Re: [dinosaur] Party like it's 1758!

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

Three reasons why misleading names cannot be changed under any existing code of 
nomenclature:

1) How misleading is misleading?

2) When we find out a name is misleading after we've been using it for seventy 
years (*Oviraptor*!), do we really want to upset that?

3) Sometimes we don't know if a name is misleading because we don't know what 
it means. In the 19th and early 20th century, many authors simply assumed 
everyone knew enough Latin and Greek, or at least had access to dictionaries 
and knew how to use them (which implies a pretty thorough knowledge of the 
grammars of these languages!), that everything was obvious anyway, and so they 
didn't explain what they were thinking of. Sometimes that hasn't work out. 
Consider the North American mole salamanders, *Ambystoma*. Well, Amblystoma 
would mean "blunt mouth", so maybe the author or the printer just made a little 
mistake here. For a few decades, many authors actually called it *Amblystoma*. 
But the original author never explained his intentions, so we can't be sure 
that's what he meant; therefore, *Ambystoma* stays.

Gesendet:ÂMontag, 22. Juni 2020 um 12:03 Uhr
Von:Â"Tim Williams" <tijawi@gmail.com>

> > How are Notatesse[rae]raptor and Aberrantiodontus incorrect?
>
> Aberratiodontus speaks for itself.

Well, it does if you know enough Latin and Greek, so I better furnish an 
explanation.

Aberratio is not the adjective (or participle) "aberrant", but the noun 
"aberration", complete with its negative nominative singular ending. The stem 
of such -o words ends in -on-, so in a compound you'd rather expect 
aberrationi-...

...except that Latin is rather bad at making noun compounds in the first place, 
quite unlike Greek (or German or indeed English; written English cheats by 
putting spaces between the components).

Latin for "tooth" is dens; that dent-s with a regular sound change. The Greek 
version must have been odÃnts at some point; but on top of sharing a complete 
ban on the cluster [ts] with Classical Latin, most dialects of Classical Greek 
also had a ban on the cluster [ns]. That was resolved by dropping the [n] and 
modifying the vowel that preceded it, giving what eventually became odÃs. But 
that way, the language ended up with an irregular, unpredictable declension for 
this word, because "tooth's" (the only way to say "of a tooth", because there 
was no "of") remained odontÃs the whole time, and the stem remained odont- in 
the other two cases of the singular, and throughout the plural, as well. Some 
of the dialects of Classical Greek, therefore, changed the nominative singular 
to fit the expectation created by a stem that ends in -nt; the outcome was 
odÃn.

(In taxonomic nomenclature today, -odus is mostly used for sharks and -odon 
mostly for mammals and dinosaurs. That's a historical coincidence.)

Neither from dens nor from odÃs nor from odÃn can you get to -odontus. It 
looks like some adjective created on the spot in some unique way...

*Notatesseraeraptor*, as I explained, isn't a compound at all in Latin terms, 
it's just three Latin words in a row: nota, tesserae, raptor = "mark", "mosaic 
stones", "robber". To get to a compound mosaic-stone-mark robber, not even the 
order of the components is right. I would expect something like 
Tesserinotiraptor, but this is a really long and awkward compound for Latin 
anyway...