There are all kinds of languages that spell meter in all kinds of ways.
Besides, many languages have inclinations meaning that there may be a half a
dozen or more spellings in one and the same language as grammar stipulates.
Speaking of Slovaks they, as with any phonetic language, pronounce the
second -e-. That is why it is there, to include in the word all its sounds.
Then there are languages that do not write vowels at all, like Hebrew, and
no letters at all like Chinese.
In my writings, as Jesse prefers, I use symbols. For numbers as well. I
cannot recall a case of having to spell a unit in decades (outside this
forum and training materials). And most of my writing uses lots of units.
Publishers, however, usually change the symbols to units, unfortunately. But
not necessarily the numbers! Go figure - some arbitrary rule again, probably
based on fear that Americans are too stupid to learn symbols (think of the
people who do not know the Latin alphabet to help their memory with the
association to a sound).
Silly, silly, issue and provincial.
Stan Jakuba
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pierre Abbat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: 08 Oct 09, Thursday 20:35
Subject: [USMA:41835] Re: Spelling metre or meter
On Thursday 09 October 2008 13:04:21 Ziser, Jesse wrote:
Ha! Nice suggestion about dropping the "e" entirely: "metr". Aren't
there
some Eastern European languages that spell it that way?
There are. Polish and Czech both use that spelling, as do Welsh and
Breton.
The slide show about sizes, if I remember right, is in Slovak and uses
that
spelling, but Wiktionary says that Slovak spells it "meter". As the slide
show mixed up some orders of magnitude and called one "fotometr", I
wouldn't
rely on it for spelling.
Pierre
