ICTHYSAURS | 2005-11-18
The reason I entitled the last article "Icthysauri" instead of Icthysaurs was because they lived a hundred million years ago. I am an educated man so I know they spoke Latin and Greek back then.
Like so much I say that sounds like a joke, this is taken seriously in academia. "Dinosaur" means giant lizard, but a Norwegian who called himself Linaeus -- not a typical Norwegian name -- developed a way of naming species based on Latin and Greek, which was the language of scholars in his day, hence his own name.
It is every bit as reasonable to say that Lastin and Greek are the international languages today as to say that the Icthysaurs spoke Greek.
Yes, but the word "dinosaur" is international. So everybody knows what it means so you can use it in any language.
Nice try, but what about the REST of the article you are writing? It won't be in ancient Greek, so what's the point?
I remember when I was embarrassed out of my wits by a multilingual German asking me why, if Americans were going to use untranslated French quotes, they didn't just go ahead and write the book in French?
It was emabarrassing for me to explain that the author COULDN'T write the book in French and even if he could the readers who were bursting with pride that they had taken high school French and owned a dictionary couldn't read the book if he did.
I don't think he ever really believed that any adult, much less a scholar, could be that silly.
In German there are no big words. Since my subject back then was brick, I know the German word for "refractory," a material that can withstand huge and rapid temperature changes, is Temperaturwechselbestandigkeit, which looks huge.
But Temperatur means temperature, wechself means "change," bestandig means the ability to stand against, and keit is a the ending to such a combination, which indicates that if you put it all together you get what the stuff is. Temperaturwechselbestandigkeit can be understood by any adult German. He doesn't have to go to a dictionary.
So why do doctors have to speak Latin? Why do they spend so much precious time learning words they have to go to a dictionary to look up?
Because it SOUNDS good. It ups their fees.
An icthysaur was an ancient reptile fish.
That wasn't hard, was it?