HISTNEUR-L: The History of Neuroscience Internet Forum

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-sis, Greek and Latin 

At 11:59 AM 1/23/98 -0800, Arthur T. Murray wrote:
>As an independent scholar in neuroscience with a B.A. in Latin
>and Greek (University of Washington, Seattle, 1968) I question
>whether "propriocepsis" is a legitimate term in the vocabulary.
>
>Action-nouns taken from Greek verbs typically end in "-sis" as
>in the case of "thesis" or "epiphysis" or "thanatopsis," but
>a word starting with the Latin root "proprio-" should continue
>only with similarly Latin stems such as "-ceptive" or "-ception"
>or even "-spinal," but not a forced Grecification like "cepsis."
>If "cepsis" were a Greek word, the result would be "autocepsis."
>
>Not only do I advise histneur scholars to shun bad compound words,
>but I alert you to the fact that your field of neuroscience is
>ripe for a sudden merge with artificial intelligence and robotics.


I have been alerted! I will shun bad compound words, in particular, bad
words for bad breath, like "halitosis", which I thought came from the Latin
"halare", meaning 'to breathe' which is the source of the Latin "halitus"
(I'm not sure of the spelling) meaning 'breath' plus "-sis". But, my Latin
is very poor and my Greek is nonexistent. What I need is a good
"amanuensis" but, could it be that the Latin "manus", plus the prefix "a-"
got attached again to one of those Greek suffixes? 

Actually, I'm sure that Arthur Murray will be able to set my etymology
straight; what I'd really like to do is make a pitch for linguistic
freedom. One of the joys of language is its dynamic, ever-changing,
creative character (notwithstanding the antics of the French language
bureaus in France and Quebec). My reaction to the first posting on
"propriocepsis" was 'hey, what a neat idea! we've got 'proprioception' to
refer to the physiological mechanism and now we've got 'propriocepsis' to
refer to it in a more general way; why not add 'proprioceptic' on the
analogy of "antithesis" and "antithetic"

I guess "-ceptive" and "-ception" are Latin "stems", Arthur, but the
suffixes of interest here are "-ive" which English uses to make adjectives
and which derives from the Latin as you said, and "-ion" which English uses
to make nouns and which also derives from the Latin as you said. Do we have
a problem with bad compounds like "phonation"? My (English) dictionary
tells me that the origin of this is Greek "phonos" or "phone" and you just
pointed out that the ending is Latin...

Next thing you now we're going to have a bunch of fellows running around
telling us that AI connectionist networks are capable of modelling some
aspects of the nervous system! Beam me up, Scotty! Apres tout, mon corps
n'est qu'une machine.

Amities,
Whit
<HISTNEUR-L@library.ucla.edu>