IOhannes m zmölnig wrote: >> My dictionary (American Heritage) says 'homogenous' is an acceptable spelling >> of 'homogeneous', and it's how I pronounce the word. > > So I did a quick check, and Merriam-Webster [1] seems to allow the > 'homogenous' > spelling as well. > Other sources [2] even suggest that 'homogenous' is the de-facto spelling of > the > word, while the Online Etymology Dictionary - which according to [3] suggested > that this is an 'erroneous spelling of "homogeneous"' - claims in it's current > edition [4] that it is 'a spelling of "homogeneous" that represents a common > pronunciation' (thus accepting the spelling).
The version I learned at school is that "homogeneous" and "homogenous" are spelled differently because they're different words with different meanings and different pronunciations, and the word people usually mean is "HOMOGENEOUS"; but even in those days the upshot was that it was far too late to stop people using "HOMOGENOUS" when what they "really mean" is "HOMOGENEOUS". And my paper en_GB dictionary even suggests that the Mediaeval Latin word we borrowed it from already had the same inconsistency. > I would therefore suggest to consider 'homogenous' to be a false positive and > drop it from the lintian database. Agreed. The two words have been homogenised by usage. -- JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package