Re: catenate vs concatenate (was: strncpy clarify result may not be null terminated)

Alejandro Colomar
2023-11-27T15:13:23Z

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On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 04:08:17PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi Zack,
>
> On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 09:33:56AM -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > [all attribution deleted because it was so tangled I couldn't make
> > sense of it]
> >
> > >> Rather than "catenation", in my experience "concatenation" is the
> > >> common term
>
> The above was Jonny Grant.
>
> > > We began fighting this pomposity before v7. There has only been
> > > backsliding since. "Catenate" is crisper, means the same thing,
>
> The above was Doug McIlroy.
>
> > [English pedant mode on]
> >
> > "Concatenate" is the correct term; "catenate" means something completely
> > different, probably "hang between two posts like a chain". You can't
> > chop prefixes off a Latinate word and have it still mean the same thing.
>
> [Latin pedant mode on]
>
> contatenate comes from the Latin concatenare. The prefix "con-" means
> "join", "together", and "catena" means "chain".
> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concatenate>
>
> catenate comes from the Latin catenare, which AFAICS, seems a synonym.
> It just drops the redundant "con-" prefix, since "catena" already
> implies it.
> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate>
>
> English isn't as propense as other Latin languages to have such synonyms

s/other//

> where one of them simply adds a redundant prefix or suffix, but Catalan
> or Spanish for example have several such cases.
>
> [Latin pedant mode off]
>
> > [English pedant mode off]
> >
> > Also, and much more importantly, "concatenate" is used at least 100x
> > more often than "catenate" in modern English, and that means it's the
> > word that a randomly selected reader of the manpages is more likely to
> > know, and, therefore, the word that the manpages should be using.
> >
> > https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=concatenate%2Ccatenate&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
>
> Heh, Paul sent a patch for changing it to append, which I applied, since
> it reads better, even if it removes the mnemonics of cat for catenate. :)
>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
> --
> <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>