Re: what is etymology? (linguistics and biology)



My permutations of EID and EIS yielded a cluster of
twelve words around the meme of seeing and reasoning.
Here you are with four of the twelve words:

EID --- appearance, image, idea; ancient Greek eidos
for appearance, form, shape, beauty, concept, idea,
imagination, essence, state

EIS --- reality behind all the ever changing appearances,
idea of all ideas

IED --- reasoning, to follow appearances, notions, ideas;
Indo-European iet for to strive, aspire (Pokorny)

IES --- to find the reality behind all appearances, the
idea of all ideas; Indo-European ies for to boil, bubble,
foam, froth (Pokorny)

EID was easy. The comparative EIS was less easy,
and the pair of IED and comparative IES were rather
difficult, not self-evident at all, the only way to get at
their meaning was by considering the whole cluster
of twelve permutations.

Alan confirms IES in the sense of a boiling, bubbling,
foaming and frothing discussion. One can work in all
earnest, explain every step one takes, answer all
questions, make one's work transparent in every way.
Doesn't help. In the end one is caught in a heated,
bubbling and boiling discussion, surrounded by foam
and froth.

Heated discussions apparently belong to the conditio
humana. There must have been heated discussions
15,000 and 32, 000 years ago. There will still be heated
discussions at the university of Lagany on Mars in 7129
AD. I can imagine a lecture given there. Professor Bar
Leni will say that Homo wannabe sapiens of the Early
Concrete Age was a rather primitive race, not able of
a truly scientific reasoning. Consider the legend of the
two magicians at Bims Town in the land of Amiqua,
perhaps *amar(3e)-i-qu(ah). There is only one reliable
statement left by Alvy Stone himself. He said he was
playing God by throwing dices. A dice was a colored
pebble. By throwing colored pebbles on the floor and
studying the resulting patterns, a magician of the Early
Concrete Age took a guess at the future. Hence Alvy
Stone was nothing else than a fortune teller. There is
no evidence at all that he was engaged in proto-physics.
Now for Andy Why, allegedly working in the field of pre-
proto.mathematics. By him we have two statements left.
In one he says that he was drawing subconscious noodles.
A noodle must have been some sort of a primitive number
stick. Drawing noodles out of a felt cap was yet another
way of telling fortune. In his other statement, Andy Why
explains how he was working: stumbling around in a dark
room, bumping into the furniture ... Here, Professor Bar
Leni makes a meaningful pause, which is filled with the
laughter of the students. My reincarnation will stand up
and protest: Albert Einstein and Andrew Wiles worked at
Princeton, a famous university in America, each of them
was a high ranking genius. They were true scientists.
Terms such as proto-physics and pre-proto-mathematics
are denigrating, and so is the term Early Concrete Age.
As if those people produced nothing else than concrete.
As if their skulls were filled with concrete instead of a brain.
Andrew Wiles didn't draw noodles, which were something
to eat, no, he was drawing subconscious droodles, will say
he scribbled, allowing his intuition to speak up. All great
scientists rely on their intuition, even today. Terraforming
Mars took a long time. The earthlings must have conquered
space much earlier than it is believed now. I dare say that
they went to the moon at a mind-boggling early time of only
a thousand years after Albert Einstein and Andrew Wiles ...
The students moan and groan: Stop it! Shut up! Spare us
the rest of your sermon! Whereupon the reincarnations of
Alan and Christopher Culver get hold of me and throw me
out. Shut up!, they shout at me, and shut goes the door..


Andrew Wiles, quoted from Simon Singh's book on
Fermat's Last Theorem (Fourth Estate London 1992):

"I sometimes write scribbles or doodles. They're not
important doodles, just subconscious doodles."

"Wiles describes his experience of doing mathematics
in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion:
'One enters the first room of the mansion and it's dark.
Completely dark. One stumbles around bumping into
the furniture but gradually you learn where each piece of
furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the
light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated.
You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into
the next room and spend another six months in the dark.
So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're
momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two,
they are the culmination of, and couldn't exist without,
the many months of stumbling around in the dark that
preceded them.' "

Simon Singh wrote a fine book, apart from a serious flaw,
namely the nonsense in the Preface and in Chapter 1,
where he says that Pythagoras created the foundations
of mathematics and was responsible for the first golden
age of mathematics. The so-called formula of Pythagoras
was known a long time before Pythagoras, to which testify
the triples on the Babylonian clay tablet Plimpton 322
from around 1650 BC. The clay tablet YBC 7289 with
the fabulous Babylonian value for the square root of 2
dates from the same time. Also the Rhind Mathematical
Papyrus, a copy of a lost papyrus from around 1850 BC,
sparkling of mathematical and geometrical gems (look
up my website). And then there was the school of Imhotep,
and Hemon, who, I believe, discovered and developed
the first systematic method for calculating the circle, more
than two millennia before Archimedes: a simple yet clever
and ingenious method based on additive number patterns,
and a simple algorithm starting from the Sacred Triangle
3-4-5 and generating a sequence of further Imhotepean
triples, 7-24-25, 44-117-125, 336-527-625 ...

Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch

.

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