the logical art of technology

yes, that's right, time for another etymological interlude.

over the summer (yes, my backlog of things to blog really is that long), I started wondering, what are the etymological roots of the word "technology?" well, with a little help from dictionary.com's entry on technology, I discovered the following.

from the Greek technología systematic treatment. see techno-, -logy

looking at the entries for techno- and -logy reveal something quite interesting.

techno- is from téchné, for art or skill. it's also used particularly to form compound words meaning "technique" or "technology." -logy, from the Latin -logie, which is in turn from the Greek -logia, refers us to -logue. this stem comes also from Latin, -logus, then Greek, -logos, and makes another reference to logos, the word from this stem derives. the word logos in English refers to rational principles in philosophy. the Greek logos refers to a word, saying, speech, discourse, thought, etc. (the interested reader can also refer to similarities between logos and lection).

to what does this amount? well, techno- is used to refer to a technique, meaning an art or skill. logos is used to refer to logic, particularly that sort of rational logical reasoning in Western philosophy. as I technologist, I find this somewhat inspiring, that technology can be seen, in a way, as a meeting of art and logic. not that it is logical art, not that it is artistic logic, but that it is its own hybrid of the two. however, I also find it in a way illuminating with respect to many of the challenges faced in technology development. by its very nature, technology, especially computational technology, requires codification, explication, and quantification. however, the téchné of the things for which we use computational technologies--social interaction, cultural artifacts, knowledge and meaning construction--by their very nature resist codification, explication, and especially quantification.

I don't think all of this is necessarily implied by the word "technology" itself. the point here is instead to demonstrate how the etymology of the word can be used as an elicitor of (potentially useful) reflection.

an etymological interlude

so, the academic unit where I'm doing my Ph.D. is called the Department of Informatics. I'd never really thought about it until a little while ago, but what do you call someone who does informatics? biology is practices by biologists, chemistry by chemists, mathematics by mathematicians, statistics by statisticians, therapy by therapists, etc. so, what does one call a practitioner of informatics? I think there are two distinct possibilities:

informatician

informaticist

this quandry was started when David Kay, for whom I was TAing last quarter, used the former term. it threw me off guard, as it took me a moment to parse it. after having done so, I thought, how cumbersome. first, how does one pronounce that? he said it with a small emphasis on the first syllable and a large emphasis on the fourth, the same emphatic pattern as mathematician. this isn't too bad, but it ends up making the "o" pronounced with that soft vowel sound denoted by an up-side-down "e," which I think masks the root word "information." I think the latter alternative, with an an emphasis only on the third syllable, is easier to pronounce, is clearer about the proper pronounciation, and pays clearer homage to the root word.

when I started thinking about that, I said, hm, I wonder what the etymology of information is. turns out it's from a participial form of the Latin informare (which is actually the origin of "inform," the root for "information"), meaning to form into, implicitly to form into a shape. I thought this was particularly striking, especially when one considers the way that one interpretation of informatics, according to Bill, is "the process of transforming data into information." the etymology would seem to indicate not only that informatics could refer to the process of informing, but also the study of that process. interesting indeed.

however, this gets us no closer to the goal of determining the proper form of the word to refer to one who practices informatics. so, I looked into the two suffixes, -ist and -ian. on first glance, it seems that -ist is more appropriate; "one that performs a specialized action ... a specialist in a specified art, science, or skill," as opposed to "one relating to, belonging to, or resembling." dig a little further into the etymology. -ist is from the Latin noun-forming suffix -ista, -istes, which is from the Greek agent noun suffix -istEs, and I believe an agent noun is exactly what we're trying to form. -ian, on the other hand, is from the Latin -ianus, meaning of or belonging to, hence noun forms like "Bostonian" or "Washingtonian." however, -ianus was, it seems (see the third bullet point under that link), used to refer to the original family name of an adopted person, quite literally indicating from whom they had come and to whom they belonged. why, then, do mathematician, statistician, physician, and a number of others use the -ian (or its derivative, -ician) suffix? it could be that these are fields to which one can belong or from which one can come, in a way that fields that get the -ist suffix are less focused on being a well-defined group and more focused on the object of study. in this way, it would be appropriate to say that someone was from mathematics, but not that someone was from physics. however, I suspect that this is far more likely an etymological artifact than as aspect that carries great amounts of meaning.

given all these considerations, I think that "inforamiticist" is a much more appropriate, if not accurate, form of the word. what do you think, which form do you prefer? or would you possibly suggest an alternate formation?