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I'd heard of concatenate, but never catenate. I guess concatenate is a verb, and catenate is an adjective.

"Concatenate" seems redundant to me, as the Latin prefix "con" means "together" and the root "caten" is a chain. So technically it's "chain together", but a chain is already a thing that is linked together.

My Latin is rusty, but IIRC "con" can optionally just be added for emphasis, e.g. "iacere": to throw, but "conicere":to hurl. Maybe that's what was done here.

Links in a chain are already together. You absolutely can chain 2 things together that are not the chain itself. Where chain is used as a verb to describe the tying of things together. Saying chain together absolutely makes sence. Example "His ankles were chained together".

I thought maybe they chose "cat"enate to avoid a naming clash with a "con" command but looking back through the early Unix sources there doesn't appear to have been one.

Maybe it was to avoid confusion with Lisp's "cons" which conventionally (or always? It's been a while...) adds to the head of a list, whereas "cat" is a bit closer to adding to the tail. This is pure speculation on my part.

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