From: "Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.RETICULATEDOBJECTcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Pronunciation of 'Clostridium difficile'?
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 15:30:13 -0700

"Iannis Kyris" <ikyris_greece@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9ustr7$anerd$1@ID-93377.news.dfncis.de...
> "CBI" <00docATmindspringDOTcom> wrote in message
> news:9ursvl$5ud$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net...
> >
> >
> > US -  dif-i-seal
>
>
> Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer -- the only clue I had from
> Dorland was that the stress falls on the first syllable.
> One more question, if you don't mind:  Is the last syllable of 'quinolone'
> pronounced /-lon/ (as in 'log') or /-loan/?


Klost-RID-ee-uhm  DIF-uh-seal is how most people in the profession say it.
Which is not to say that this is right.  Consider Salmonella, which I've
heard as SAH-MON-el-ah, as though the stuff came from fish.  Instead it was
discovered by a Jewish pathologist, whose last name was Salmon (= Solomon)
pronounced rather like Salmon Rushdie.  So it really is SAL-mon-ella.

The antibiotic class is floor-o-KWIN-uh-loan. Chemists tend to stress a few
more vowels, so you might get KWIN-oh-loan from somebody who's done more
chemistry.

Unstressed vowels in English tend to get pronounced "uh" as in schwa (upside
down e). That started happening before the Norman conquest, and is probably
some disease of the language related to illiteracy, kind of like the loss of
all those English inflected cases. Nothing to be done about it now. It
remains to cause problems for poor spellers such as myself, who have to
decide what to put in rather at random, as in Hebrew.

These days, the only places you really hear the vowels in unstressed English
syllables are in those airport announcements where somebody with a
midwestern accent carefully puts them in for you, to enhance understanding.

"If aye strer-aaan-jer appr-ohh-ch-ez you to cay-ree aye fore-IN
OB-jiikt..."

SBH