Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@...> wrote:

> 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."

I didn't say wrong -- just unusual :)



*Muke!
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