On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 21:19:11 -0700, Watson A.Name - 'Watt Sun'
put finger to keyboard and composed:

In article ,
mentioned...
"Costas Vlachos" wrote in message
...
Do people use the "jig-a" way? Never heard of it.

No? Jigawatts? ;-)

Jigahurts was the only way I heard Gigahertz pronounced back in the
'60s when I woekrd for a radio eng'g lab. That's not long after the
time when the prefizxes were adopted. Before that, it used to be
micromicrofarads instead of picofarads.

Somehow betwen then and now it got perverted to today's pronunciation.

I think the perversion was in the original pronunciation. English
already has thousands of inconsistencies and irregularities, primarily
as a result of Norman influence (IMO), so it makes no sense to
intentionally create new words with non-phonetic pronunciations and/or
spellings.

Tim

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