Re: CHAT Almost well-formed southern ape (wasRe: Teknonyms)

On 11/1/05, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
> It is [Greek] - tho not awful ;)

Fair enough. :)


>My questions:
> >
> > 1. is it well-formed?
>
> If it is spelled _nychthemeron_ it is.

Well, it's not in my dictionary either way (hence my questions; of course,
this is the same dictionary that didn't have "metronym" either). I may have
misremembered the spelling in the Oxford Companion to the Year (the most
reputable source I have which uses the word). There's about a 2:1 Ghit ratio
favoring the "ch" version, but both numbers are under 1,000, so the
difference may be statistically insignificant.


The word is attested in ancient Greek and means 'a period of 24 hours'. It
> occurs also in the Greek NT (2 Corinthians 11:25).

Ah, cool. An actual ancient word rather than a modern coinage.

> 3. what's the plural?
>
> _nychthemera_ (like criterion ~ criteria).

That was my guess, but since I don't actually know any Greek grammar, I
wasn't sure there wasn't some other lookalike declination that did plurals
differently.

Thanks!


--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>