obelion

Comments by obelion

• obelion commented on the user obelion

  Obelion is a wonderful word, in my eponymously shared opinion. All the words for anatomical structures, like the thousands of binomial names of species, were harvested from the exuberantly rich cornucopia of Greco-Latin roots, prefixes and combining forms, a convention of the Occidental sciences and humanities that began, logically enough, with the first astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, botanists and physicians, such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galenius and Lucretius, and continued through Vesalius, Linnaeus, Humboldt, Wallace, Darwin, Pastuer, Koch and Ramon Y Cajal. I often wish more terms had been absorbed and welcomed from the glorious tradition of Islamic scientists, such as Ibn al-Haitham, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rusd, and the more recent flowering of Slavic science, given the genius of men like Mendeleev and Vavilov, and German- language scholars who worked in Russia, like Euler and Humboldt. That would have made Western scholarship more ecumenical, though for the sake of syntactical purity and logic, even two ancient languages are sometimes one too many. I could survive without recourse to ancient Greek, until one of those exquisite Hellenic consonant congestions removes its clothes (gymno-) or takes flight (opter). And a naked humpback whale is too majestic to be contained by Latin alone, earning it a Linnaean Greco-Latin cetaceanym of Melvillean grandeur — Megaptera novaeangliae, the “Great-Winged New Englander.”

  January 14, 2021

• obelion commented on the user obelion

  Obelion is a wonderful word, in my eponymously shared opinion. All the words for anatomical structures, like the thousands of binomial names of species, were harvested from the exuberantly rich cornucopia of Greco-Latin roots, prefixes and combining forms, a convention of the Occidental sciences and humanities that began, logically enough, with the first astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, botanists and physicians, such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galenius and Lucretius, and continued through Vesalius, Linnaeus, Humboldt, Wallace, Darwin, Pastuer, Koch and Ramon Y Cajal. I often wish more terms had been absorbed and welcomed from the glorious tradition of Islamic scientists, such as Ibn al-Haitham, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rusd, and the more recent flowering of Slavic science, given the genius of men like Mendeleev and Vavilov, and German- language scholars who worked in Russia, like Euler and Humboldt. That would have made Western scholarship more ecumenical, though for the sake of syntactical purity and logic, even two ancient languages are sometimes one too many. I could survive without recourse to ancient Greek, until one of those exquisite Hellenic consonant congestions removes its clothes (gymno-) or takes flight (opter). And a naked humpback whale is too majestic to be contained by Latin alone, earning it a Linnaean Greco-Latin cetaceanym of Melvillean grandeur — Megaptera novaeangliae, the “Great-Winged New Englander.”

  January 14, 2021