Re: Graeco-Latin hybrids (was: Teknonyms)

Somehow missed this earlier reply until it was replied to . . .

On 10/20/05, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > Or, my personal (least) favorite, "hexadecimal" - chosen over the more
> > linguistically consistent (albeit still demonstrably artificial)
> > "sexadecimal" to avoid having "sex" in the word. *sigh*
>
> Humph - altho we have _sexaginta_ (60), _sexagesimus_ (60th) etc, the
> use of -a- as an infix between 'sex' and another morpheme is not
> productive in Latin. The Latin for 16 is 'sedecim'.
>
> But it should be noted that 'decimal' is derived from the Latin
> _ordinal_ number 'decimus' (not the cardinal 'decem'); 16th was two
> words 'sextus decimus'. If a word is used as a prefix the normal
> connective infix in Latin is-i-, thus the purely Latin derived form
> would be *sextidecimal*

My understanding was that the rejected form was indeed "sexadecimal" despite
that term's dubious construction; the reasons you cite above are why I said
the word was "still demonstrably artificial". Thanks for doing the actual
demonstration, though. :)

In fact a Google for 'sextidecimal' will confirm this.


Indeed. It seems that "sextidecimal" may have been the actual rejected form.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, if such it was.



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

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