On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 04:34:13 -0700, Watson A.Name - 'Watt Sun'
put finger to keyboard and composed:

In article ,
mentioned...

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.

I doubt you will find any *international* standard where giga is
pronounced jiga. Unfortunately I can't find any non-US standard on the
Net, so I can't support my claim.

I reckon you guys ought to pronounce *our* system the
way *we* do. :-)

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.

All of these are US standards. You may as well suggest that speakers
of UK English revert to US spelling amendments such as "color" instead
of "colour", for example, or that the British alter their gallon to be
in line with the US measure, or that the world play football the
American way. Having said that, I believe simplicity should be the
primary determinant of language, which means that color makes more
sense than colour, but giga is better than jiga. Hopefully common
usage will eventually eliminate the latter.


- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 's' from my address when replying by email.