Metric system, spoken, has grave drawbacks

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 13

Metric system, spoken, has grave drawbacks

(By

ROBIN MITCHELL)

Written, the metric system makes for speed and accuracy; spoken, it has grave drawbacks; yet the problems of speaking in metric units have received scant attention.

There are two basic difficulties with the metric International System (5.1.) which New Zealand is adopting: first, the name of almost every metric unit, apart from basic units, is a polysyllable; and second, the metric prefixes make the polysyllables so similar that abbreviation is difficult.

. The effects of the polysyllable invasion are seen at their worst in perhaps the most commonly-used of all units—those of length, area, and volume. In place of the concise inch, foot, yard, chain,furlong, mile we have millimetre, centimetre, metre, kilometre, and the rest of their caterpillar clan: an average length of 1.2 syllables traded for an average of 3.5 or more. Perch, acre, and square ■mile make way for square metre, hectare, and square kilometre: 1.7 syllables traded for 3.3, or more if the hectare is ousted as proposed. Pint, quart, and gallon give way to millilitre and litre: 1.3 syllables swapped for three, or for six if the purists have their way and millilitre and litre are dropped for the cubic centimetre and cubic decimetre. Those last sentences were rambling, but who can talk about cubic decimetres and the like and not be verbose? Limits of weight The S I. units of mass (or weight, in common parlance), gram, kilogram, and tonne, are not quite as fearsome as the length units; but even so the most common British unit, the pound, is replaced by the three-syllable kilogram, while the gram is too snail for many uses and the tonne is accepted only on sufferance. The generality of people WiH no doubt get used to polysyllables in measurement as they have in other ideas taken over from science into every-day life; but should Sneed to? And anyway, the names last? I have a very strong suspicion that the names of the British units owe their brevity to their length of history: for language is a tool to be sharpened, not an

omamant to be decorated, and the every-day speakers of English realise this even if some grammarians don’t;, so that the more ancient a commonly-used tehn is, the more likely it is to have been worked over and abbreviated. As evidence tiie names of the more recent of the British units, such as degree Fahrenheit, British Thermal Unit, and horse-power, are at least equally as complicated as those of the corresponding metric units. Abbreviations One may expect, then, that the language will grind down and round off the metric names as water smooths the pebbles in a stream: already there is evidence of this from the French in the abbreviation of kilogram to kilo and centime to cent, and in our own language in the streamlining of millilitre to mil. But there the second difficulty of the system comes into play: the metric prefixes, being übiquitous, sabotage most abbreviation attempts. For, if the kilogram is a kilo, the kilometre can’t be; if the centime is a cent, the centimetre can’t be; and mil for millilitre forestalls mil for millimetre, which will be much the more common unit.

The French have got over some of their difficulties by resurrecting old units—hence the tonne instead of the more logical megagram, the sou for half a centime, and the livre (pound) for half a kilogram. We have successfully resisted calling cents pennies, mainly I suspect because cent is shorter: but we are on the way to accepting kilo; we have officially accepted tonne, though With the unlikely pronunciation to rhyme with don; and shall we again follow the French in their helplessness in face of such everyday polymonstrosities as millimetre, centimetre, and kilometre? Likely routes The situation is not hopeless. Here are three possible routes to improvement, all moreover usable for writing as well as speed. First there is the point that in French such words as metre and litre are effectively of one syllable: it is only when we take them into English that the -re acquires a syllable of its own. From a linguistic view, therefore, we should be fully justified in leaving out the r-sound in these words and their compounds and using mete and , lite (or better, lete). There is also open to us the more radical line of scrapping the metric prefixes while retaining the system of tens. We already have one measurement table built

on this principle: the multiples of the year—lo years one decade, 10 decades one century, 10 centuries one millenium. The main difficulties would be in thinking up enough suitable names and in getting people to remember them. Last, and probably more acceptable to the standards authorities, we could take the metric abbreviations such as mm (millimetre), cm (centimetre), dm (decimetre), km (kilometre) and so-forth and insert a vowel for pronunciation. Avoiding the a’s, o’s, and u’s (mam, mom, and mum, dam and dum, and the confusing cam and kam, com.and kom, cum and kum), we get mim, cim, dim and kim or mem, cem, dem and kem; kilograms (kg) give kigs

or kegs; millilitres lead to mels or, satisfactorily, mils; other units yield such abbreviations as kevs or kivs for kilovolts and kews for kilowatts. In most cases the i’s seem to have it, but e’s are necessary for some—dem and kew, at any rate. Names beginning with mega- (1,000,000), micro(millionth) and the rare deca. (10) would have to be used in full to avoid confusion with milli- and deci-. What will probably happen, of course, is that there will be no attempt at a rational system of abbreviations and that, instead, innumerable generations of schoolteachers and grammarians will fight determined but losing battles against this or that uncoordinated attack on some one or other of the polysyllables, until the English speakers of a few thousand years’ time will once again have a highly illogical but easily spoken system of units which the scientists of the day will once again find it necessary to reshape.

Mr Mitchell teaches physics, mathematics and communication English at the Christchurch Technical Institute.