Hi Zack, On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 09:33:56AM -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote: > [all attribution deleted because it was so tangled I couldn't make > sense of it] > > >> Rather than "catenation", in my experience "concatenation" is the > >> common term The above was Jonny Grant. > > We began fighting this pomposity before v7. There has only been > > backsliding since. "Catenate" is crisper, means the same thing, The above was Doug McIlroy. > [English pedant mode on] > > "Concatenate" is the correct term; "catenate" means something completely > different, probably "hang between two posts like a chain". You can't > chop prefixes off a Latinate word and have it still mean the same thing. [Latin pedant mode on] contatenate comes from the Latin concatenare. The prefix "con-" means "join", "together", and "catena" means "chain". <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concatenate> catenate comes from the Latin catenare, which AFAICS, seems a synonym. It just drops the redundant "con-" prefix, since "catena" already implies it. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate> English isn't as propense as other Latin languages to have such synonyms where one of them simply adds a redundant prefix or suffix, but Catalan or Spanish for example have several such cases. [Latin pedant mode off] > [English pedant mode off] > > Also, and much more importantly, "concatenate" is used at least 100x > more often than "catenate" in modern English, and that means it's the > word that a randomly selected reader of the manpages is more likely to > know, and, therefore, the word that the manpages should be using. > > https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=concatenate%2Ccatenate&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 Heh, Paul sent a patch for changing it to append, which I applied, since it reads better, even if it removes the mnemonics of cat for catenate. :) Cheers, Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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