Most males become sadly familiar with this term. But take a look at the etymology!

alopecia [ˌ©¡lə'pi¢°ʃ©¥ə]
noun loss of hair, esp. on the head; baldness
[ETYMOLOGY: 14th Century: from Latin, from Greek alopekia, originally: mange in foxes, from alopex fox]

Do you know any other words that use this root?

Alopeks 'fox' from *wlp- (*lup-) 'dog-like beast of prey (fox, jackel, wolf)' :- Latin volpes 'fox'. There's another root *wlkwos 'wolf' :- whence Skt vrka 'wolf', lupus (whichis listed as a Sabine loanword), English wolf.

The /w/ sound in Greek is interesting. There used to be a special letter called digamma that looked like an italic capital eff. It stopped being pronounced and used before the classical period. Dropped at the beginnings of words like in alopeks above. There were a couple of other letters in the old Greek alphabet, some of which still appear as numerals (letters in Greek and Phonoecian alphabets doubled as numbers).

italic capital eff=F?

italic capital eff=F?

Yeah, that's pretty much how it look. More rounded on the top. It was alled a digamma 'cause it looked like a gamma with a second crossbar. (I'm not sure if it's even in Unicode, but it should be.)

I see that Unicode has both upper- and lowercase digamma (0x03dc and 0x03dd), as well as qoppa (0x03dec and 0x03df) and sampi (0x03e0 and 0x03e1). I'll try pasting them in as XML entities, but that might not work: Ϝ, ϝ, Ϟ, ϟ, Ϡ, ϡ. (I only see the capital versions in my browser.)

The URL below has the PDF for this section of Unicode and includes Coptic letters, too.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf

thanks, jheem. wow. there's so much I never knew I didn't know...

Wenige wissen wieviel man wissen muss, um zu wissen wie wenig man weiss.

"Few know how much one to know must, around to know as few one white."

cool.

as few one white

Whadjoo, cygne, get that from Babelfish?

Sherlock, my dear Watson...

Sherlock as in that miserable attempt to find stuff on Macs?

It's sure luck to find anything alimentary on a Mc

miserable attempt

yup. that'd be the one. I couldn't find my usual translator page, so I resorted to Sherlock. woeizmi...

For what it's worth, I doubt your usual translator page would have done much better.


Take it from a human: Few know how much one must know to know how little one knows.