ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION FOR THE METRIC SYSTEM
DOUBTLESS practically all scientific workers favor general use of the decimal or metric system of weights and measures. Obviously there are certain unavoidable difficulties, both psychological and economic, which must be overcome before this end can be attained. It seems inconsistent, then, for users of the system to add unnecessarily, even in small degree, to the popular prejudice against the change.
Just such an unnecessary minor difficulty is produced by a common American practise in the pronunciation of metric names containing the prefix
cent-. As a matter of history, it is true, these names came to us from the French; they could just as well, however, have been taken directly into English from the Latin and Greek. In most respects these words are already, by common consent, fully Anglicized; we never employ the French syllabic stress, nor do we use the French sound of the
r or the
i or the second
e in
centimeter. Why, then, should we ever say "sänt" (sahnt), approximating the sound in
centime, for the straightforward English "sent" [Note: the "e" appears with an accent mark on top of it that looks like a parenthesis with the concave side upward...couldn't find the symbol for that letter in a modern-day ASCII table
] (as in
center) ? Although this hybrid pronunciation is (for example) not recognized by the Funk and Wagnalls "New Standard Dictionary," it is certainly widely prevalent in this country, and it doubtless adds a little to the unthinking popular prejudice against the metric system as a "high-brow" foreign innovation. The same considerations apply to the word
centigrade, which has come into English by the same route.
In various other English words, such as
cental,
centipede, and
centenary,
cent is regularly pronounced as in the case of the name of our monetary unit. The only excuse for a different practise for the metric system is the fact that these words were first used by the French. They are truly international words, however, and as a matter of practical convenience they should be naturalized in each language in which they are used. Any attempt at precise international uniformity for such words is obviously predestined to failure, except as this uniformity comes with the general adoption of an international auxiliary language such as Esperantoand even when this happens the usage of "national" languages will probably remain unchanged.
And while we are about it, in conformity with the definite trend of modern English usage, can we not all agree to drop the "me" from
gram(
me), and to write
meter rather than
metre?
