![]() Gough Whitlam visited the ABC's usage committee in 1990 to argue his kilometre case. Words where a weak initial syllable is followed by a ternary "foot" (which is, incredibly, an academic term for a rhythmic unit) are commonly found in English words, even those that have nothing to do with measurement: medicinal, pathology, apostrophe, America. ![]() The stress pattern of kuh-LOM-uh-tuh is hardly an aberration in English, either. You can begin to see how, with all these words occupying the same semantic space, an argument-from-analogy forms. Similar-in-stress, too, are other measurement words: diameter and perimeter spring to mind. One group of words with similar meanings in English ( odometer, thermometer) take antepenultimate stress without controversy. But there is sense to be seen - though it is the sense of linguists, not of physicists. Here's a rough approximation: kuh-LOM-uh-tuh.Ī common theme with opponents of this pronunciation is that it makes a mockery of the natural order, that it makes "less sense". Or, as the ABC pronunciation guide for announcers might have it, KIL-uh-mee-tuh.īut another pronunciation of kilometre exists - and has existed for some time - where the stress is placed on the second syllable. The only logical pronunciation, therefore, combines both prefix and measurement with equal stress. ![]() Like all metric words, these masses cry in unison, kilometre is a marriage of a prefix ( kilo) and a unit of measurement ( metre). The first is favoured by logicians, members of the Metric Conversion Board and particularly enthusiastic ABC Language writer-innerers ( Arthur Comer, from Sebastopol, springs to mind). There are two main schools of thought on how to pronounce the thousand-metre word. Australians have been saying the word kilometre far longer than they've been using the measurement, but there's been a decades-long battle over how to say it right.
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