Re: Exceptions to the -tion rule in French

On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Alfred Wallace wrote:

> I can think of two off the top of my head. One is "un cation," which means
> (incredibly) "a cation" (the chemical term).
>
> Also,  the french word for a violent ancient greek sport is "le pankration."
>
> Do these count?  Greek loanwords are good for exceptions in French.
>
Both of these words, IIRC, share the same quality in French as they do in
English:  the -tion ending is not pronounced as [-S@n] (I hope I got that
SAMPA right...)  The chemical term in particular describes a type of ion
(a charged particle), and so is divided along those lines.  I don't know
exactly how "pankration" is pronounced, but a practitioner of the art is
spelled "pankratiast", suggesting that it's a ti-on split.

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