[FRIAM] looking for a word

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Coalescence is a very nice sidetrack, actually.  It, again, takes me back to the notion of *a* filtration, in particular ascending and descending filtrations.  A brief hunt for a good antonym of "coalesce" lands me on "fractionated".  I like that better than the temporal implications (evoked in *me* even if nobody else) of divergent.  The volume of space is *rationed* amongst the branches sprouted from a tree trunk, much like the volume of tissue is divied up amongst the sinusoids sprouted from the portal vein in the liver.  And I can say the same thing about the other side.  The tissue is fractioned/rationed/divied up amongst the sinusoids that lead into the liver's output.

Such a fractionated (fractioned? rationed? "binned"?) region can be talked about independent of the direction of flow.

And this idea of divying up the space carries with it some sort of agency, functionality, or purpose beyond the more objective terms like plexus or plenum, which could be engineered or natural.  Divied up how? Why? What is being optimized by tree branching, basin canalization, dendritic spreading, etc?

On 08/21/2018 08:22 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
> When you first asked, and hadn’t talked yet about specifically tree-like networks, I was thinking that the converging end could borrow the term “coalescent” from population genetics.  I don’t think the geneticists have a corresponding word for the final-time data that it is the purpose of the coalescent to assign a history to, but I guess the counterpart would be the “divergent”.  That would have been a strange notion for a merely-concentrated part of a network that wasn’t both treelike and directed in some sense, so I stayed quiet.  But it seems treelike networks with sources and destinations are still in the conversation.
> 
> Of course this has the problem that both words are natively adjectives, themselves derived from transitive verbs, which have now been repurposed as nouns in technical fields.  But maybe in linguistic typology that isn’t so uncommon (Bill Croft has told me this, but I don’t have a particularly good reference.  Perhaps
> http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACabst.html
> or his book(s?))

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