July 25, 2005
Windows 'Vee-sta'?
In online forums and on at least one Microsoft employee blog, there's some suggestion that the company may be pronouncing the new Windows Vista name as "vee-stah" instead of the more traditional "vis-tah." I don't have any official word on this, but going with the more unusual "vee-stah" would seem extremely awkward, and in my conversations with Microsoft people about the new name, everyone has used the normal "vis-tah" pronounciation.
Meanwhile, on a related subject, one of the Inside Microsoft bloggers jokes that the company should start referring to the control-alt-delete combination -- used for terminating frozen programs, among other things -- by the term hasta la vista. Or would that be hasta la vee-sta?
Posted by Todd Bishop at July 25, 2005 02:33 PM
Well, it all depends on your point of view. If you're English, then "vistah" sounds right. If you're one of the majority in the Americas, Latinos (meaning the majority of people in North, Central, and South America), "veestah" is absolutely the traditional pronunciation, not the "short i" Anglo minority pronunciation.
I'm an English American, but it's funny how the media continues to ignore the fast-growing Latino demographic. Wonder what it's like to be a Latino watching Taco del Mar's nonsensical commercials? Their slogan "Release Your Inner Baja" translates literally as "Release Your Inner Lower." WTF?
Good point, John. As my old anthropology professor would say, I was being pretty ethnocentric in this post.
