Pat (C & H), (01)
PC>> I had occasion, years back when I was doing DNA research, to
>> coin a term "isagelous" to refer to abstract informational
>> objects that have the same information content, but in different
>> physical or syntactic form. It is from Greek, "iso" meaning
>> "same" and "agelos" meaning "information". (02)
PH> Useful word, to be sure.... is it pronounced i-SA-gelous or
> isa-GEL-ous? (03)
The etymology is interesting: (04)
1. The Persians had a word 'aggaros', which meant a mounted
courier who distributed dispatches for the Persian empire. (05)
2. The Greeks borrowed the word 'aggaros' with the same
meaning, from which they made many derivatives. (06)
3. In various Greek dialects, the A became E and the R
became L. That produced the variant 'aggelos' for
messenger and 'aggelia' for 'message' or 'news'. (07)
4. By classical times, the GG combination continued to be
spelled GG, but the first G was nasalized. So the
Latin transliterations were 'angelus' and 'angelia'. (08)
In any case, it's necessary to keep both Gs or to make
the first one N, because the Greek 'agele' means 'herd'.
Therefore, 'isagelous' would mean 'from the same herd'. (09)
There is also a problem with the ending '-ous', which
is from Latin. The Greek adjectival form would end
in '-ikos', which becomes the English '-ic'. (010)
Therefore, the correct term would be 'isaggelic'. The
form 'isangelic' would also be permissible, but it might
cause confusion with the word 'angelic', which is used
for a more specialized kind of messenger. (011)
John (012)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (013)
|