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

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 11:20 AM, David Marjanovic
<david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
> 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.

Me too.

> > (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.

(Ignore my French example, then.) Portuguese and Italian, have it,
though (I think).

> 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),

Actually, using "turtles" for all testudinates (not just testudines,
the crown group) seems to be more common nowadays. The splitting into
three arbitrary groups was more of a British practice, I think, and
starting to die out. (I'm American and I've only ever encountered it
in older books. Not that we don't use the terms "tortoise" and
"terrapin", but they are subtypes of "turtle".)

(Incidentally, I love the German word for "turtle", "SchildkrÃte".
Shield-toad! Hahaha!)

> 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").

I love German animal names!!!

>  Actually, anurans are a counterexample. English: frogs, toads.

And science texts often say that toads are a type of frog. (That's not
the common usage, though, in my experience.)

> French: grenouilles, crapauds, rainettes (*Hyla*). German: FrÃsche, KrÃten, 
> Unken (*Bombina*).

Interesting. ("Unken" -- another great name. Onomatopoeic?)

>  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)

That would indeed be fascinating.

>  I'd say the division is there, it's just applied higher up in the ivory 
> tower.

Yes, I didn't mean to say that there was no division, just that it's
not as salient a feature of the language for German as it is for
English. (That's my impression, anyway.)

> Scientific papers to use _Pterosaurier_ most of the time,

Wellnhofer P. (1977), Araripedactylus dehmi nov.gen., nov.sp., ein
neuer Flugsaurier aus der Unterkreide von Brasilien. Mitt. Beyer.
Staatsslg. Paleont. hist. Geol. 17: 157-167.

Wild, R. (1978). Die Flugsaurier (Reptilia, Pterosauria) aus der
Oberen Trias von Cene bei Bergamo, Italien. Boll. Soc. Paleont. It.
17: 176-256.

(O.K., that doesn't contradict what you said, really.)

I'm suddenly reminded that the phenomenon extends to other types of
technical term as well. Where English has "the Lower Cretaceous",
German has "die Unterkreide" -- "the underchalk".

>  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.

Indeed, English seems to have almost the exact opposite attitude
(insofar as a language can have an attitude, of course).

[Interesting examples snipped.]
-- 
T. Michael Keesey
Director of Technology
Exopolis, Inc.
2894 Rowena Avenue Ste. B
Los Angeles, California 90039
http://exopolis.com/
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