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Posted by Ben C on 04/11/07 12:16
On 2007-04-11, Toby A Inkster <usenet200703@tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> Scripsit Toby A Inkster:
>>
>>> Bilingual is a special case of multilingual.
>>
>> Not really; "bi-" means "two", "multi-" means many.
>
> "Multi-" means "multiple", as opposed to individual.
>
> It comes from the Latin "multus" which is often translated as "many",
> simply because there's not really any more elegant way to translate it
> into English. But multus is meant more in the sense of "more than one"
> than the normal English connotations of "many", for which the Romans had
> words such as "plus"/"pluris" and "plurimus" which would pseudo-translate
> as "many-er" and "many-est" in English. The Romans had different shades of
> the word "many" to play with, and "multus" is the weakest shade of it, so
> could certainly apply to two.
>
> The Greek equivalent of "multi-" is "poly-". The term "polyunsaturated" is
> applied to fatty acids which contain *two* or more double-carbon bonds.
But someone who speaks two languages is bilingual but not a polyglot;
and someone who knows two things is certainly not a polymath.
Sucrose is a polysaccharide (with only two saccharides in it). y = x^2 +
x is a polynomial with only two terms, and polyunsaturated fats only
require two unsaturations.
My pronouncement is therefore that to describe a website with two
languages as multilingual is OK, because it's a technical context.
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