7/1/2023 0 Comments Kilometer kilometreGough Whitlam visited the ABC's usage committee in 1990 to argue his kilometre case. Words where a weak initial syllable is followed by a ternary "foot" (which is, incredibly, an academic term for a rhythmic unit) are commonly found in English words, even those that have nothing to do with measurement: medicinal, pathology, apostrophe, America. The stress pattern of kuh-LOM-uh-tuh is hardly an aberration in English, either. You can begin to see how, with all these words occupying the same semantic space, an argument-from-analogy forms. Similar-in-stress, too, are other measurement words: diameter and perimeter spring to mind. One group of words with similar meanings in English ( odometer, thermometer) take antepenultimate stress without controversy. But there is sense to be seen - though it is the sense of linguists, not of physicists. Here's a rough approximation: kuh-LOM-uh-tuh.Ī common theme with opponents of this pronunciation is that it makes a mockery of the natural order, that it makes "less sense". Or, as the ABC pronunciation guide for announcers might have it, KIL-uh-mee-tuh.īut another pronunciation of kilometre exists - and has existed for some time - where the stress is placed on the second syllable. The only logical pronunciation, therefore, combines both prefix and measurement with equal stress. Like all metric words, these masses cry in unison, kilometre is a marriage of a prefix ( kilo) and a unit of measurement ( metre). The first is favoured by logicians, members of the Metric Conversion Board and particularly enthusiastic ABC Language writer-innerers ( Arthur Comer, from Sebastopol, springs to mind). There are two main schools of thought on how to pronounce the thousand-metre word. Australians have been saying the word kilometre far longer than they've been using the measurement, but there's been a decades-long battle over how to say it right.
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