Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.

[Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine <p.l.lumsdaine@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Fred E.J. Linton <fejlinton@usa.net> wrote:
> Peter Easthope (peasthope@shaw.ca) proposed:
>
>> According to online dictionaries, categorical and categorial can be
>> synonyms.  Almost everyone seems to prefer categorical whereas
>> categorial comes from the simple rule of replacing the last vowel of
>> the noun with "ial".
>>
>> So, is the preference for categorical just an inheritance from early
>> authors?  Is there a stronger reason to use it?  Is the explanation
>> in the archive?
>
> It's a lovely "simple rule", Peter, but where does it apply? Certainly not to
> Allegory, Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Catastrophe, Economy, Geology,
> History,
> ..., Numerology, Ornithology, Philosophy, Psychology, ..., Topology, ...,
> Zoology.

Both constructions have plenty of examples; the OED online’s wild-card
search is useful here, e.g.
http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=*orical&_searchBtn=Search.
This gives 81 words with -orical, against 279 with -orial.  The -orial
examples are mostly from verb roots — dictatorial, professorial, etc.
— but with some exceptions: armorial, (im)memorial, and so on.  I’m
not enough of a linguist to see any full explanation for which words
get which suffix.

But in the case of categories, the OED backs up what others have
written: categorists are/were simply following standard usage.
“Categorical” is older and more widely used, going back to 1598, and
with plenty of both colloquial and technical usage.  “Categorial”
appears in 1912 in philosophy, and from the 50’s in linguistics, but
remains mostly restricted to these fields.  Google N-grams gives a
quick view of the comparative frequency:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=categorical%2Ccategorial&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Even proponents of “categorial” generally take this for granted, I
think.  Goldblatt, in the preface of his (lovely) book on topoi,
explains his motivation as precisely to *break* with the older and
more common usage of “categorical” in logic, to distinguish  the new
sense from the old.

Best,
–Peter.


[For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]