Re: [math-fun] The word "stathm"
Allan wrote [of stathm]: << It's too cute a word to stay out of the dictionary. Yes, but . . . there are precious few citations for it. Googling on +stathm algebra only 10 distinct citations come up (ignoring the ones Google calls "similar"). Meanwhile, MathSciNet has *zero* occurrences of the word *anywhere* in their database (though there are maybe five for foreign versions of the word). (But besides not being in the OED, it's also not in either the 2nd or 3rd edition of Merriam-Webster's unabridged.) --Dan _____________________________________________________________________ "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi." --Peter Schickele
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:16:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net>
Allan wrote [of stathm]:
It's too cute a word to stay out of the dictionary.
Yes, but . . . there are precious few citations for it.
I asked a friend, who is a classicist specializing in ancient Greek, about our conversation on "stathm". Here's what he head to say, upon reading one digest of Math-Fun:
From: Mike Tueller <miketueller@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:44:47 -0700 To: Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> Subject: Re: math-fun Digest, Vol 80, Issue 8 (fwd)
[...]
Words with the peculiar English -thm ending ordinarily come from Greek words with the -thmos ending (which is a lot easier to pronounce--as usual, the interference of French complicates matters).
By etymology, stathmos relates to a "standing" or "stopping," and so is used (in the earliest sources) for farmsteads, stables, posts holding up a roof, and lodgings.
Springing from those are uses related to weight (a balance is something that worked when the weights were brought to a standstill, so it Greek its name derived from that), and to stopping while marching.
It is this last use that most students of Greek probably remember best, as it is a very common usage: a temporary campsite that one would make while marching was a stathmos. From this, the word came to apply to a distance that an army would march in a day, and thence to a rough unit of distance measure (probably about 15-20 miles).
I confess that I don't know how any of this would apply to the function described in the e-mail correspondence. That you may have to work out.
On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that the word stathm comes from the Greek stathme, which is equally ancient. This word refers to a carpenter's line or ruler, and consequently is also applied to units of measure.
That is, I think, all I can say about the matter, unless I should come to know more.
Mike
-- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/ Skype: sgr000
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