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Oh god not another one:
hemiptera
I thought it was "hemi pet tera"
(hemi, like the motor)
no. It's "he mip ter a"
I give up. I doubt I know how to say any of these obscure bug words.
@futurebird Did you know that helicopters aren't heli-copters but helico-pters?
I feel like I'm losing my mind.
@negative12dollarbill @futurebird I have a dictionary of "word elements of Latin and Greek technical terms in biological sciences". So fun to finally understand what parts those words are made of and what they mean!
@Limnobotanik @negative12dollarbill
Impulse buying this book instantly. I need this BADLY.
@futurebird @negative12dollarbill it's in German unfortunately. I hope there is an English equivalent...
@Limnobotanik @negative12dollarbill
OK I can't find a book by that name LOL but I did find this PDF which seems handy.
https://lamitopsail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Latin-and-Greek-BIOWORDS_SHEET.pdf
@futurebird @negative12dollarbill great! My book has a little more information about the original Greek and Latin words plus some examples of use, but what one really needs and uses is a list like this!
@negative12dollarbill @futurebird
This is one of my favourite linguistic quirks and relevant to the other thread about hyphenation from yesterday. In English, you hyphenate based on root words, so helico-pter is the correct hyphenation, but in American you hyphenate based on syllables and so heli-copter is correct. I prefer the American rules because they give a pronunciation hint, whereas the English rules are just there to let you say 'Oh, you don't speak Latin / Greek / French / Celtic / Proto-Germanic / ... ? Peasant!'.
This makes quad copters a silly word, they really should be quad pters or similar.
Mind you, that's nowhere near as meaningless as 'quad bike', a noun phrase that just means four two. It's lost the cycle (bi-cycle: two wheels) but kept the root word that describes the one bit that it's changed. And I will insist on referring to them as quadracycles.
@david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird if they’re quadcopters it’s because they’re made by a company, probably called quadco
Which reminds me about corespondent shoes
/∞
∫ @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird
Really quadcopters should be tetrapters, or you're mixing Latin and Greek roots like an absolute ignoramus.
@petealexharris @negative12dollarbill @futurebird
Tetrapters is an amazing name! You should file a trademark immediately.
Though pedantically they might be tetrahelicopters, since they have four spirals, not just four flyings, but I am definitely going to call them tetrapters from now on.
@david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird And in English that's not actively hostile to second language readers, readers with visual, perceptual, tracking, etc. difficulties or disabilities, YOU DON'T HYPHENATE AT ALL.
@david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird Hyphenation is an elitist ableist practice that should have been abolished long ago. Especially since we don't format text as 3 cm newsprint columns anymore. It has no value but does lots of harm.
@dalias @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird I haven't come across this take before. I've found hyphens help me parse often. I'll look it up more. (btw: musl.libc.org has some hyphenated terms, as do a handful of comments in mallocng.)
@thesamesam @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird I mean hyphenation for line splitting. That's not the same as words where the - character is part of the spelling.
@dalias @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird AH, that makes far more sense - thanks!
@dalias @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird On a related note, I recently found grepping a technical document a huge pain because of inconsistent use of hyphens.
@thesamesam @dalias @negative12dollarbill @futurebird
I had so much fun with the copyeditor my second and fourth books because 'run-time' (compound adjective), 'run time' (noun phrase) and 'runtime' (noun, abbreviation of 'run-time library') were all valid, used repeatedly, and each had a different meaning. Eventually they just highlighted every occurrence of any of them for me to double check.
@dalias @david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird wrt "not part of the spelling": yes, but it's generally called hyphenation, and it affects compound nouns too where it's debatable, so I thought you were saying "don't ever do that". I think it'd be clearer if you'd just talked about line-splitting with hyphens.
@david_chisnall @negative12dollarbill @futurebird
And pronounced "qua-driss-a-cull"
@negative12dollarbill @futurebird helicopter is short for helical opteryx and that’s what I say when I point at one in the sky
@u0421793 @negative12dollarbill They have eyes now!? oh no no no they are now like terrible angels… the all-seeing wheels in the sky :(
@negative12dollarbill @futurebird So many word-initial Greek consonant clusters are unpronounceable by most English speakers: kt, pt, ps, ks, probably others. Having studied Greek a little, I always want to pronounce the silent-in-English letter in pterodactyl, Xerox, psychology. (To say nothing of “phthalate.”)