A few gentle corrections, if I may, and a comment. First, a recurrent typo: *never* "abuter" -- only "abouter". Next, when I wrote
French "abouter" is a verb, derived from "bout", whose meaning is 'to join (or to place) end to end'
I omitted what I (evidently incorrectly) thought went without saying; better would have been to include it, so:
'to join (or to place) [two things] end to end'
(thus "abouter" can be used for the placement of two successive spans of a bridge, as in Vaughan's illustration, with the special dedicated support where the two spans 'abut' being, obviously, an 'abutment'; but one would not ["abouter" a path]). And then, I omitted to mention that the verb "aboutir" is *intransitive* -- it does *not* accept any direct object. Thus it is linguistically impossible to ["aboutir" a path]: but one *may* say of a path that it "aboutit" *at* a certain point, or *in* a certain set, or ... . [There is a reflexive cognate of "aboutir" -- "s'aboutir" -- used in gardening terminology to mean 'to bud' or 'to be covered with buds', but this usage surerely serves only as a red herring if one wants to understand "aboutir" proper.] Finally, to make peace with Jim S and Mike B: I in no way intend what I've written (initially just privately, first to Mike, and then to Eduardo) to dictate new terminology in place of established spectral sequence usage. And I very much appreciate Jim's having shared his mental 'abutting' vision for that usage. And yet, remembering the triples/monads transition, I wonder whether a similar transition may not yet take place as regards "aboutissement", etc. Cheers, -- Fred [PS: As not all mail-readers render what are known as HTML named entities correctly, let me just add that, where a reader may see an 'agrave' between an ampersand and a semicolon, I had intended an "a" with 'accent grave'; my similarly placed 'eacute' was meant to show as "e" with 'acute accent'. Apologies to all those whose mail-readers garble these. -- Fred] --- ------ Original Message ------ Received: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:56:30 AM EDT From: "Eduardo J. Dubuc" <edubuc@dm.uba.ar> To: Categories list <categories@mta.ca> Subject: categories: Re: abutment = aboutement?
Fred Linton has in this mail enlighten us all about the meaning in french of the words "aboutissement" and "aboutement". Quite different meanings.
(*) It seems that "aboutir" means more or less "to arrive" or "to finish" "come to the end" etc,
while "abuter" means 'to join end to end',
....