On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: #As a particle physicist, you might get a chuckle out of Anderson's #short work "Uncleftish Beholding". It's a bit of a linguistic #exercise rather than an actual story; the entire text is basic science #written in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic words and phrases where we would #use terms from Latin or Greek derived roots. As you might guess, an #"uncleft" is an "atom", and it goes on from there. I LOVE that one! (I'm a linguist...). Actually, there is *one* Romance-derived word in the whole text. The Periodic Table is "the Roundaround Board of the Firststuffs". "Round" is from Latin by way of French. The native English root for that concept, "ym" (compare modern German "um"), was completely replaced; it has left no reflexes -- uh, no traces -- in modern English that I'm aware of, and Anderson simply had to use the import to express the meaning. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel