h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is always difficult to write a universal article about pronunciation, because it changes from country to country. Where I come from, Ireland, the pronuncation of "compact" meaning small is always stressed on the first syllable. So Compact Disc and Compact Computer are both compact. I suspect it is the same in Great Britain.

Compact is only stressed on the second syllable when it is being used as a verb: "I compact the rubbish before tying up the bin bag".

And by the way, it's Compact Disc, not Compact Disk. The name was created by Philips and Sony when they invented it, and that's what they called it.

The compact(noun/adjective) vs. compact (verb) pronunciation difference is, in fact, reflected in several words in English, such as:

'export and 'import (nouns) vs. ex'port and im'port (verbs).

We can see this in compound words as well:

'blue 'bottle (both words (adj+noun) stressed) = a blue coloured bottle

'bluebottle (compound word (noun) where the first syllable receives primary stress) = a type of insect.

(The symbol ' means stress here).

Am I being too much the purist in rejecting the term 'floppy disk' to describe the disk that you put into your computer's A drive? Is it archaeological and pedantic to prefer 'diskette' on the grounds that the old 5 and one quarter inches flexible friend of yesteryear is different from the robust little crowd-pleaser of 3 and one half inches we have all come to know and love?

3.5 inch diskettes are floppy if you take them apart. The disc inside is actually very floppy. But you are right, the whole thing is not as floppy as a 5.25" or an 8" floppy.

You may well be being pedantic, but certainly not archaelogical!

Unless of course you actually dug up one of those archaic floppy disks while looking for remains of ancient civilisations in your back garden.

The word 'discography', meaning the total list of all singles and albums released by an artist, seems to always be spelt with a 'c', even by Americans.

So there.

Gif

There are a large number of two-syllable words in English which have different pronunciations according to what word class they are. Generally, nouns and adjectives are stressed on the first, and verbs stress the last syllable, as in 'export vs ex'port above. Adjectives tend to vary a bit more though, and com'pact is an example of this.

Eeyore mentioned the pronunciation of compact disc, which is technically [,compact 'disc] (There are three grades of stress in English - primary, secondary, and unstressed. The first two are marked here by ' and , respectively.)

The stress on compact moves due to something with the (for linguistics) unusually sensible and unpretentious name of stress shift. Two consecutive syllables can't be stressed, so the stress in 'compact' moves to the first syllable, and is weaker than the stress in 'disc'. I hope I'm making sense here. It would help if I could get the footnote thing to work .

Another example: 'thirteen' is normally stressed thir'teen. Put 'men' on the end and it becomes ,thirteen 'men - Try it

There we are - remarkable isn't it

747

Care for a weed?

Believe it or not, my last posting was moderated because it was taken to refer to "promoting an illegal activity". I actually meant "Care for a tumbleweed"!