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Comment by alpinisme | Hacker News Reader

Transition is an odd one to get hung up on. We may not illumination but we do vacation, function, question, proposition, requisition, audition, reposition, and many other words of similar etymology.

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Not really. Many of those do not have other verb forms that mean the same thing.

I don’t understand what you mean here.

The verb form of "transition" is "transit." But there is no similar form of "function" (like "funct," for example).

Therefore the comparison is invalid.

I disagree that to transit is the right verb form of transition in general. Transit (to my ear) is pretty much limited to a change of place, usually even through something (you might “transit a stretch of wood”, to steal Merriam-Webster’s example). Transition is more generally about a state of change.

By the same token, you could still reject to question because the verb to quest exists.

Well, that's... like... your opinion, man. But not supported by etymology.

"Quest" and "question" are also not a valid comparison, because the two forms aren't even clearly the same word. For example, if someone goes on a quest through the jungle, you don't say "his question through the jungle was interrupted by a phone call from home." Or, "he questioned from one end of the jungle to the other."

But quest and question have the same etymology, just like transit and transition. Having the same etymology clearly does not mean that the words cannot diverge in meaning. And if you looked up transit and transition in a dictionary, you’d find that they’re considered distinct in meaning, much along the lines of what I wrote.

Which dictionary?

And quest/question are not parallel to transit/transition. If you think otherwise, please provide an example.

Merriam-Webster, OED, Wiktionary. (If you have a preferred dictionary not on the list, I’m sure you can look there yourself.) All of them have some variant of “to pass through” as the primary meaning of to transit and “to change from one state, place, etc. to another” as the meaning of to transition.

And I didn’t claim that quest and question had a similar relation as transit and transition in meaning, only that in both cases, the two words have the same etymological root. I mentioned this in reference to your claim that my opinion was not supported by etymology. It doesn’t have to be, because etymology doesn’t dictate the current meaning of a word, it can just try to explain it.

Vacate, query (or inquire), propose, require, audit, (re)posit. Idk about function but the word might be out there. The thing is that all of these have slightly shifted meanings when denominalized in English. To proposition someone isn’t just to propose something. And for a liquid to transition into vapor isn’t for it to transit.

Edit: We don’t have a straight verb but we do have fungible. So we could try to bring funge into the mix as the “proper” verb.

Note that I said "many." And yes it is "transit" when you go from water to vapor.

I do like "funge." Let's go for it! I'd be gruntled.

Merriam-Webster lists transition as both noun and verb from at east 1946.

The verbs transit and transition mean different things. The former is the physical movement, the latter is a change of state.

In the process of evaporation, water transitions from liquid to gaseous state. It doesn't *transit from liquid to gas.

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