Re: Intelligentsia? Re: Adopting a plural

RB> I was reporting the information given in my dictionary, as I said. I quote
RB> from  Chambers English Dictionary (1988 reprint):
RB> "[Russ. -- L. _intelligentia_]"

AS> Ah, my apologies. You have a cool dictionary then. Because according
AS> to my source (Rossiyskiy entsiklopedicheskiy slovar, 2000) the word
AS> intelligentsiya comes from Latin _intelligens_, not intelligentia.
AS> That was the point of my objection.

Semantically, "intelligens" (the present participle of "intellego", and
therefore a noun meaning "knowing", "perceiving", etc.) and
"intellegentia" (my L. dictionary spells that with an E in the middle
rather than an I) "capacity for knowledge" seem pretty close, and
phonetically I can see the borrowing into Russian going the way it did
from either source.

To my inexpert brain, the word "intelligens" seems more likely to have
gotten transformed from a noun describing a quality to a noun describing
people who supposedly possess said quality.  As a verb, it implies the
existence of a subject who is performing the "action" of perceiving.
And it seems that a verb ascribing a quality is closer than a noun
*de*scribing the the quality to being a referernt to the possessor of
the quality.   IMESHO, of course.

-Marcos