Talk:Hadron

Pronunciation of "hadron"

The purpose of supplying the suggestion that hadron is pronounced hay-dron is to emphasize the ay sound. Saying the pronunciation is had-ron does not accomplish this goal. According to this web site the long "a" in English Phonetics is represented by "EY". Accordingly, I have modified the pronunciation guide. John R. Brews 12:47, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

According to the following dictionaries, it's pronounced had-ron, not hay-dron or hey-dron.

• Chambers
• Merriam-Webster
• Collins
• Oxford
• American Heritage
• McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technological Terms

That's why I said in the edit summary that, if any evidence can be found for the existence of the pronunciation hay-dron or hey-dron, it should nevertheless be treated as a comparatively rare alternative. Peter Jackson 10:32, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Peter: Sorry, I didn't catch on that you objected to this pronunciation, and thought you objected to how it was portrayed. I'd simply adopted this formulation from a technical source I had read without looking into it further. I thought Leonard Susskind was pretty authoritative. He provides both hay-dronj and had-ron, seemingly suggesting hay-dron is more common by placing it first. It also is his own pronunciation as in this YouTube interview with him. His etymology hadr appears to be his own.

Now that I have got the point, I looked at the available pronunciation schemes on the web. The source Dictionary.com says the correct phonetic version is had·ron /ˈhædrɒn/ Wikidictionary says the IPA is /ˈhæd.ɹɑn/ and also provides a different etymology: hadros, “thick”, which agrees with Merriam Webster. The sounding at howjsay sounds to me like had-ron, but that at Forvo definitely sounds like the shorter ae sound as in head ron, and accords with the IPA designation.

There is the possibility that the dictionary version is not typical of high-energy physicists, but I don't know that. This YouTube discussion and this one use had-ron, and this one and this one use hay-dron. I'd suggest we adopt both à la Susskind but drop his etymology? John R. Brews 16:22, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't think anyone really says head-ron. That is, the only people who do are those who pronounce had and head identically in the first place. So I suggest removing this one.

Of course dictionaries, even the scientific one cited above, don't necessarily know how specialists say it, but then nor do we. Now if we get someone telling us "I go to lots of international conferences where they talk about them all the time and many/most say it thus" then we're getting somewhere. Peter Jackson 09:30, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

On etymology, OED gives the "thick" one, and says the word was first used in Russian, giving first English citation as 1966. These details of origin given tend to support its authority on etymology. Peter Jackson 09:47, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, I have only ever heard the 'had' pronunciation—in reports on BBC, Sky & AlJazeera, none of them American. Ro Thorpe 11:37, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

As I have pointed out with links to YouTube presentations above, both hEY-dron and hah-dron are in common use, and both are suggested by Susskind (an active particle physicist and author) in print, as sourced on the article page. The pronunciations in evidence in the YouTube interviews range from IAP symbol ae, corresponding to "had", to ε as in "leather" & "said", to ei as in "say". So, IMO the best approach is to indicate a range of pronunciations.

I wouldn't care to oppose Susskind in his idea of the origins in hadr="strong", which obviously fits the application, while hadros="thick, bulky" has got nothing to do with it: the dictionaries possibly are ignoring the historical evolution of this word in this context among the scientists, and are imposing their classical educations instead. Of course, the physicists may not know their Greek. So I've ducked the matter by dropping the etymology. John R. Brews 14:34, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

What you have to bear in mind is that sounds in speech aren't absolute. Not only can the same phoneme sound different in the voices of different speakers, but also the same sound can represent different phonemes. We calibrate people's voices without conscious effort. That's why you start a phone conversation by saying ha/e/ullo, so the other person can calibrate your vowel sounds. So what may sound to another person, out of context, like head may in fact be that speaker's normal pronunciation of had. Peter Jackson 09:40, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's normal practice for reference sources to list how everyone's pronunciation sounds to everyone else. For example, to British ears the American pronunciation of bomb sounds like balm, but I don't think dictionaries list that as an alternative pronunciation. Peter Jackson 16:41, 8 September 2011 (UTC)