Re: abutment = aboutement?

["Fred E.J. Linton" <fejlinton@usa.net>]

A few gentle corrections, if I may, and a comment. 

First, a recurrent typo:

*never* "abuter" -- only "abouter".

Next, when I wrote

> French "abouter" is a verb, derived from "bout", whose meaning is
> 'to join (or to place) end to end'

I omitted what I (evidently incorrectly) thought went without saying;
better would have been to include it, so:

> 'to join (or to place) [two things] end to end'

(thus "abouter" can be used for the placement of two successive 
spans of a bridge, as in Vaughan's illustration, with the
special dedicated support where the two spans 'abut' being,
obviously, an 'abutment'; but one would not ["abouter" a path]).

And then, I omitted to mention that the verb "aboutir" is
*intransitive* -- it does *not* accept any direct object.
Thus it is linguistically impossible to ["aboutir" a path]: but
one *may* say of a path that it "aboutit" *at* a certain point,
or *in* a certain set, or ... .

[There is a reflexive cognate of "aboutir" -- "s'aboutir" -- used in
gardening terminology to mean 'to bud' or 'to be covered with buds',
but this usage surerely serves only as a red herring if one wants 
to understand "aboutir" proper.]

Finally, to make peace with Jim S and Mike B: I in no way intend
what I've written (initially just privately, first to Mike, and 
then to Eduardo) to dictate new terminology in place of established 
spectral sequence usage. And I very much appreciate Jim's having shared 
his mental 'abutting' vision for that usage. And yet, remembering the
triples/monads transition, I wonder whether a similar transition
may not yet take place as regards "aboutissement", etc.

Cheers, -- Fred

[PS: As not all mail-readers render what are known as HTML named entities 
correctly, let me just add that, where a reader may see an 'agrave' between
an ampersand and a semicolon, I had intended an "a" with 'accent grave';
my similarly placed 'eacute' was meant to show as "e" with 'acute accent'.
Apologies to all those whose mail-readers garble these. -- Fred]

--- 

------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:56:30 AM EDT
From: "Eduardo J. Dubuc" <edubuc@dm.uba.ar>
To: Categories list <categories@mta.ca>
Subject: categories: Re: abutment = aboutement?

> Fred Linton has in this mail enlighten us all about the meaning in french
of
> the words  "aboutissement" and "aboutement". Quite different meanings.
> 
> (*) It seems that "aboutir" means more or less "to arrive" or "to finish"
> "come to the end"  etc,
> 
> while "abuter" means 'to join end to end',


....