Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2161-2165 (9-13 April 2012) QC: Back To Earth
Skewbrow:
Ok. Problem solved. :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
DSL:
OK. But Hanners still needs to take naps.
Carl-E:
--- Quote from: dkorduban on 10 Apr 2012, 07:29 ---Gover's "database search"
--- End quote ---
All I can think of is a furry blue monster digging through a chest, looking for something...
Method of Madness:
Maybe she's just not a nap person. And they were probably talking during those 90 minutes intervals.
Akima:
--- Quote from: Near Lurker on 10 Apr 2012, 09:55 ---Actually, he was pronouncing it correctly - it's only when the word "gigabyte" entered common parlance that a mispronunciation stuck, and is now standard.
--- End quote ---
According to Wikipedia, the "jigawatt" pronunciation was only ever standardised in American English:
"In English, the initial g of giga can be pronounced /ɡ/ (a hard g as in giggle), or /dʒ/ (a soft g as in giant, which shares its Greek root).
This latter pronunciation was formalized within the United States in the 1960s and 1980s with the issue by the US National Bureau of Standards of pronunciation guides for the metric prefixes. A prominent example is found in the pronunciation of gigawatts in the 1985 movie Back to the Future.
According to the American writer Kevin Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 109 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German "ɡ" was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain at what point the alternative pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had died out.
In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with /ɡɪ/ (as in gig), 9% with /dʒɪ/ (as in jig), 6% with /ɡaɪ/ (guy), and 1% with /dʒaɪ/ (as in giant)."
As always with English, there is no correct answer...
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version