cartesian miniver 'Cartesius' is (was) the latin form of 'Descartes'. So they didn't just arbitrarily cut off the "des", as one might suppose. Which might make you wonder if at some point the French arbitrarily ADDED a "des". But, as we are all aware, "des", itself, has meaning (and is a word) in the french language. French "des" takes the place of Latin "ius", oui? 'Of'. Of something... Of course, looking back far enough, all assignment of words to concepts will be arbitrary. Except, perhaps, onomatopoeia. Or do you suppose that maybe every concept has (/had) some sort of intrinsic syllabic pattern that subconsciously pervades our attribution of certain sounds to it? Or is it conscious, and no one has ever taken the time to tell me about this before? There must be some sort of linguistic theories on the matter. I'm not THAT original. 001010 ... j_blue i think onomotopeia (sp?), like visual communication, contains decisions made by the sender, which may be culturally biased, which contains arbitrary decisions. however, visual communication and onomotolalala also refer often to events of the non cultural variety... 001010 what's it to you? who go blather from