Talk:Mega-

Move
This should be moved to mega- and get a lowercase tag. See Talk:Micro for rationale. — Omegatron 17:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

On metric tonnes
From a previous version of the article: "The metric tonne is 1,000 kg, so it is in fact this unit that should be called the megagram."


 * Yes, and so what...? What does that have to do with non-standard usage of mega? --Wernher 03:23, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Popularity of mega- as general prefix (not SI)
How popular of a belief is it to think it's okay to use mega- for a million as if it belonged in the Greek numerical prefixes article (that is, to use it as if it were a general numerical prefix rather than just an SI prefix)?? 66.245.120.241 02:00, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Er, I don't know of (m)any cases where that is done (e.g. making a word such as "megagon", meaning a "polygon with a million sides" [ cf, for example, hexagon ] &mdash; if that was what you meant? --Wernher 15:49, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Etymology of 'megas'
Greek is not descended from Sanskrit. The closest analogy is that they're cousins: Greek is (if memory serves) the oldest well-attested language on the 'centum' side of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages, and Sanskrit is the oldest well-attested language from the 'satem' side. Please read the articles on Indo-European languages for an in-depth explanation.

The basic gist is that all IE languages are descended from a common ancestor language (dubbed Proto-Indo-European or PIE), for which there is no written evidence. Words in PIE are reconstructed best-guesses based on examining similarities between modern IE languages, and how the sounds of words have evolved over the past two thousand years, and working backwards to derive common 'ancestral' words, along with their hypothetical meanings. Any unattested word (word that there's no written evidence for) derived in this way must be prefixed with an asterix *, to show that we can't be certain it existed.


 * So then why did somebody say it was? 74.38.32.195 00:59, 28 February 2007 (UTC)