Posted: Aug 27, 2017 3:30 pm
Tracer Tong wrote:scott1328 wrote:a-theos means "without God"
It's not quite as straightforward as that, though. In fact, that seems to be a christianised meaning of a term that long predates the religion.VazScep wrote:The etymology of "proposition" interests me, but I think I'd need Tracer Tong to help me out with it. The standard translation of Euclid's Elements uses the word "proposition" as mathematicians would nowadays use the word "theorem." But in many cases, what Euclid is proposing is something he can do.
Do you have an example of where Euclid is translated like this? I can have a look at the text to see what term he uses.
Of course words can gain an idiomatic meaning beyond the simple definitions of their roots. But other languages that adopt such words don't necessarily adopt the linguistic baggage. English, mostly through academia, has adopted not only words, stems and affixes from Latin and Greek, but also methods of composing those words and stems affixes into words that would puzzle native speakers of those languages. The prefix a- in English means "no, not, or without" and is affixed to words without regard to their origin or etymology, I.e. amoral, achromatic, atonal.
what was adopted into English? Was it the word "atheos" and its derivatives as the Greeks and Romans used it: a pejorative for the early Christians? Or, was it coined from its root words into English? I suspect something close to the original meaning was adopted but linguistic reanalysis has introduced a shifted meaning and the current dispute.
Descriptive grammarians would document how the word is used. Both by those who apply the term to themselves and those who apply it to others. Suffice to say the term has multiple conflicting definitions and tends to stop conversations in quibbles over semantics.
Non belief is more useful when one hopes to avoid these quibbles.