we’re evidently at a point now where 26/29 of the letters of our alphabet can be read in two completely different ways, and if you read an initialism with the wrong reading it will either confuse people or make you look incredibly lame. We did it, Reddit! We’ve created Scandinavian on’yomi and kun’yomi! Ichi-ni-san vs hi-fu-mi, first as tragedy, then as farce!

It of course makes sense when you understand that acronyms/initialisms are just words that can be loaned like any other, up to and including their original pronunciations, and in the abstract this is an interesting phenomenon to observe that isn’t at all inherently wrong or bad… But that doesn’t make it less frustrating in practice as a person who actually uses this language. And it is of course symptomatic of the cultural and economic hegemony of the Anglosphere on the rest of the world, which is something I’m politically opposed to and disturbed by.