Re: Albisaurus... and Shuvuuia... and Cryptovolans

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>   Sorta like how Carl von Linné, a Swede, got transformed into Carolus
> Linnaeus to suit the (at the time) convention of formal Latin _everything_
> in science.

Looks like this occurred to his father or an earlier ancestor -- in church, 
not science.

> Yang Zhang-jian

Zhongjian.

> becam Young Chang-chin,

Chung-chien. Pinyin wasn't invented yet, so Wade-Giles was used. :-) "Young" 
is obviously an attempt to make the name look more like English, if not a 
downright pun; and I think he did that himself, not some journal editor.

> Müller (Mueller) became Miller, and so forth.

Isn't that just a translation? And there are Englishmen called Miller in the 
first place, aren't there?

> Take harder names, like the Welsh and Czeck and Hungarian names,
> or even Polish, and you get similar stories.

In Vienna there are lots of cases of this, too. And there are _repeated_ 
cases. For example, there's a TV commentator called Renate Csörgits. Looks 
like a typical Burgenland-Croatian name (Hungarian orthography + ts for what 
became c with accent when Serbocroatian orthography was invented in the 
mid-late 19th century) -- except for the ö which can't be Croatian, maybe 
it's Hungarian... Or take the director of the State Opera, Ioan Holender. 
Comes from Romania... and Holländer means Dutchman in German.
        The ch in the Czech language is pronounced as in German and in Loch 
Ness, 
not as k.

Ah! Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs! ...

Many thanks to HP Ben Creisler for the link to the pdf on *Shuvuuia*. At last 
I learn it's Tögrögiyn... OK, not linguistics again. I don't completely 
understand why the authors think *S.* has more than 35 vertebrae in its 
surprisingly *Jeholornis*-like tail. More than 25 are preserved, but with 
counting through the missing parts, I can barely pass 30. Where's my mistake? 
Do I underestimate the missing number of proximal caudals?

HP Tim Williams proposed that *Cryptovolans* could be *Microraptor*. Doesn't 
the former have a much longer tail?