
This place is looking more like the French forum every day!
Michael, you have bravely, and maybe somewhat foolishly, entered a minefield. And Steve was happy to follow.
For example, the position of the hands of a clock is an analog representation of time.
So you reckon time is continuous and not quantised...?!? Stick with the EngLitt, may I suggest, considering the debate raging on this subject in the physics world. And so what happens with the moving image captured on film: is that analog(ue) or digital? Our perception blurs the frames into a continuous signal, but they're still individual frames. A case where analogue is digital, then? Or you could say that the print from a digital camera has colour levels too fine for us to distinguish, and therefore is analogue.
I like the French term "argentique" (silver-based) for what you call analog(ue), even if even that is restrictive. Wouldn't it be fairer to say that both digital and silver-based photography utilise a physico-chemical vehicle, whether it's grain or pixel at the smallest dimension, and are not that different really? In one case, you shine light through the tranny (which acts as a signal processor), in the other case, the file guides the monitor's emission (software control - ie more signal processing). At most, you could say the former is subtractive and the latter additive.
For me, the term analogue is very close to analogy/ analogous. I don't see why silver-based or digital are any more analogous to the real-world (or a projected version thereof), one than the other. And like-wise with audio.
Charles, a word-nerd