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Re: smallest ANCIENT non-bird dinosaur - was what I was asking

Warning: this is getting off-topic. In the second half of this post, the footnotes are longer than the main text. I'll try to keep it offlist after this.

Arguably "fowl" is a much better English translation of _Aves_.
Spanish speakers still get to use "pÃjaro", in any event.


OK, but...

(German doesn't seem to have the same birds/fowls//pÃjaros/aves//oiseaux/aves
dichotomy of some other European languages.) 

Neither do French or Russian.

I think we may be seeing a divide between English and other languages
here.

Actually, that could be true. To some extent, English seems to be splitting more, though maybe I'm overvaluing my favorite examples -- Testudines explained as "turtles, tortoises and terrapins", with the implication that there is no cover term (though some do use "turtles" for that, it seems), while German and French only have a cover term, and Crustacea, where German _Krebs_ (actually "crayfish") can be used for all malacostracans-or-so or even all crustaceans (next to the artificial technical term _Krebstiere_ "crayfish-animals" and the culinary term _Krustentiere_ "crust-animals").

Actually, anurans are a counterexample. English: frogs, toads. French: grenouilles, crapauds, rainettes (*Hyla*). German: FrÃsche, KrÃten, Unken (*Bombina*).

Hmmm. Someone should do statistics on this kind of thing. I can see the paper title... "Standard Average European animal terms: splitting and lumping"... :o)

In English perhaps we are more comfortable with the idea of a division
between clinical and everyday nomenclature? I am often amused when I
read German texts by the use of what seem like "coarse" words to me
(as a native English speaker). In English we frequently vernacularize
Graeco-Latin names: avian, pterosaur, etc. German seems to avoid this
whenever possible ("Vogel" for "avian") or do it halfheartedly
("Flugsaurier" for "pterosaur"). ("Dinosaurier" is one rare exception
I can think of.) In German, as in many languages, there doesn't seem
to be the same division between opaque clinical and transparent
commonplace terms that English has.

I'd say the division is there, it's just applied higher up in the ivory tower. Scientific papers to use _Pterosaurier_ most of the time, and never say _AugenhÃhle_ ("eye socket") when they can say _Orbita_. Doctors behave the same way.* Popularizations, on the other hand, immediately step down and use terms like _Oberarmknochen_ ("upper arm bone") and _Oberschenkelknochen_ ("thighbone").

In Russian, BTW, it's applied even higher up. I've seen scientific papers talking about the squamosal as _cheshuychataya (kost')_.

* I remember a nice scene in a detective movie where a forensic pathologist says the carotid artery is damaged and needs three seconds to remember the vernacular term while the rest of the department gazes in frustration: "Carotis... [hand waving]... pft pft pft [hand opening/closing]... Halsschlagader." No mere mortal understands "Carotis". In English, that is the only term in existence according to my admittedly non-gigantic dictionary, and not just is this term used, but also "jugular" is used -- the average German speaker doesn't know that the jugular vein exists, and there is no fixed phrase comparable to "going for the jugular".

One big difference in the histories of German and English is that the former has seen several movements to replace opaque loans by obsolete or dialectal words or new coinages with the aim to make them understandable.* Many of these attempts have been successful. This has introduced a layer of quasi-technical terms, such as _StachelhÃuter_ "echinoderm(s)" or even _Panzerfische_ "placoderms" (literally "armor fish"). Many of these terms are in fairly wide use.

* This phenomenon started after the enormous influence of French in the 18th century. It goes without saying that it regularly ventured off into the ultranationalistic and even into the deeply ridiculous.