Tuesday, November 18, 2008

ceteris paribus

there's this interesting word mentioned today in macroeconomics course,
ceteris paribus
meaning: if other relevant things, factors, or elements remain unaltered

there must be some historical reasons the English language creators or broadly speaking, users, favor Latin words to be their linkage words, like

"i.e." originated from Latin expression "id est", means that is;
"e.g." from Latin "exempli gratia", means for example;
"q.v." from Latin "quod vide", means which see;
"etc." from "et cetera", means and so forth;
...

and now the ceteris paribus, which is abbreviated as cet. par.

Wikipedia has given a list of Latin Abbreviations which could be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_abbreviations



.

3 comments:

melop said...

Hahahaha, again I'm sure you cannot produce a decent pronunciation lalala.
Anyway, remember etc.? = et cetera.
ceterus, -a, -um is a Latin adjective meaning, the rest. The neutral form ceterum could become a noun. "cetera" in et cetera is in plural nominative.
ceteris paribus is a phrase in plural ablative, whose singular nominative form should be ceterum par. Literally it means "the equal other". When declined into plural ablative, it means "with the equal others".
The Anglian language was considered barbarous by the Romans, who conquered Britannia, bringing tremendous amount of italic vocabulary into English. Certain anglophonic pedants tend to show off Latin terms(with their ridiculous anglosaxonic pronunciation), without realizing the ironic fact that their language was conquered by the Romans and the true English words had been long forgotten. Yes, I like Latin and I studied it, but at the same time I feel sorry for those English speakers who take pride to replace native English terms by Latin phrases. The same phenomenon can be observed in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, which borrowed so extensively from Classical Chinese that many of their own words were abandoned.

Anonymous said...

Er, hang on melop, we English didn't arrive in Britain until after the Romans left. You needn't feel sorry for anyone.

Muhammad Hassan said...

Very nice article, I enjoyed reading your post, very nice share, I want to twit this to my followers. Thanks!. paribus reviews