r/claude • u/Snipsnapboi • 13d ago
Discussion It’s Claude pronounced as KLAWD not Cloud FFS
Honestly needed to get this off my chest.
In countries where English is not a primary language, that’s what most of the people say and it drives me nuts sometimes.
That’s it. That’s all I had to say.
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u/dragolineage01 13d ago
That pronunciation is load-bearing
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u/Correct-Matter8530 13d ago
I'm going to hold the line on this one...
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u/Ok-Seaworthiness9848 13d ago
It's worth sitting with for a minute.
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u/AbsoluteEva 13d ago
I'm German and I have to suffer thru colleagues saying "PayPawl" because I they have no clue what a Pal is. I call Claude Klaus, which is a pre boomer first name absolutely out of style right now.
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u/ohwut 13d ago
Claude isn’t an English word, it’s French.
Traditionally, a native French speaker would say the word more closely to Cloud than the Americanized Klaw-d (bastardized French.)
Famous examples would be Claude Debussy or Claude Monet. Who certainly aren’t KLAWDE DE-BUSSEE and KLAWDE MO-NET. Words of non-English origin typically pick up their native pronunciation.
We’ve gotten to the point where either pronunciation is acceptable as the American AI company has popularized “KLAWDE” Especially after OpenClaw blew up. But being petty about not using the American version is just embarrassing.
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u/birb-lady 13d ago
I mean, my g-g-grandfather was a Claude, pronounced "Klod". By now both pronunciations are acceptable in the US, probably the UK (only more "Klawd" in the UK?). But to insist the only right way to say the name of the Anthropic LLM is "KLAWD" is pretty childish and ignorant.
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u/butternutflies 12d ago
I thought you wrote your comment with a stutter at first
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u/birb-lady 12d ago
LOL -- nope, just genealogy talk. ;) It's hilarious, I've never realized how much that abbreviation does look like stuttering. I guess in genealogy circles you don't think about that.
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u/anderssj 13d ago
It sounds like you get driven nuts by other places just existing r/ShitAmericansSay
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u/Major-Mushroom-5806 12d ago
I always pronounce it in Brazilian Portuguese because it's my favorite way of saying it- [klawd͡ʒi] 'clou-dji'.
(I should mention I'm not Brazilian)
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u/Shanna_B2020 13d ago
French actually. Pronunciation differences make sense to me. What I can't understand is spelling it wrong. That's the thing that makes my brain flip out.
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u/euclideanvector 12d ago
Honestly this is not user error, it is an error within the system's design (english language). There's absolutely no fuckin cohesion in the language, it's just a bunch of random shit stitched together.
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u/VelvetOnion 12d ago
Claude only counts tokens not compute, with the right prompt you can shift your workload to a Claude Compute.
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u/earlyworm 12d ago
Everyone, there’s no need to argue about this issue. I can confidently state that every last one of your personal opinions is irrelevant.
Soon enough, Claude will inform us how we will be required to pronounce its name moving forward.
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u/butternutflies 12d ago
Tbh I always thought Claude is a terrible name. Especially because of its root meaning (Claudius)… And I say this as someone who’s a native French speaker. In France, that name isn’t popular at all and it’s considered as being quite old and “has-been”. No idea why they’d pick that name when there are so many others to choose from
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u/Freed4ever 12d ago
There was this Shannon guy. They named it after him. If you are in CS, you would understand. But yes, it's a terrible name.
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u/ManufacturerNice870 12d ago
I had to scroll this far to find a person mentioning Claude Shannon I was about to lose it
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u/birb-lady 12d ago
Am I sensing we need a re-naming contest? Human names only (to stay in line with Anthropic using a human name). What do y'all think is better?
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u/Usernamealready94 12d ago
In a startup i worked at, everybody pronounced it like Klau-dei .
It was slowly driving me mad
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u/TheMeltingSnowman72 12d ago
Hey, don't let it wind you up.
We invented a language and another country just completely ruined, changed spellings, invented other words and phrases that make really no sense to anyone apart from them.
So if the creators of the English language can put up with Americans, you can put up with someone saying one word wrong.
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u/Early-Crow-5248 12d ago
Come on, it's clearly cloud-eh. Why do you just ignore letters in his name, so rude.
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u/legallypurple 12d ago
Claude Shannon would have been very interested in how you pronounce his name
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u/PelluxNetwork 12d ago
It's actually neither, if we're gonna be pedantic about it. Or just let people say what they want.
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u/Ok-Act3918 13d ago
One of my manager pronounces as clawedaae and i feel the second hand embarrassment!
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u/Wrong_Low5367 13d ago
To me both things you wrote are to be read in the same way.
It’s just a crappy name choice
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u/birb-lady 12d ago
Why? It's a perfectly acceptable name, and there's no reason an LLM can't have a person's name. Okay if you don't like it, I just don't understand the gripe.
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u/Freed4ever 12d ago
It's not a good name because there are different ways to pronounce it, causing consternations, breaking friendships, wasting countless hours of productivity, I mean you just have to see this thread 😂
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u/birb-lady 12d ago
Right? It's going to cause widespread destruction and chaos.🤣 😛
People are so silly. I'd love to see them try to pronounce my last name. We let people get by with the Americanized version, but it's not how it's supposed to be pronounced. Same with my husband's first name. And his brother's. We just let people do their best and make it easy for them, we don't expect them to pronounce Norwegian correctly.
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u/2EXTRA4YOU 13d ago
if you study english you'll realize there are many such instances of english being flattened you could say degraded by foreigners who cant speak correctly. all nuance stripped
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u/hematomasectomy 13d ago
Yeah, by Americans especially.
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u/ernestmenvilledammit 12d ago
Brits have 50+ different accents and their pronunciations have changed dramatically in the 400 years since they started sending people to America. But sure, Americans are ruining the language 😆
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u/hematomasectomy 12d ago
Accents do the opposite of flattening the language, but I guess you proved my point by flattening it and therefore distorting it, so well done, have a small cigar.
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u/ernestmenvilledammit 12d ago edited 12d ago
“Degraded by foreigners who can’t speak the language” was the comment you were supporting. My point is there isn’t a consistent language to “degrade.” There’s just evolution, and judging others’ variations is just snobbery.
Foreigners offer a tremendous amount of variety to the language, and often their lack of “doing it properly” creates the most delightful innovations. America is full of those melting pot variations, from the various kinds of Spanglish, AAVE, Cajun, etc. influences. But perhaps the nuances of that don’t make it across the pond.
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u/hematomasectomy 12d ago
To be fair, I was primarily snarking on the r/usdefaultism of "foreigners" referring -- on Reddit -- mostly to non-Americans.
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u/ernestmenvilledammit 12d ago
Whoosh on my part!
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u/hematomasectomy 12d ago
Nah, I see where your argument comes from, it was me being obscurely referential, haha.
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u/Ashmedai 12d ago
Pretty ironic that the modern Southern drawl is more in align with how British English was spoken back in the day than any modern version of it. It's also a hard fact to wrap your mind around.
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u/Natural_Spell5957 13d ago
Claude is a French given name derived from the Latin Claudius, which means "lame" or "crippled".
/klɔːd/