Re: Erliansaurus etymology

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

David Marjanovic (david.marjanovic@gmx.at) wrote:

<That's the same as Iren [Dabasu], right?>

  Not really. Erlian is a township that was a small city at the time of
Andrews; the Iren Dabasu telegraph station is MUCH smaller and more
isolated, further to the south and west, and not so close to the Mongolian
border, which Erlian straddles. However, both represent localities in the
Iren Dabasu Formation, based on faunal comparisons that date further back
to Andrews' 1921 scouting expedition.

  I wrote:

<<Nei Monggol>>

  David corrects:

<Menggu.>

  In some systems. I am following National Geographic for now, and this
writes Monggol. This name also appears on the maps of most expeditions
there, though perhaps I can drop the second "g," as suggested by the use
of "neimongol" in the most recent papers on material being recovered by
Zhou, Sereno, Xu, etc., from that region. This is true even of the
Daohugao fauna papers released so far. They do not use "neimenggu," and
however correct it may or may not be, common usage would suggest
otherwise. This is also the case with using "Kazakstan" despite the
probably more correct "Qazaqstan;" even in Qazaqi publications, the "K" is
used. However the wroks are transliterated into the English they are used
for publication, I would offer to follow their nomenclature for the nonce.

<Actually... in classical Latin, that's just "pretty". But Sereno et al.
didn't know that either.>

  In "classical" forms, perhaps, but I beleive the middle and later Latin
forms took this connotation of general beauty when the language became the
wellspring of the Romance structures, such as using _bella_ and
_bellissimo_, _belo_, etc., for something beautiful. _Beata_ was used in a
more glorified manner by Late Latin, so I think that, at least as far as
the Oxford is used in other etymological constructs, Zhou et al. were
justified in using _bella_, as were Dong et al. in naming *Bellusaurus*.
The "appropriateness" is arguable, but the intended meaning and the use of
the word by the time the work was published is likely to stand, as their
intent was clearly stated.

  Cheers,

=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)

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