On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 04:08:17PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > 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 s/other// > 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/> -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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