--- Erik Haugan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> It's amazing how long this thread has gone before
> anybody looked it up
> in a dictionary.  According to the Webster (look up
> "paleolithic" or
> "Paleo-Indian" at www.webster.com) the first
> syllable is pronounced like
> "pale" or "pal", the latter especially in Brittish.
>
Erik,

Just to clarify, the reason I orignally made the post is
that I had been pronouncing it as "pal," but then looked
it up in Websters and the first pronunciation given there
was as "pale," which got me thinking about it. But being
'merican, I wanted to find out what others said. For the
record, I don't own an Oxford dictionary, which is the
"other" dictionary of the English language I guess. The
"correct" spelling of a synonym for "middle" would be
given as "centre" in Oxford, but "center" in Websters.
It's not a question of which is correct or incorrect, but
rather which is more commonly used.

Jens Wilkinson

And just to stress this again, it's only important to me
because in Japanese, you *have* to transliterate foreign
loan words according to pronunciation. And I'm a
translator, so this is what I have to do.