RE: Newbie

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

Title: RE: Newbie

>On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Boyse, Jim wrote:
>>
>> <clip>
>> Yep, except the plural of schema is schemas. See me after class :-)
>> </clip>
>>

>> Shucks, I was hoping it was schemata.  Sort of like stigma, stigmata.

>

I wrote about this in the second edition of the XML Bible. To quote:

You say schemas, I say schemata

Probably no single topic has been more controversial in the schema world than the proper plural form of the word schema. The original Greek plural is Û¯ËÌ·Ù·, schemata in Latin transliteration; and this is the form which Kant used and which you'll find in most dictionaries. This was fine for the 200 years when only people with PhDs in philosophy actually used the word. However, as often happens when words from other languages are adopted into popular English, its plural changed to something that sounds more natural to an Anglophone ear. In this case, the plural form schemata seems to be rapidly dying out in favor of the simpler schemas. In fact, the three World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) schema specifications all use the plural form schemas. I follow this convention in this book.

The entire chapter is online at http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/chapters/ch24.html if anyone's interested.

--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
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