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From: Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories
Subject: Re: Terminology; categorical versus categorial.
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 19:37:14 -0400
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Cc: peasthope@shaw.ca, categories@mta.ca
To: "Fred E.J. Linton"
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On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Fred E.J. Linton 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 no=
t to
> Allegory, Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Catastrophe, Economy, Geology,
> History,
> ..., Numerology, Ornithology, Philosophy, Psychology, ..., Topology, ...,
> Zoology.
Both constructions have plenty of examples; the OED online=E2=80=99s wild-c=
ard
search is useful here, e.g.
http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=3Ddictionary&q=3D*orical&_searchBtn=3D=
Search.
This gives 81 words with -orical, against 279 with -orial. The -orial
examples are mostly from verb roots =E2=80=94 dictatorial, professorial, et=
c.
=E2=80=94 but with some exceptions: armorial, (im)memorial, and so on. I=
=E2=80=99m
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.
=E2=80=9CCategorical=E2=80=9D is older and more widely used, going back to =
1598, and
with plenty of both colloquial and technical usage. =E2=80=9CCategorial=E2=
=80=9D
appears in 1912 in philosophy, and from the 50=E2=80=99s in linguistics, bu=
t
remains mostly restricted to these fields. Google N-grams gives a
quick view of the comparative frequency:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=3Dcategorical%2Ccategorial&yea=
r_start=3D1800&year_end=3D2000&corpus=3D0&smoothing=3D3
Even proponents of =E2=80=9Ccategorial=E2=80=9D generally take this for gra=
nted, 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 =E2=80=9Ccategorical=E2=80=9D in logic, to distinguish=
the new
sense from the old.
Best,
=E2=80=93Peter.
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