Muke Tever wrote:

>
> 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.

Nothing wrong with it -- unless you're also going to object to
"television."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...