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Always quick with an illustration

One of our undergraduate researchers was giving a presentation today in which she mentioned a dodecahedron—“You know, like a D20,” she said, as though everyone would know what that was.

Also, she said “dough-DESS-uh-hee-dron,” a soft “c,” when I had always mentally expected “dough-DECK-uh-hee-dron,” a hard “c.” I suppose it makes sense, if a deciliter (a tenth of a liter) is pronounced with the soft “c” and decaliter, ten liters, with the hard “c” is sometimes spelled with a “k”.

Posted by pjm on November 29, 2006 9:45 PM |

Comments

I’m pretty sure I’ve always heard it with a hard c, but maybe that’s a regional thing. Although, it is 2x10, not 2x1/10, so the k sound makes more sense with your explanation.

Posted by: lucy | November 29, 2006 10:58 PM

The hard c is correct, for exactly the reason Lucy gave. But… a d20 is an icosahedron. A dodecahedron is a d12 (10 plus 2, not 10 times 2).

Posted by: Andy B | November 30, 2006 2:49 AM

It’s possible that she said D12 and not D20; I certainly wouldn’t be the one to correct her. (I’m not going to claim to be “bad at math” but compared with most people in my line of academics, I’m math-deficient.)

Posted by: pjm | November 30, 2006 3:23 AM

She pronounced it incorrectly. The “i” after “c” makes the “c”a soft “c”. The “a” after the “c”, makes it a hard “c”. This the same sort of argument around whether a vowel before a double consonant is long or short - or the reverse - whether the vowel before a single consonant before another vowel is long or short. This kind of thing makes me crazy - there are rules and we just need to memorize them! After all there are so many words without rules to pick from, why pick on the words that have them?

Posted by: Julia | December 3, 2006 9:25 AM

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