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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: DATUM was sight reduction with GPS receiver
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Mar 23, 08:12 +1100
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Mar 23, 08:12 +1100
Datum is Latin for 'what is given'. Over nearly two thousand years being educated, in England, meant learning Latin and Greek. As the sciences grew it was natural to look within these languages for new words. It was also practical, as Europe was and is infested with mutually unintelligible tongues, but other educated people were assumed to also understand Latin and Greek. So it was a common 'lingua franca' - so to speak.. Since these ancient languages were awfully short of native speakers (modern Greek is rather different to classical Greek) there were few to complain at the barbarisms that were thus created. Purists would recoil from 'datums' but I think its rather too late to moan about lost purity of language. Language is what it is made to be, much as Alice (Through the Looking Glass) discovered. > From: Michael Dorl > BTW, is datum plural or singular, does it have a plural?
