451 CAOS Theory 
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That’s MeSQL, by the way
Matthew Aslett, April 25, 2008 @ 8:50 am ETI really thought I was done writing about MySQL for a while, but I attended a Sun/MySQL event in London today and have some shocking news to impart. It seems we’ve got MySQL all wrong.
At the event, MySQL co-founder David Axmark talked through some of the history of the MySQL project and company, confirming what has previously been reported about the origins of the database’s name.
It was, he confirmed, named after co-founder Monty Widenius’s daughter, My. The big news, for the English speaking audience at least, is that the Scandinavian name My is pronounced “Me”. So the correct pronunciation of the company name should technically not be “My-S-Q-L”, or even “MySequel”, but “Me-S-Q-L”.
Congratulations go to Sun’s UK product and marketing manager, Chris Atkins, who managed to stick to the “correct” pronunciation throughout the next presentation, but I’m not sure I can see it catching on. After all, it’s only recently that people stopped referring to the “Lienux” operating system.
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I have to correct you here!
‘my’ in Scandianvian langages is neither pronounced like English ‘my’ nor ‘me’.
The phonem ‘y’ in those languages has no parallel in English actually! If you know the Swiss/German word ‘müsli’ the sound of ‘ü’ here is much similar to a Scandinavian ‘y’.
Peter
(Danish)
.. and btw: before MySQL there was msql (could we guess that ‘m’ means ‘Michael’/'Monty’ ?). And what do you think Monty’s new ‘Maria’ Engine is named after ??
One day too I will teach you about PPPPL (Peter’s Private Personal Programming language)! One more example of breaking technology named after a person ….
Thanks for the update. Maybe David was just simplifying for the English speakers. In the circumstances, we should probably stick to MySQL.
Before we all go on believing that everything read online is true… mSQL was not written by Monty at all. It was written by David Hughes of Hughes Technologies, based on the Gold Coast in Australia. World’s apart, except that both David (aka Bambi) and Michael (Monty) are nice people, and Monty based his C API on that of mSQL to gain easy access to the already existing tools and other stuff.