Re: [dinosaur] Keresdrakon, new pterosaur from Cretaceous of Brazil (free pdf)

"The stem of the Greek noun mys is my-"

Which only goes to show that even the ancients were sometimes confused
about stems - as the Latin, English, etc. forms show, it must earlier have
been mys- (or mus- if the stem reinterpretation predated the fronting of
the vowel).

On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 3:32 AM Ben Creisler <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ben Creisler
> [email protected]
>
> I rushed the last reply a bit and missed a typo on keressiphoretos (NOT
> "keressiphanetos").
>
> Responding to David...
>
> The term Neo-Latin (also called New Latin and modern Latin) is commonly
> used for not only formal zoological names but also for modern medical
> terms, technological and scientified terms (helicopter, telescope, in
> English), etc. Starting in the Renaissance, Neo-Latin was actually a fully
> developed language for scholarly discourse that lasted up into the 19th
> century.
> Neo-Latin had a different vocabulary and different meanings compared to
> classical Latin.
>
> It survives now mainly only in names of animals, plants, microbes, and
> medical conditions. The ICZN still imposes a few Latin rules (use of the
> Latin alphabet, family-group suffixes, gender matches, etc.). (Botanical
> descriptions no longer have to be written in Latin.)
>
> I gave the example of Mosaesaurus to show that some people tried to
> "correct" the grammar to match the intended meaning "saurian of the Meuse"
>  more explicitly compared to the original spelling Mosasaurus. I in no way
> implied that the form Mosaesaurus was the valid name.
>
> Greek had both the words myagra and mysphonon for a moustrap. The stem of
> the Greek noun mys is my-.
>
> If the first part of compound is a noun that ends in a vowel, it is
> sometimes left as-is, which gives the appearance of a noun in the
> nominative case. The grammatical meaning, though, can be similar to regular
> compound formed from stems.
>
> I'll do a future post of various points.
>
>
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>
> On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 3:23 PM David Marjanovic <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Gesendet: Samstag, 24. August 2019 um 20:50 Uhr
>> Von: "Ben Creisler" <[email protected]>
>>
>> > The bottom line here is Neo-Latin is distinct from classical Greek and
>> Latin.
>>
>> There is no such thing as "Neo-Latin". Taxonomic names are just a set of
>> nouns and adjectives, not a language.
>>
>> Personally, I find there is something to be said for abandoning the
>> pretense of Latin altogether not only if you're unable to do Latin right,
>> but also if you simply aren't feeling like it: *Juratyrant* is unmodified
>> English, problem solved. A heap of names from China are toneless but
>> otherwise unmodified Standard Mandarin, problem solved. *Seitaad* is
>> toneless Navajo without the apostrophe for the ejective consonant in the
>> middle, problem solved...
>>
>> The ICZN allows practically anything you can imagine, including
>> meaningless combinations of letters as long as the result looks kinda
>> pronounceable and doesn't cause too much offense (neither "looks kinda" nor
>> "too much" are defined). There are actual cases of this: the name of the
>> Jurassic bivalve *Gythemon* Casey, 1952, may look Greek, but it's
>> arbitrarily made up out of thin air, and there's nothing wrong with that.
>>
>> > There are many examples in Neo-Latin zoological names in paleontology
>> in which two nouns are combined without modifying the ending of the first
>> word.
>>
>> Most of these are formed the way compound nouns were formed in Classical
>> Greek and, very rarely, in slightly pre-Classical* Latin: by taking the
>> _stem_ of the first noun and sticking it on the second noun, exactly as the
>> ICZN wants it.
>>
>> The trick is that not all Latin or Greek nouns have special nominative
>> singular endings (-s, -m/-n) to begin with. The Latin ones that end in -a
>> don't; their dictionary form is the endingless stem. That means there's
>> nothing whatsoever dubious about *Mosasaurus*, *Camarasaurus* or (once
>> theke has been Latinized to theca) *Thecachampsa*. I suspect *Platecarpus*
>> should have had -a- instead of -e- even if Latin is completely left out of
>> the picture, but don't actually know enough Greek to tell.
>>
>> * Specifically in Plautus: legerupa ("lawbreaker") from lex (leg-s, a
>> "consonant stem" that gets extended with -e- when a vowel is needed),
>> sociofrauda ("who defrauds his friends") from socius (socio-s after a sound
>> shift that turned -os, -ol, -om into -us, -ul, -um). That's pretty much it.
>> Later Latin, like the Romance languages today, avoid noun compounding (e.g.
>> by resorting to "breaker of the law").
>>
>> > It gets a bit messy because Parkinson changed the spelling to
>> Mosaesaurus (using a genitive "of the Meuse") in later editions of the book.
>>
>> Irrelevant, because "Mosaesaurus" is invalid by the principle of priority
>> (and because *Mosasaurus* isn't a nomen oblitum). It's an objective junior
>> synonym.
>>
>> > Other examples include Confuciusornis, Xiphosura, etc., where  for ease
>> of pronunciation or clarity of etymology, a first noun is left unmodified
>> with a grammatical ending intact with a consonant before a vowel.
>>
>> Bad examples: neither ease of pronunciation nor clarity of etymology
>> would be any worse in the expected forms "Confuciornis" and "Xiphura".
>> These names were simply coined by people who – like practically all people
>> on this planet except the very few (and shrinking!) who've had a very, very
>> peculiar kind of education – didn't know enough about Latin or Greek to
>> even wonder whether they should ask someone who might know better.
>>
>> > However, Greek had amphisbaina  (amphisbaena) for serpent that could go
>> forward or backward with a head at each end, and mysphonon "mousetrap" with
>> an s retained.
>>
>> I don't know about amphis-; but the -s in mys is not (only) the
>> nominative ending, it's part of the stem, as you can see from the fact that
>> the stem of the Latin homolog of that word, mus, is mur-*, and the fact
>> that the -s is still there in the English homolog – mouse.
>>
>> * Between vowels, s became r a few hundred years before Classical times.
>> Or rather, it became [z] a few hundred years before Latin or any Italic
>> language was written, then this [z] was written S in the first few Latin
>> inscriptions because there was no dedicated letter for [z]** and because
>> the language treated the difference between [s] and [z] as predictable and
>> therefore meaningless. Later this [z] merged into the existing [r], and [r]
>> from both sources has been spelled R ever since.
>>
>> ** The letter Z existed, but stood for [dz] and/or [zd], neither of which
>> occurred in Latin. It's only later that Greek went through a sound change
>> that simplified this to [z].
>>
>

-- 
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?