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

G. Branden Robinson
2023-11-27T16:59:40Z

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At 2023-11-27T16:08:17+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> 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]

This elision was pretty poor form, given that one of the people whose
attribution (and opinion) Zack discarded was a relevant authority: M.
Douglas McIlroy, an alum of the Bell Labs Computing Science Research
Center and editor of the Seventh Edition Unix Programmer's Manual.

> > > 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.

In some cases, you can. Witness the case of "flammable"/inflammable",
which are synonymous. The former term arose because the prefix "in-"
alters meaning in multiple ways in English[1] (maybe Latin, too). The
coinage of "flammable" later became important in the labeling and
transport of hazardous materials. Some pedants must despair of this
linguistic innovation, perhaps viewing the prospect of handlers of such
materials burning to death as a just punishment for their lack of
morphological and etymological sophistication. If you don't want to die
like a prole, get an English degree, eh?[2]

Here, the "con-" prefix is duplicative. It doesn't pay its freight.

> > [English pedant mode off]

When one discards all other authorities, all that remains is one's own.
I trust we can recognize the parallels here with Dunning-Krugeresque
self-regard.

> > 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.

Man pages are specialized technical literature demanding a bespoke
vocabulary. Some employment of jargon is inescapable, even necessary.
In any case, "catenate" has ~50 years of attestation in this domain
alone, which constitutes approximately the entire history of Unix
discourse.

If you apply this sort of frequency analysis to contrast man page and
general English corpora more broadly, I predict that you'll find many
candidates for terminological replacement that you would _not_ embrace.

For instance...[3]

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source%2Cfree+software&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=emacs%2Cvi&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

Zack also overlooks the process by which speakers and readers of a
language grapple with unfamiliar words that they encounter unexpectedly.
Before undertaking to reach for dictionaries (online or otherwise), many
readers morphophonemically analyze them to see if they can infer their
meanings from familiar components.[4]

> > 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. :)

In Unix culture, one will need to remain conversant with the term
"catenate" to know why cat(1) is not named "concat(1)". ;-)

"Concatenate" may end up prevailing even in *nix man pages; languages do
not necessarily evolve in directions that maximize lexical economy.[5]

But to change one's usage based on the break room reasoning put on offer
in this thread is a terrible idea.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/02/in-a-word-flammable-inflammable-and-nonflammable/

[2] ...where the first-order factor in determining your academic merit
will be your facility with the ideas of 20th-century French
political philosophers.

[3] One can complain that the second example suffers from a confounding
effect given one of the terms' appearance as a roman numeral.
Precisely. Google Ngram Viewer is not sensitive to context. Zack's
use of it is a makeweight recourse to cloak an opinion grounded on
personal preference in a shroud of false objectivity.

[4] I see this practice offered as advice in numerous resources, and it
reflects my own approach as a native English speaker who acquired
language before the availability of computerized (let alone
hyperlinked) dictionaries in the home, but in a perfunctory search I
couldn't turn up any _studies_ of what readers _actually do_. One
technique that could arise from Zack's approach would be to obtain
an English word list sorted by frequency, strike off known words
until encountering an unfamiliar one, learn it, then resume the
process until the unfamiliar word that actually came up is reached.
(This way you can be more confident in your own writing and speech
that you don't use an obscure word where a more common one
suffices.) How well do we suppose such a process might work?

[5] certainly not if _my_ emails play any part in that evolution <drum fill>