| 词组 | kilometer |
| 释义 | kilometer In North America, kilometer is most often pronounced with the principal stress on the second syllable: Xka-'läm-at-aA. This pronunciation has drawn heated objections from some quarters. Since centimeter, millimeter, etc., are pronounced with principal stress on the first syllable, it stands to reason that kilometer should be too. For just one word of the series to receive second-syllable stress seems to violate the very spirit of uniformity which the metric system represents. The proposal to use only first-syllable stress in these words is not a lost cause. First, \\\\'kil-ǝ-,mēt-ǝr\\\\ is a fairly close runner-up already, especially among scientists. Second, those who have been saying \\\\kǝ-'läm-ǝt-ǝ\\\\ and are made aware of the issues are sometimes contrite. The great American chemist Harold C. Urey wrote the following letter to the journal Science in 1972: • Some years ago, I noticed that a European friend pronounced the word for a thousand meters, ki'lome'ter, whereas I was pronouncing it kMom'e.ter'. I consulted my dictionary, Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Mass., ed. 2, 1950). It said that this word should be pronounced kil'o.me'ter, but sometimes pronounced ki-lom'e-ter' "by false analogy with" ba-rom'e-ter. Following this, I tried to correct my pronunciation of the word and succeeded in doing so. Because many scientists are still using the second (erroneous) pronunciation, I again consulted a dictionary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) gives both pronunciations as acceptable. This is because we scientists have used the wrong pronunciation for many years, and, of course, the dictionary tries to keep up with us, or perhaps better to keep down with us. Should we then use the following pronunciations—mil-lim'e-ter, cen-time-ter, ki-log-ram, ki-lov'olt, and so forth? May I appeal to all my friends (if I have any friends after complaining about such details) to use the same pronunciations that are used in European countries. Unfortunately the matter is not quite so simple. Interestingly enough, second-syllable stress was, in fact, the only option shown for millimeter and centimeter in Noah Webster's original 1828 dictionary: in that book, kilometer rhymed with barometer, and centimeter rhymed with perimeter. The analogy between these sets of words is false in the sense that the semantic relations between prefix and suffix are different in the two cases, but in both cases the same Greek word meaning "measure" is at the root of -meter. Nor will European example help us much. The \\\\kǝ-'läm-ǝt-ǝ\\\\ variant is quite widespread in the British Isles as well—we have heard it for instance from an editor of Nature (English counterpart of the American periodical Science), along with such characteristically British pronunciations as \\\\kǝn-'träv-ǝr-sē\\\\ for controversy and \\\\kǝ-'räl-ǝ-rē\\\\ for corollary. The stress pattern in non-English-speaking European countries is not especially relevant to questions of English pronunciation, but for what it may be worth, the local equivalent of kilometer is pronounced with second-syllable stress in Spanish and Italian, and with third-syllable stress in German, French, and Russian. It might seem desirable to many to have a standard pronunciation for kilometer, but in the present case there is an inherent dilemma which cannot be dismissed out of hand. Normally a pronunciation wins out over its rivals not by reason of etymology or logical niceties but because of the bandwagon effect. In the case of kilometer, however, there is at present no bandwagon. The currently most widespread American pronunciation, \\\\kǝ-'läm-ǝt-ǝ\\\\, faces a plausible challenge from \\\\kil-ǝ-mēt-ǝr\\\\, and it is anyone's bet what the outcome will be. It is entirely conceivable that there will be no outcome, in the sense that one variant will drive out the other. We may be wise to remember that it is really not all that unusual for words that might well be pronounced analogously to differ, even in the vocabulary of science. For instance, two closely related areas of mathematics are homology theory and homotopy theory, often pronounced in the same breath. But the former is pronounced \\\\hō-'mäl-ǝ-jē\\\\, the latter \\\\'hō-mǝ-,täp-ē\\\\. And there is another odd-man-out among the -meter words of the metric system: centimeter is often given a quasi-French pronunciation \\\\'sänt-ǝ-mēt-ǝ\\\\, especially by doctors and nurses (see also hyperforeignisms). |
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