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

On second thoughts, given that intervocalic -s- tends to drop in Greekm
maybe what's going on historically speaking is that the -s in nominative
*mys* is part of the stem, whereas the stem has been regularly transformed
into *my-* in forms like gentiive *myos*.

In which case *myagra* and *mysphonon* could both be historically regular,
the -s being perseved before a consonant but lost before a vowel.

On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 9:41 AM Andreas Johansson <[email protected]>
wrote:

> "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.
>>
>>
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.avg.com_email-2Dsignature-3Futm-5Fmedium-3Demail-26utm-5Fsource-3Dlink-26utm-5Fcampaign-3Dsig-2Demail-26utm-5Fcontent-3Dwebmail&d=DwMFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=Ry_mO4IFaUmGof_Yl9MyZgecRCKHn5g4z1CYJgFW9SI&m=Puqh-CHtNmypixpNjz5Ium_amHOVbuYv89HtBgmmvME&s=sQccAUytkKgwB3waOBpAxrZ_PgZtT7aZ9y-MN7hOwTU&e=> Virus-free.
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>> <#m_9034279648585568556_m_7971321606278017172_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>
>> 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?
>


-- 
Andreas Johansson

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