monumentum:interretialia:psychoglossia:interretialia:moeasdf:The Resurrecionist: Siren OceanusSiren
monumentum:interretialia:psychoglossia:interretialia:moeasdf:The Resurrecionist: Siren OceanusSiren oceanus? “Siren, the Ocean”? That is a bit strange to me. How about Siren oceanensis? (The whole taxonomic rank presentation here is wonky.)The Mammichthyes name interests me. I am assuming that the first part of the compound comes from Latin mamma, “breast.” How about Mastichthyes? Mixing Greek and Latin word elements is not really wrong, but there is no need to do it when both languages have a word element for a particular idea.After doing some research on it, I found some text [Wiki] that says both nominative (as in Tyrannosaurus rex) and genitive (Felis catus) cases are perfectly okay. The first part of a binomial name is treated as a word in Latin’s nominative case, in the singular, as that site points out. That Felis in Felis catus is nominative singular, not genitive singular. It is the i-stem variant of feles.So in defense of Siren oceanus, The second part of a binomial may be a noun in the nominative case. An example is the binomial name of the lion, which is Panthera leo. Grammatically the noun is said to be in apposition to the genus name and the two nouns do not have to agree in gender; in this case, Panthera is feminine and leo is masculine. I just interpret it as “Ocean Siren,” personally. The genitive could also be used, but more along the lines of Siren oceani; -ensis seems to be when they have to fudge an inflection.I suggested oceanensis because it is an already-established word. The adjectival -ensis is a valid Latin suffix for place names, and it does comes in handy when a word to which it is attached is not even Latin!At any rate, I suppose oceanus here can very easily be used metonymically (after the deity) to refer to maritime creatures of this sort.In that case, the two nouns in apposition (like Tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrannosaurus the King) make sense: Siren oceanus = Siren the Oceanus.Also, this design is super awesome and I like it a lot. No argument there!Well, seeing as we are being pedantic, Sirens (Σειρῆνες) are mythological creatures who are maidens with the lower half of birds, not fish.Let’s go further! Sirens, in that mythological sense that you cited, may not be fish, but they are neither mermaids nor even aquatic salamanders!At any rate, since this discussion was about the term Siren being used as a name of a genus in that image to refer to the fabulous creature depicted in the image, the metonymic use of the term, not the use relevant to Graeco-Roman mythology, was the one being discussed. That mythological use was not relevant, nor was there any claim about such Sirens being fish!By the way, many Romance languages use variants of Siren to refer to mermaids, and not only is there a relevant trope about the equation of Sirens with mermaids (Sirens Are Mermaids), but also some Neo-Latinists use Siren to mean “mermaid,” as seen on Akira Okochi’s card! -- source link
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