GLGLGL! BLEP, BLEP was Re: nitpicking...

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>

> Torfinn Ørmen (torfinn.ormen@nhm.uio.no) wrote:
>
> <However, since the ending is supposed to come from Animalia: Note that
> Carl Linné's "Animalia" has one Latin ending otherwise typical for names
> of countries or geographic areas [...]

Unavoidable coincidence. Look up "animal" in a Latin dictionary... you'll
find just that, "animal", one of the rare i-declension nouns that end
in -al. Nominative plural: animalia.

> [...] and his treatment of groups of entities by geographic
> metaphors was certainly on purpose. [...]>

In the pretty long text that precedes his classification (there's a
facsimile volume in each the geosciences and the biosciences libraries
here...), he does mention countries and counties etc. to explain his new
hierarchy (as mentioned in the title: "...per regna tria naturae, secundum
classes, ordines, genera, species") -- he also mentions several other
hierarchical systems, always ones with 5 hierarchy levels.

> At least one great thing von Linné did before the
> classification caught on thanks to Cuvier was destroyed the Ladder of
> Nature, and we owe that man gratitude for this.

Right. And then he went ahead and put ourselves at the beginning of
Mammalia, followed by *Homo troglodytes*. :-)

>   Yeah, literally "those that breathe."

Correct, but not his invention. It's a genuine Latin word.

>   Mesozoica Itamberata .... erk

?

> <[...] Coleopterorum catalogus. [...]>

Very easy with all those -ptera (pteron --> "pterum" --> "pterorum"). Not
that easy with Dinosauria...

>   What is the origin of the terms -orum and -arum? As in, what do they
> derive from?

The answer to that should lie somewhere deep in the unrecorded history of
the Italic languages blah blah... bingo, probably the r is just to keep the
vowels apart, because oum and aum sound too dumb (all other declensions
have -um, so it's most parsimonious to assume that -um is the original
genetive plural ending for all).

> I have seen one comparative word, _sorum_,

Pure coincidence. :-)

**************************************
Nothing dinosaur-related in today's Nature. Apart from the author Alexander
W. Bird. :-)