Dear Shadow watchers (if not shadowy types!) A little while ago, someone (can't remember who now) posted a report about Martian sundials by Bill Nye. Several pages into it he refers to early Greek sundials by the name Plekhnaton(s). I had never met this word before, and wondered what it meant. By chance I work with a native Athenian, and asked her, without disclosing what i knew about it, whether she could tell me what it meant, at least broadly. She could not, which slightly puzzled me. After all, a word like that is surely constructed from root words (much as the words helicopter or pterosaur are; if you understand broadly what the root words mean, you can work out that one means something like a helical wing and the other wing-lizard, even if you have never encountered the objects themselves). There seemed to be no sensible Greek roots to this word though. She then asked a linguistic friend who also could not understand it. She did suggest it might be Ancient Greek (which apparently is vastly different from modern Greek), but I maintain that if so, Bill Nye would not be using it as no-one would understand it, AND it still must originate from somewhere. This word is clearly not plucked (?plekhed) out of thin air!
So I am now intrigued as to where this word came from and what exactly it means. It isn't easy to invent a whole new technical word (which appears to have roots anyway) from scratch (except perhaps acronyms and street slang), so just what is its origin? Does anyone know? Has anyone met the word before (and I hope I don't get hundreds of replies saying what a common word it is, and how I can find it in any dictionary etc....) Peter Tandy -
