The first “e” in methane is pronounced like the “e” in metal in the US but it is pronounced like the “e” in me in the UK.
I asked a friend how this difference in pronunciation came about. She immediately replied that the gas was discovered by an Italian in the year 1776. Coincidentally this was the same year that the US declared its independence from the UK and that the difference in pronunciation was a deliberate act of colonial defiance.
Is there any truth in her statement or was she attempting to be humorous?
Best Answer
Since the actual question here is very easy to answer (the answer is no, there is no truth whatsoever in her statement), I will instead comment a bit on why it really is that methane has two varying pronunciations.
Note that this is not merely a BrE vs. AmE thing—while AmE generally only has the pronunciation with the short e, BrE has both.
Methane is derived from methyl + -ane (used in chemical compounds). Methyl itself is back-formed (originally in Swedish) from methylene. This is ultimately based on the Ancient Greek word μεθύ [meˈθy] ‘sweet wine’ (cognate with English mead and Sanskrit madhú-, all from a root that just means ‘sweet’). Note that Greek ε is a short e.
The back-formation of methyl from methylene was based on the very similar-sounding pair of ethyl and ethylene, which was just a few years old itself when methyl was back-formed. Ethyl was formed in German, from the base of (a)ether + -yl (used in names of chemical groups).
Ether itself is from the Ancient Greek αἰθήρ [aiˈθɛːɾ] ‘upper layer of the stratosphere’, which has a diphthong /ai/. This diphthong regularly (through Latin ae and Old French é) yields a long e in English.
In other words, etymology means that we should have:
Meth- [mɛθ-] with a short e
Eth- [iːθ-] with a long e
But there are so many pairs between the two—(m)ethyl, (m)ethylene, (m)ethane, etc.—so it’s not that strange, really, that people started getting their long and short e’s mixed up a bit, particularly when you remember that the long e in eth- is automatically shortened in words where it loses its stress, like ethereal.
In AmE, this confusion has mostly meant that the long e of eth- has been shortened except in ether itself: ethane, ethanol, ethyl, and ethylene all tend to have a short e, unetymologically. The short e in meth- has been retained.
In BrE, the confusion is more random: eth- tends to have both long and short variants in many derivations, but not all (ethanol, for instance, always has a short e, and ether itself always has its etymological long e); while meth- has taken over the long e in some derivations, but not all (e.g., methane always has a long e, while methanol always has a short e).
Pure transatlantic chaos, in other words.