Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote:

> (Should I try to write, or find, a gentle, easy intro. to "hex"
> (hexidecimal, radix-16, base-16; all the same thing) for the Qalam pages
> on Yahoo?) Btw, although "hexadecimal" is the commonplace spelling,
> nevertheless, I once read, not long after IBM publicized it, that the "a"
> is not linguistically correct.

It's not the "a" - many Greek words are spelled with "hexa-", e.g.
"hexadactylos" (having six fingers), "hexabiblos" (in six books), etc.
The linguistically unusual part is that it grafts the Greek 6 onto the
Latin 10. The Latin 6, "sex" would be expected, thus "sedecimal" = 16-al.


*Muke!
--
website: http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/