At a recent conference the name of a program transitioning new nurses to practice was "Gnosis." They said it means "specialized knowledge." I know that "gnosis" and "diagnosis," come from the word gignoskein, meaning "to know." However, the definition of "gnosis" in most dictionaries is "Intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths, an esoteric form of knowledge sought by the Gnostics." Is the "specialized knowledge" part an extension of that definition...or was the speaker using liberties with the definition?

Gnosis is just the Greek for 'knowledge'. In English it's used in particular for the special knowledge sought by the Gnostics, but that's just a historical accretion. It is in principle re-borrowable for any kind of knowledge.

On an unrelated point, I don't much approve of The New Oxford Dictionary of English, but amid all its dumbing down it has made one big improvement: they no longer describe words as coming from the nominative of nouns or the infinitive of verbs. Gnosis doesn't come from gignoskein; rather both come from the root gno- 'know'. The first has an abstract noun suffix -sis, the second a reduplication, an inceptive (?) stem suffix -sk-, and the infinitive ending -ein. The infinitive is not a primary form.

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an inceptive (?) stem suffix -sk-

aput, I've usually seen -sko- called an inchoative suffix. (That may be an older term though.)

Oh well, inceptive and inchoative are the same thing grammatically. The '(?)' is there because for some reason I first thought it was frequentative; then thought of cresco and that 'know' was semantically perfective, and so decided it was more likely inceptive/inchoative.

[Smiling at aput and zmj in bemused, confused fascination.]

Would it be possible to translate for the simpleminded, or is the matter too long and convoluted?

Zmj, you were learning yiddish, I believe? Zog mir a bisel linguistics.

Inceptive, inchoative, and ingressive are grammatical terms for pretty much the same verbal aspect. A-H defines aspect as "A category of the verb designating primarily the relation of the action to the passage of time, especially in reference to completion, duration, or repetition." Take completion, many languages have the notion of an action which has been completed (perfect) and one that is on-going or uncompleted (imperfect). The inchoative aspect is one that is defined as having started or become. This is separate from the grammatical category of tense. For example, what is the difference between "I read the book ysterday" and "I was reading the book ysterday"? In the former, there is a sense, usually, that you finished reading the book. In the latter, that you mightn't've finished it. This is the difference, in many languages (e.g., Hebrew, Russian, Spanish), between perfect and imperfect. Both actions, though, took place in the past. So, they're both past (or preterite) tense.

In English, aspect is reflected in the verbal paradigm, as a periphrastic (e.g., have + V + -ed, be + V + -ing), but in many languages aspect is marked by verbal affixes. aput was saying that -sko- is an inceptive in some IE languages: e.g., Latin.

Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up! <scratches head>

Perhaps aput can explain it better.

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mightn't've

Now that is a manly word, zmjezhd.

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a manly word

Ta, Sean. Strangely enough, I thought it effete.