StrangerCoug wrote:
Hmm. Apparently, <solenoid> is /ˈsoʊ.lə.nɔɪd/, not /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/.
Is /ˈsɔl.ə.nɔɪd/ the pronunciation you would expect based on some spelling pattern, or do you not know why you expected it? I forget, what type of accent do you have and which vowel does /ɔ/ mean to you (I'd guess THOUGHT, but I know some people like Australians sometimes use to transcribe the vowel of LOT)?
The OED says "Brit. /ˈsəʊlənɔɪd/, /ˈsɒlənɔɪd/, U.S. /ˈsɑləˌnɔɪd/".
Having "o" represent the THOUGHT vowel is relatively rare, but in American English at least "o" is fairly commonly CLOTH (which is merged with historical THOUGHT as /ɔ/). It seems fairly common for "o" before /l/ to be realized as CLOTH /ɔ/ when the l is in a syllable coda (as in "golf", "solve" or "alcohol") but I can't currently remember hearing of an American accent where historic "short o" is /ɔ/ before /l/ in all contexts, but an /ɑ/ vs. /ɔ/ distinction is still maintained in other contexts. (I know that CLOTH can sometimes show up before intervocalic /l/ due to analogy/derivation/inflection, as in
alcoholic <
alcohol or
aerosoling <
aerosol, but that wouldn't be a possible explanation in
solenoid, unless it was influenced by association with the word
sol or
Sol.)
A pronunciation with "short o" doesn't seem particularly objectionable to me, although it does seem that the pronunciation with "long o" is significantly more common and also not objectionable.
- It is derived from Greek σωλήν with long o, but it isn't usually regular for Greek/Latin vowel length to affect English pronunciations.
- Also, the word seems to be partly derived from French solénoïde, which I wouldn't expect to have a long vowel in the first syllable (I'm not certain because I haven't bothered to check, but many accents of French don't have vowel length at all and in the ones that do, a plain letter "o" in this position wouldn't usually correspond to a long vowel in pronunciation).
- A vowel in a stressed syllable that is followed by an unstressed syllable and then a third syllable tends to be pronounced short (the so-called "trisyllabic laxing" rule, although it's apparently unclear whether there was ever a real synchronic process of shortening/laxing vowels in these contexts), and the first vowel of "solenoid" meets these criteria in modern English. Even though -oid is a weird suffix that ought to be two syllables if it were pronounced regularly, that doesn't seem like it would affect this.
- The evidence of other similarly-formed words seems to be mixed, and therefore inconclusive: sesamoid < Gr. σησαμοειδής (with a long e) is always pronounced with a short vowel, gyn(a)ecoid is pronounced both ways, and can additionally have stress on the "(a)e" because it is derived from an original diphthong; flavonoid is pronounced both ways, despite the first syllable being ultimately derived from Latin flāvus with a long vowel (although the long pronunciation does seem to be considerably more common); hyracoid seems to always be pronounced with a long vowel, by influence from the noun hyrax, even though the "y" of the root seems to have been originally short in Greek. The OED does have an entry for solen as a word in English but it doesn't seem to have ever been very common, or the direct source of the word solenoid, so it doesn't seem to me that there is any particularly strong pressure to pronounce these words with the same vowel sound, as there is for hyrax and hyracoid.
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