[USMA:33988] Re: Spelling of metre

[Pierre Abbat]

Pat Naughtin wrote:
I don't know the proportions, but I suspect that about 80 per cent of 
the world population uses 'metre' another 15 per cent uses meter, and 
the other 5 per cent are still using old pre-metric measures and don't 
understand your question or even know what either of us is talking about.

Of the top six languages, English uses two spellings, Chinese uses an 
ideogram, Spanish writes "metro", I don't see a Hindi article on 
Wikipedia, Russian writes "метр", and Arabic writes "متر".

Portuguese, Basque, Galician, and Esperanto call it "metro" like 
Spanish, but Catalan joins French in saying "metre", but without the 
accent. The Serbo-Croatian word is "metar". Slovak and Slovene both say 
"meter", but Czech and Polish join Ukrainian and Russian in dropping the 
second 'e'. Icelandic and Finnish change the final vowel to 'i', while 
Romanian says "metru". And Vietnamese shortens it to "mét".

phma