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units of measure
- From: BestATN@hidden.email
- Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 20:37:14 EDT
- Subject: units of measure
- To: katanda@yahoogroups.com
Rick,
I would like to recommend that you use a separate root for each type of measurement. You already have at least three of the nine basic SI units (meter, second, radian), and you have in place a system of prefixes equating to the metric prefixes.
There are less than 60 SI units, and many of them have no separate name, only their equivalents in terms of other units. Some of those equivalents can be very lengthy. The main reason for this suggestion is to keep the names of (at least SI) units short and consistent. English does this with terms like "newton" and "pascal", but not with units of velocity (meters per second) or acceleration (meters per second-squared) or radiance (watts per steradian-meter-squared).
For example, 'second' is "susya" and 'meter' is "mosya". Rather than using a compound term for "meter per second", create a new root with the meaning of "meter per second", and add the various metric prefixes to that. This would also avoid the complication of coming up with ways to say "per", "squared", "cubed", etc. These all have simple equivalents in Katanda, but as far as I know, they can only be used with numbers, i.e. with classifier "-mu", and compounds using them can be pretty long.
In the same way, the names of units for length, area, and volume would all be distinct, rather than all based on length.
As for non-metric units, you could treat them the same way, or come up with a way to build the compounds I'm recommending against. Two (similar) cases for compounding are the terms for "kilometers per hour" and "miles per hour". I suspect that the number of such common terms is small in everyday life, though. And even for them it's possible to create single roots.
Steven