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

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

The idea that taxonomic names today belong to the language Linnaeus wrote in, 
or any language at all, is exactly what I called a pretense. As far as the Code 
is concerned, they're just sequences of letters formed according to rules 
spelled out in the Code.

> This is pretty far back in the history of Greek.
>
> I'm not sure that mysphonon and myspoleo retain an ancient stem and aren't 
> just a case of combining mys as a nominative noun.

It's not that far back, really. At the Mycenean stage, [h] had not yet 
disappeared from everywhere except the beginnings of words; we know that  
because there was a Linear B sign for the syllable _ha_, which shows up both at 
the beginning and inside words exactly where it's etymologically expected.

(That sign was not used in Knossos. That's why it wasn't discovered in the 
1950s like most of the rest of Linear B. Maybe the local dialect had lost [h] 
in all positions, like some Classical dialects and all post-Classical forms of 
Greek.)

When the preceding shift of [s] to [h] between vowels â not in front of p and 
ph â happened cannot be dated in absolute terms, only in relative ones (e.g. 
after bh became ph, which is another shift that is impossible to date in 
absolute terms); mysphonon & myspoleo are evidence that it didn't happen much 
earlier than the introduction of Linear B, though.