Semi-, Hemi-, Demi-这几个前缀的区别
2014-10-20 22:49阅读：
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爱思英语编者按：Semi-, Hemi-, Demi-这几个前缀都有“半”的意思，那么区别在哪儿呢？
Semi-, Hemi-, Demi-: What’s the Difference?
English has a number of pre
fixes that come from the concept of “half.” Why
do we have so many? And what’s the difference between them?
1. SEMI
Semi-, from the Latin for “half,” is the most common and the
earliest to show up in English. It was first used, with the
straight sense of “half,” in the word semicircular, but soon
attached to concepts that were harder to quantify. It’s easy t
o see what a half circle looks like, but what amount of “abstract”
is “semi-abstract”? How permanent is “semi-permanent”? Through
these less concrete uses, which proliferated wildly in the 1800s,
semi- came to mean “virtually” or “somewhat.”
2. HEMI
Hemi- is from the Greek for “half.” It is less common than semi-,
and it is associated more strongly with technical language in
fields like chemistry, biology, and anatomy. Its sense of “half,”
more than semi-, implies a lengthwise axis of symmetry. This is not
obvious for the most common hemi- word, hemisphere (since a sphere
is symmetrical all the way around), but a hemicylinder, is not just
half a cylinder, it’s the half cut lengthwise, and hemiplegic
doesn’t just mean half the body is
paralyzed,
but the right or left half (paraplegic is the
term for when
only the lower half is
paralyzed).
3. DEMI
Demi is from the French for “half.” It was first used in English in
heraldry, where things like demi-angels, demi-lions, demi-horses
show up. It also held sway in other specific domains, such as
military (demi-brigade) and fashion (demi-cap,
demi-lustre, demi-worsted). It also picked up the sense of
“virtual” or even “lesser.” A demigod, after all, is not quite the
real thing.
It might seem ridiculous that English had to borrow a “half”
pre
fix
from three different places, but if it didn’t we wouldn’t get to
have a word like hemidemisemiquaver—that’s a 64th note, in other
words, a half of a half of a half of an eighth note, which is so
much less fun to say than hemidemisemiquaver.
