In article ,
mentioned...
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:21:18 -0700, Watson A.Name - 'Watt Sun'
put finger to keyboard and composed:
In article ,
mentioned...
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 08:50:43 +1000, Franc Zabkar
wrote:
I would think the most sensible pronunciation would be "giga" as this
prefix is derived from the Greek word, "gigas", meaning "giant".
How do the Greeks pronounce "gigas"? The "jig-a" pronounciation
for giga seems to be in more-or-less in keeping with "gigantic".
Are there any hard-"g" English words with the "giant" meaning?
Not that anything is going to change common usage! ;-)
The NIST page doesn't show the pronunciation. Here's the URL:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
But see he http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?giga-
and he
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionar...onary&va=giga-
Generally speaking, the first listing in the dictionary is the
preferred pronunciation.
My Concise Oxford dictionary lists both pronunciations for "giga" as
being acceptable, although here in Australia absolutely nobody uses
the "jiga" form. My dictionary also lists both pronunciations for
kilometre, although the ki-lometter version is "disputed", for obvious
reasons.
And the following URL talks ad nauseum about the pronunciation, but
all that is moot since the reference publications from NBS (now NIST)
(which are presumably derived from the SI international stds), and
such pubs as the U.S. Navy and ASME give the prounciation as jiga.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2001-12/msg0037637.html
I'm not sure that one could consider any US based metric reference to
be authoritative.
As I said, it is derived from the international standards.
Apart from Liberia and Myanmar (Burma), the USA is
the only other country that retains the old Imperial system of weights
and measures.
The metric system is the U.S. standard as it is in the rest of the
world, even tho the 'U.S.' system is still in common use along side of
it. See URL http://ts.nist.gov/ts/htdocs/230/235/h4402/appenc.pdf
I reckon you guys ought to pronounce *our* system the
way *we* do. :-)
"Our" system *is* the international system. It's called SI.
See URL
http://www.bipm.fr/pdf/si-brochure.pdf Page 103 gives the SI
prefixes, and there is no pronunciation shown. This *is* the official
standard. As shown on a previous page, the U.S. is a member of the
SI, and uses SI as the official standard.
The old NBS (now NIST) publications, the ASME (American Society of
Mechanical Eng'rs), the U.S. Navy, and other publications show the
pronunciation as jiga. I have those pubs and would be glad to show
the picture of the actual page that shows the pronunciation.
Does your country have a standards body? Does it have a publication?
If not, does it use the SI publication (URL above) as the standard?
If so, then your system doesn't *have* any pronunciation.
You have to realize that the language of some countries doesn't even
have some sounds that we have, and English speaking countries don't
have some sounds used in the language of other countries. And this
also doesn't take into consideration that the language of other
countries might be written in characters that bear no relation to the
'Roman' characters we use. So it would be left to the individual
countries to translate the reference materials into their own
language.
Bob Masta
tech(AT)daqarta(DOT)com
- Franc Zabkar
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