[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [OT] The stigma of schema
> Every neuter plural in Greek and Latin (find me an exception!) ends in -a. My Greek has fallen into complete disrepair, but in Latin, only neuter plurals of the second and third declension reliably end in "a". I don't think there are any neuters of the first declension (which are motly feminine, with masculine exceptions such as "nauta": sailor). If there were, they would end in "-ae". Neuter plurals of the fourth declension end in "-us". Examples off head are "manus": hand and "acu": needle. I always remember that "anus", in the fourth declension neuter does *not* mean what the smirking English speaker first thinks. Neuter plurals of the fifth declension end in "es". The most common example is "re": thing, matter. Others off-head are "fides": faith and "spes": hope. But all that aside, my argument for "schema", "schemata" go beyond respect for the original language: it includes respect for English. Rick talks about the "ta" ending bucking idiom. English is probably the most expressive language ever because of its complexity of idiom. It's not just a homegeneous complexity like, say that of Finnish, but a divagating complexity that draws from its many sources, direct or indirect, forced or affected, including Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Latin, Greek, East Asia, Sub-saharan Africa, North America, etc. Efforts to pare this richness to a blond regularity of idiom are quite dangerous. Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 is not just about efforts to place political codes into speech (as the popular press seems to interpret it). It's more about the effort to stultify people's imagination through highly regular idiom. I see this as a real threat. And it does seem that the computer revolution has dangerous tendencies towards Newspeak. -- Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant uche.ogbuji@f... +1 303 583 9900 x 101 Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com 4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA XML strategy, XML tools (http://4Suite.org), knowledge management
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