On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Mark A Mandel wrote: >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. > Well, I've been thinking about this, and I *think* I have an alternate suggestion (and it's a pity that I can't make it directly to Poul anymore). Looking at the OED for "periodic", I see that it is from the Greek for (peri) around + (odos) way. "Way" has a good Germanic heritage, but that leaves us with the problematic "around" (OED says "rare before 1600"). Now, while the Old English for the concept of "round" may be lost to us, I would suggest that an alternate might be "wheel". Wheels are necessarily round; more to the point, "wheel" would be used in other places for "cycle", and similar words. The original usage of "period" was only applied to time; the table of elements could just as easily be called "cyclic" as "periodic". So therefore, the concept of "periodic" in chemistry might be expressed by "wheelwayish". With a little more effort, I might be able to come up with some other possibilities.