At 8:22:26 PM on Wednesday, March 12, 2008, Patrick Ryan
wrote:
[...]
> I did _not_ write "nihilist"; I wrote "nilist", a
> reference to your peculiar "nil-grade" terminology instead
> of the standard 'zero-grade'.
Arnaud isn't the only one who failed to understand it as you
intended. I also took it to be a misspelling of 'nihilist',
or possibly a pun on 'Nile'; normal English orthographic
conventions guarantee that <nilist> will be read /'naIlIst/,
not /'nIlIst/. If you want the latter, <nil-ist> and
<nillist> are about your only reasonable choices.
Then again, it would never have occurred to me that anyone
here would fail to recognize the term 'nil-grade'. Though
'zero grade' is more common, 'nil grade' isn't precisely
uncommon, probably as a direct translation of 'Nullstufe'.
Here, for instance, is a quotation from Piotr's 'An Overview
of the Proto-Indo-European Verb System', 'The suffix
*-sk^e-/*-sk^o-, usually added to nil-grade bases, forms
iterative (or inchoative) stems'. (There are several other
instances of the term on that page.)
Brian