Re: [dinosaur] Keresdrakon, new pterosaur from Cretaceous of Brazil (free pdf)

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

Gesendet:ÂSamstag, 24. August 2019 um 20:50 Uhr
Von:Â"Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>

> The bottom line here is Neo-Latin is distinct from classical Greek and Latin.

There is no such thing as "Neo-Latin". Taxonomic names are just a set of nouns 
and adjectives, not a language.

Personally, I find there is something to be said for abandoning the pretense of 
Latin altogether not only if you're unable to do Latin right, but also if you 
simply aren't feeling like it: *Juratyrant* is unmodified English, problem 
solved. A heap of names from China are toneless but otherwise unmodified 
Standard Mandarin, problem solved. *Seitaad* is toneless Navajo without the 
apostrophe for the ejective consonant in the middle, problem solved...

The ICZN allows practically anything you can imagine, including meaningless 
combinations of letters as long as the result looks kinda pronounceable and 
doesn't cause too much offense (neither "looks kinda" nor "too much" are 
defined). There are actual cases of this: the name of the Jurassic bivalve 
*Gythemon* Casey, 1952, may look Greek, but it's arbitrarily made up out of 
thin air, and there's nothing wrong with that.

> There are many examples in Neo-Latin zoological names in paleontology in 
> which two nouns are combined without modifying the ending of the first word.

Most of these are formed the way compound nouns were formed in Classical Greek 
and, very rarely, in slightly pre-Classical* Latin: by taking the _stem_ of the 
first noun and sticking it on the second noun, exactly as the ICZN wants it.

The trick is that not all Latin or Greek nouns have special nominative singular 
endings (-s, -m/-n) to begin with. The Latin ones that end in -a don't; their 
dictionary form is the endingless stem. That means there's nothing whatsoever 
dubious about *Mosasaurus*, *Camarasaurus* or (once theke has been Latinized to 
theca) *Thecachampsa*. I suspect *Platecarpus* should have had -a- instead of 
-e- even if Latin is completely left out of the picture, but don't actually 
know enough Greek to tell.

* Specifically in Plautus: legerupa ("lawbreaker") from lex (leg-s, a 
"consonant stem" that gets extended with -e- when a vowel is needed), 
sociofrauda ("who defrauds his friends") from socius (socio-s after a sound 
shift that turned -os, -ol, -om into -us, -ul, -um). That's pretty much it. 
Later Latin, like the Romance languages today, avoid noun compounding (e.g. by 
resorting to "breaker of the law").

> It gets a bit messy because Parkinson changed the spelling to Mosaesaurus 
> (using a genitive "of the Meuse") in later editions of the book.

Irrelevant, because "Mosaesaurus" is invalid by the principle of priority (and 
because *Mosasaurus* isn't a nomen oblitum). It's an objective junior synonym.

> Other examples include Confuciusornis, Xiphosura, etc., where Âfor ease of 
> pronunciation or clarity of etymology, a first noun is left unmodified with a 
> grammatical ending intact with a consonant before a vowel.

Bad examples: neither ease of pronunciation nor clarity of etymology would be 
any worse in the expected forms "Confuciornis" and "Xiphura". These names were 
simply coined by people who â like practically all people on this planet 
except the very few (and shrinking!) who've had a very, very peculiar kind of 
education â didn't know enough about Latin or Greek to even wonder whether 
they should ask someone who might know better.

> However, Greek had amphisbaina (amphisbaena) for serpent that could go 
> forward or backward with a head at each end, and mysphonon "mousetrap" with 
> an s retained.

I don't know about amphis-; but the -s in mys is not (only) the nominative 
ending, it's part of the stem, as you can see from the fact that the stem of 
the Latin homolog of that word, mus, is mur-*, and the fact that the -s is 
still there in the English homolog â mouse.

* Between vowels, s became r a few hundred years before Classical times. Or 
rather, it became [z] a few hundred years before Latin or any Italic language 
was written, then this [z] was written S in the first few Latin inscriptions 
because there was no dedicated letter for [z]** and because the language 
treated the difference between [s] and [z] as predictable and therefore 
meaningless. Later this [z] merged into the existing [r], and [r] from both 
sources has been spelled R ever since.

** The letter Z existed, but stood for [dz] and/or [zd], neither of which 
occurred in Latin. It's only later that Greek went through a sound change that 
simplified this to [z].