Discussion Groups / British English / January 2004

John Briggs at <john.briggs4@ntlworld.com> says in
<0zwSb.13865$JL4.113401@newsfep4-glfd.server.ntli.net>:

I agree. A syllable seems to be missing. The first meaning of
"perceptibility" that's given by the dead-trees 1993 edition of _The New
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_  is "the faculty of or capacity for
perceiving", and so in that meaning we can see that it's a synonym for
"perceptivity".

The _NSOED_'s second and somewhat clashing meaning is "the state or property
of being perceptible".

So the _NSOED_'s first meaning relates to the entity that does the
perceiving, and its second meaning relates to the entity that's perceived.

I agree. And/or politely ask the people who run "Euroglot Professional 4.01"
to hire a professional troubleshooter of dictionaries.

Weedpecker's pic-files at <http://weedpecker.cjb.net/wina/euroglot.jpg>
(Dutch) and <http://weedpecker.cjb.net/wina/euroglot2.jpg> (German) show
that Euroglot Professional gives the Dutch noun for "perceptibity" (which we
now guess is trying to mean "perceptibility") as "perceptievermogen" and the
German noun  as "Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit".

Perhaps a Dutch-speaking or German-speaking reader of this thread will tell
us whether either of those mouthfuls refers to the entity that does the
perceiving or whether it refers to the entity that's perceived.

Or perhaps both the Dutch language and the German language share the English
language's love of allowing mutually contradictory meanings for some words.