Re: abutment = aboutement?

[wlawvere@buffalo.edu]

 
There are common  words, rarely used in a technical sense,
that however may be useful as explanatory marginal
alternatives of foreign words. The "ab...ment d.. " being
discussed seems to be explained by  "goal", as in
       f is the goal of F
where F is the Fourer series of a function f (which leaves to
particular investigation the question of actual convergence).

In turn "goal" can be helpfully explained as 
             purpose
a concept that academic discussions should not forget.

Bill


On Thu 08/21/08  3:18 PM , Vaughan Pratt pratt@cs.stanford.edu sent:
> Meanwhile I count eight occurrences of "abut" and
> "abutment" in the (36kilobyte!) main Wikipedia article on spectral sequences (there are a
> dozen separate much shorter articles on particular spectral sequences,
> along with a 15 kB article on derived categories).
> 
> On the other hand the algebra and geometry articles of the 1987
> Britannica Macropaedia both prefer the term "limit" for what a
> spectralsequence converges to, in respectively Peter Hilton's contribution
> "Other aspects of homological algebra" to the algebra article,
> and thegeometry article's section on algebraic topology.
> 
> Since Wikipedia seems to be trumping Britannica these days, and no one
> here has objected to established usage in mathematics trumping
> linguistic suitability, the precise distance of "abutment" from
> theoptimal English cognate for "aboutissement" would appear to be
> academic,an epithet reflecting the outside world's perception that raising moot
> points is in our job description.
> 
> Vaughan
> 
> >> Thanks to Eduardo D and Vaughan P and Michel
> H for their misgivings,>> which encouraged me to compose the above,
> despite the assurances>> of Jim S that the 'abut*' usage is by now
> well entrenched.>>
> >> Fred
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>