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Comment by throw0101b | Hacker News Reader

How about the spelling of the word aluminium?

Fascinating story behind the origins of the naming of that element. Davey, the British scientist who first isolated it, originally suggested it be called alumium. Somewhat ironically, he referred to it as aluminum in his papers, while it was a Swede writing in a French journal that spelled it aluminium.

Can you say that out loud in a sentence please?

Yeah, they at least pronounce aluminium like they spell it. It's not a "Leicester" piss take.

> It's not a "Leicester" piss take.

It's a funny example but to be fair to the British that also happens in other Germanic languages and it also happens a hell of a lot more in Romance languages.

Hopefully Map Men might help with this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4

TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian.

The video helps it makes sense.

We say it how we spell it and so do americans.

Officially we do, but lots of people make it sound more like 'aluminyum", still distinctly British rather than American, but not said in a way that someone unfamiliar with the spelling could guess it was 'ium' at the end.

I've got a fairly plain accent, fairly close to Received Pronunciation or BBC/Oxford English, Americans never have a hard time understanding my pronunciation, and even I sound closer to 'aluminyum' or maybe 'aluminiyum' more than a clean 'aluminium', though it still sounds much closer to correctly pronounced British word than to the American version.

Spell it however you like, just don't make your tyres out of it.

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