Talk:Ampheck

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[edit] Notes & Queries

I seem to remember NNOR, for "neither nor", being used in all the textbooks of my early years, so I will go with that till I can check some refs. Jon Awbrey 18:44, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Cutting both ways"?

I put a 'citation needed' tag on the proposed Greek etymology. Can somebody look that up somewhere? I cannot for the life of me think of any Greek word like "-eck" that would mean "cut". In fact, "-eck" doesn't look Greek to me at all. 'Cutting' would likely be something with "tem-" or "tom-", wouldn't it? Lukas 18:49, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

JA: I have the refs on hand and will add it later today, but have a few errands to run first ... it's "heck" not "eck"(?) Jon Awbrey 19:00, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

JA: LSJ at Perseus gives this:

• amphêkês, es, (akê A)
  • A. two-edged, phasganon, xiphos, Il.10.256, Od.16.80, B.10.87, etc.; kentron, doru, A.Pr.692 (lyr.), Ag.1149; enchos, genus, S.Aj.286, El.485; of lightning, forked, puros a. bostruchos A. Pr.1044; keraunos Cleanth.1.10.
    • II. metaph., a. glôtta tongue that will cut both ways, i.e. maintain either right or wrong, Ar.Nu. 1160 (parod.); of an oracle, ambiguous, a. kai diprosôpos Luc.JTr. 43.
• akê (A), hê, (cf. akis)
  • A. point, Hsch., Suid.
• A Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones, with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie, Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK, 1940. (ISBN: 0198642261)

JA: Jon Awbrey 05:00, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Jon, for digging this one out. I also put it at the top of the article now. As for the orthography, the dictionaries have the accent on the second syllable, but the Peirce quote has it on the third. Could you check if the quote is correct? -- I have already corrected the diacritic on the first syllable, that should obviously be a spiritus lenis, not an acute. Lukas 09:28, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

JA: Well, since it's Peirce's koineage, or conversion of the funds, and since the gloss 'cutting both ways' is traditional, I would prefer retaining the etymology that Peirce cited in disbursing the koine. Will probably do to add a second gloss. The marks in CP are ἀ on the first and ή on the third, but first and second in my Liddell & Scott -- but not all the accented characters show up in the pull-down menu on my browser -- is there something I can do to download the fonts? Jon Awbrey 16:48, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

LP: As for the technicalities, you need a font that covers the "polytonic" range of Greek in Unicode ("Greek Extended"). The following fonts are listed in Wikipedia's style sheets as suitable and commonly available: Palatino Linotype, Athena, Gentium, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, Code2000. Gentium is free; Palatino Linotype comes with Windows; don't know about the current versios of Athena. - You can also google for Alan Wood's Unicode font resources, he has a very useful list of fonts for various OS's. The Wikipedia convention is to enclose Greek text in a {{polytonic|παράδιγμα}} template; then if you have any of the fonts above, you should be okay. (I'm taking the freedom of doing that in your above comment, if you don't mind.) Lukas 19:20, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

JA: On second thought, glossing the literal meaning first and leaving the metaphorical usage to Peirce's passage looks good to me. Jon Awbrey 16:54, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On decapitalizing eponyms

• JA: It is said to be a measure of respect to name an object, a subfield, or a theorem of mathematics after its historical or legendary originator, but an even greater measure of respect to decapitalize the eponym thereof. Other theories about this usage are: (1) it is merely the erosion of the passing years that wears down the windward capital, (2) it is done to mark the fact that the eponym has become so generalized in application that its use no longer amounts to an attribution of personal authorship. Indeed, it is not infrequent that we attach the adjective "boolean" to usages that were actually introduced by others, say Jevons, Peirce, or Schroeder. Jon Awbrey 03:40, 3 March 2006 (UTC)