You can’t infer the pronunciation of “tuple” from words ending -tuple.

That said, there is a strong minority that says “toople”, so it is often listed as an acceptable alternative pronunciation.

Yes, some of those ‘tuple words could be pronounced with ‘tuhple and indeed the dictionary sometimes gives this as a secondary pronunciation. If you change the emphasis you kinda have to change the way you say the suffix.

Anyway that aside, tuple (tyoople) on its own sounds more correct to me, especially when you consider other words like ‘duple’ (and any other similarly constructed word in English). I can’t think of any example words where the vowel is short.. battle, cattle, cuttle all have double-t to make the vowel short again (after the ‘e’ made it long).

To say “tuhple” I have to spell it ‘tupple’. So to me, ‘tuple’ simply can never be ‘tupple’.

But, so long as we don’t all confuse a tuple with a list, I guess we’re all good

-c

So your *tuple examples are at least uncertain.

I think your general argument eg supple is very appealing but not definitive. I suspect the reason it’s n-tuple and not n-toople is that the initial “n” makes the production of an oo sound more difficult.

Miriam Webster gives “tuh”-ple as an acceptable pronunciation of quintuple (and sextuple).
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple

Maybe it’s a US thing?

Brendan

Words like ‘octuple’ are pronounced like ‘octopus’ with an emphasis on the ‘o’, and it should have a long vowel (see http://dictionary.com for an example).

Likewise, sextuple and septuple should have an emphasis on the ‘se’ not on the uple.

If you put an emphasis on the ‘uple’ it will sound wrong and you will want to say ‘upple’.

All these words should be pronounced with a long sounding ‘u’.

But even if you don’t agree, words of the same form as tuple, like duple, table, sable, etc are all pronounced with a long vowel. Why would tuple be the odd one out?

The Shorter OED (2nd ed) gives the following pronunciation for the tup in quintuple:
tj[upsidedown omega]p

Where:

j is y in yes

upside down omega is supposedly oo in good or u in put or ou in should and is described as a short vowel sound (at pg xii).

Exactly what this pronunciation sounds like I am not able to decipher.

The Shorter OED also gives the following as acceptable for the “tup” in sextuple:
‘s[backwards epsilon]kstj[upsidedown omega]p([upside down e])l and
s[backwards epsilon]ks’tju:p([upside down e])l

Where
u is oo in too or ue in glue

colon indicates length

‘ is a primary stress mark

upside down e is a in ago or er in gather or ah in cheetah

It gives the same alternative pronunciations for septuple and octuple. It doesn’t have nonuple. It gives similar alternatives for quadruple (with r instead of t though)

Frankly, I have never pronounced quintuple or sextuple with a y sound in it. Any my pronunciation of quintuple is closer to n-tuple than n-toople. I certainly don’t have any ah-as-in-cheetah before the l.

It may be that the pronunciation of these words is not as settled as you’re assuming.

Brendan

Dang, maybe that’s why I can’t get the hang of databases.

–
MC