Re: OT: Units (was Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long])

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:17:44 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 04:32:17PM +1100, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
> > Hectares and decibels are so rarely if ever used without those prefixes
> > that I mostly forget they *are* normal metric prefixes+measurement,
> > seeming more like tons* than kilograms (and in fact, decibel is often
> > pronounced as one inseperable word, /des@b@l/).
>
> That's the usual pronunciation here as well, but I don't think it's
> relevant; "kilometer" gets the same treatment (/k@'lO.m@.tr=/), even
> though we hear "meter" all the time.
I have /"kIl@mi:t@/, but it's true that for both that and kilogram,
1000 of them would sound weird to call megametre and megagram. (It
doesn't help that the SI unit is the kilogram, not the gramme.)

So yes, even though I'm familiar with the morphemes "kilo-" and
"metre", I still consider "kilometre" to be monomorphemic and would be
tempted to call 1000 km a "kilo-km"; similarly, saying that a ton = 1
Mg looks weird.

(Incidentally, a usage I find confusing is the notation "mcg", which
looks like "milli-centigram" to me but is actually "microgram", i.e.
what SI would spell µg.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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