COMPUTING SYLLOGISMS

Etymologies are interesting. This blog post traces the etymology of the word syllogism. Therefore, this blog post is interesting. The word syllogism, meaning "a logical conclusion, normally based on two sentences" comes directly from the Old French word silogisme. from Latin syllogismus, from Greek sullogismos, literally meaning "inference". This is derived from the earlier word sullogizomai, which meant "computation" and "infer" simultaneously; it's easy to see how these two forms of logic shared some phonemes here. Sullogizomai is a compound, of the prefix sun-, meaning "together", and of logizomai, "to compute". Sun traces back to its PIE cognate sem, and we can eliminate the -izomai suffix by tracing it to the PIE denominative suffix -idyeti. The root, logos, meant "reason" or "word" and can be traced to the PIE root leg, meaning "to gather", supposedly because one with reason gathers their wits? Eh. Interesting!