Re: reason for "s = distance travelled" - Wrapup

[brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>]

At 10:08 8/24/97 +0200, Inge wrote:
> I got recently a question from one of my students that I couldn't
> answer. The question was simply : "What is the reason for using
> the letter s to denote distance travelled ?". I promised to check it
> out, so if anyone has a historical/philological explanation I would be
> grateful to receive it.
>
> Inge H. A. Pettersen	


I quote by permission:

> At 02:26 8/25/97 -0400, David M. MacMillan wrote:
> ...
> Yes, much of Galileo's manuscript work survives.  It forms the
> basis for much of the analysis in Stillman Drake's wonderful
> _Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography_.
> From a brief look through that and from a skim through
> _Two New Sciences_, "s" does not appear in this sense.
>
> However, I would suggest that this is not surprising.  Galileo
> worked in a pre-Cartesian world and did not have available to
> him the concept of arithmetized space.  You don't, therefore,
> find Galileo saying that an object was displaced by a distance s
> in a time t.  Rather, you find him drawing a diagram, labelling
> the points on the diagram, and making statements about the
> proportions of various members of the diagram.  His space is
> geometrical, but not arithmetical.
> ...
> David M. MacMillan


I received another interesting note from a German PhD candidate
to the effect that is was common knowledge that early German work
used Latin terms.
 It seemed evident to him that s was the initialization of 'spatium'.

I was interested to find that a dictionary discloses that this 
word has a portmanteau character - it can be taken to mean
 'space, extent, distance (between points), track, course ( of races),
period, interval (of time),quantity (of meter).'

This seems a highly plausible first cause of the letter s's use.

I am unable to report a useage earlier than Maxwell's (1850) though
I am confident that earlier texts exist.

I hope that Inge's student will find at least some satisfaction in this
short report. They will notice that it is not quite definitive.

A student might do worse that publish a brief note in a European learned 
journal with results of searches on earlier texts.
  Age would be no impediment to this objective.

Sincerely,

brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK