Re: Intentive/intentiveness

kkrolewna wrote:
Hello everybody (and everything)!
I have a question to native speakers of English (only): how much
strange do the above words sound to you?
I searched it in several dictionaries and it appears that both
"intentive" and "intentiveness" were in use some 100 years ago
(they're in 1913 Webster's) but I didn't find it in any contemporary
dictionary.
The reason I'd like to know this is that I translate a contemporary
philosophical text (phenomenology) in which the term is used and I'd
like to opt for a bit unconventional and strange-sounding
translation. So if the terms sounded strange to today English
speakers, it would be an argument for the proposed translation.
In the text the terms are reffered to as a D.Cairn's terms from the
time when he lectured in New School of Social Research, which mean
they had to be used in between 1953 and 1969 for the first time (as
technical terms with the given meaning), and in that time it
probably already sounded quite oldfashioned, I suppose - at least
to the listeners, if not for Cairns (who was born in 1901). Or
could anybody give some evidence that in that time the words were
normally in use? The main question is, though, how it sounds today
to your today-ears. I'm waiting for interesting answers (confirming
my point ;))) Katarzyna

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "strange". It doesn't seem
peculiar to me, so much as unfamiliar. I would have to guess at the
meaning, and my guess for "intentive" would be something like
"relating to intention", which is not exactly what OneLook says it
means. Unless context makes the meaning very clear, I would hope to
see the word defined on first use.


.

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