Matters of Pronunciation
Thursday March 20, 2008
I'm doing laundry after a full day of sessions at the GSA section meeting in Las Vegas, so I only have energy right now to talk about trivia:
People differ in their pronunciation of some standard geological terms. Among the major time terms, moving backward in time, we have:
- Holocene: "HOLLAcene" vs "HOElocene"
- Oligocene: "OLLigocene" vs "ohLIGocene"
- Paleocene: "PAILeocene" vs "PAY-LEEocene" (the same with Paleogene)
- Cambrian: "CAMMbrian" vs "CAIMbrian" (the same with Precambrian)
- Ediacaran: "EEdiACKaran" vs "EEdiaCARan"
My preference is listed first, but that isn't to say that I'm right. Probably I'm just American, because I suspect that the second ways are more historically and etymologically accurate. It used to be that you could trust the English to mangle unfamiliar words; now Americans have that privilege of hegemony (heJEMony). I think it began with the kiLOMeter (although many American geologists make a quiet point of saying KILLometer, as they should).
Comments
I’m with ya on all those except I say Paleocene more like your second pronunciation. And instead of HOLLAcene, I say HOLLOcene … tomayto, tomahto …
I also noticed a “session effect” where a specialist community favors one pronunciation. Maybe they all had the same teacher. Or a kind of a nanodialect. I don’t understand “Pay-LEE-ocene,” but I have a pet theory that it acknowledges the late arrival of that time unit, inserted between the Cretaceous (I know, Maastrichtian) and Eocene in the late 1800s. That’s only a couple degrees of separation from today’s old-timers.
One of my peeves is the pronunciation of Iodine..you don’t put “ChlorYne” in your pool, why would you put “IodYne” in your chemical reactions.
I use your second pronunciation for all the Cainozoic Series names. Then, again, I wonder how many geologists/paleontologists pronounce the Welsh Ll-(as in Llandoverian)properly as Thl-.
Well, see, you’re probably from the British Isles, and that’s a foreign language! But you do buttress my point that there is no one right way to say these words.