Learn English – How to pronounce “scorpion’ll”, “Jim’ll”, etc

The pronunciations of proper names are notoriously unpredictable.

• Old placenames and family names may preserve old spellings set in writing before natural evolution changed the pronunciation—Cholmondely, for instance, which is pronounced chumly.
• Names may undergo all sorts of changes in pronunciation or spelling as people or their names migrate into different speech communities—my own family name, for instance, is spelled with {ey} instead of its original {eu} because a US customs official was confused by the German dialect pronunciation of {eu} as /aɪ/.
• New coinages, particularly of company or product names, may be driven by typographic rather than linguistic considerations—iPod, for instance, or dBase.

So where do you turn to learn the “correct” pronunciation?

1. You could follow the usage of knowledgeable users ... But in your case, unfortunately, these users are not consistent.

2. You could assume that the spelling follows ordinary patterns. This is, to be sure, a very unreliable guide. But a little poking around in rhyming dictionaries turns up the fact that English words in -adle—cradle, ladle—are pronounced with a ‘long a’, /eɪ/, while words with a ‘short a’, /æ/, are spelled with a doubled consonant: addle, saddle.

3. Your best source is “the horse’s mouth” (if you don’t know this expression, which means ‘the authoritative source’, it is explained here). In the end, the pronunciation of a name is determined by the person or entity who bears it. I find nothing explicitly about pronunciation on Gradle's own website, http://www.gradle.org; but I do find mention of a presentation “Rocking the Gradle”, which is very suggestive. We speak of ‘rocking’ a baby’s cradle, and the pun would be much less effective if Gradle and cradle didn’t rhyme.

   I also find that the originator of the system and the organization is named Hans Dockter, who we may presume is the “horse”. Searching on that name on YouTube I find a video interview with Herr Dockter here—and in it he consistently pronounces the name to rhyme with cradle and ladle.

Just as a by-the-way: the word gradle (no capital) is in fact recorded in English, though I have found it in no dictionaries. It appears three times in Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock, where it represents a Dublin working-class elision of the quantifier great deal—“I’m sorry to say there’s a gradle wrong with her.”

As a native speaker, I definitely say the whole consonant cluster as written, even in very fast speech ( i.e. /siksθ/ in IPA).

I tried saying it to myself out loud just now omitting the second s sound, so /sikθ/, and it sounded really strange, like I was trying to make fun of someone with a lisp saying the number six. I would not recommend that shortcut.

On the other hand I tried /sikst/ and found it inoffensive (and hard to notice a difference), so I would recommend that if you find /siksθ/ hard to produce.