Re: Bug#816599: lintian: false-positive spelling error 'homogenous'
IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:
>> My dictionary (American Heritage) says 'homogenous' is an acceptable spelling
>> of 'homogeneous', and it's how I pronounce the word.
>
> So I did a quick check, and Merriam-Webster [1] seems to allow the 'homogenous'
> spelling as well.
> Other sources [2] even suggest that 'homogenous' is the de-facto spelling of the
> word, while the Online Etymology Dictionary - which according to [3] suggested
> that this is an 'erroneous spelling of "homogeneous"' - claims in it's current
> edition [4] that it is 'a spelling of "homogeneous" that represents a common
> pronunciation' (thus accepting the spelling).
The version I learned at school is that "homogeneous" and "homogenous"
are spelled differently because they're different words with different
meanings and different pronunciations, and the word people usually
mean is "HOMOGENEOUS"; but even in those days the upshot was that it
was far too late to stop people using "HOMOGENOUS" when what they
"really mean" is "HOMOGENEOUS". And my paper en_GB dictionary even
suggests that the Mediaeval Latin word we borrowed it from already had
the same inconsistency.
> I would therefore suggest to consider 'homogenous' to be a false positive and
> drop it from the lintian database.
Agreed. The two words have been homogenised by usage.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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