[Ads-l] the platypus of languages

[Wilson Gray]

> "Duck-billed" is just a descriptor that gets added on to it in folk
> parlance

"Duck-billed platypus" was also the name used in the WWII editions of The
Book of Knowledge.

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 5:43 PM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> > On Jul 15, 2019, at 2:23 PM, Andy Bach <afbach at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> >> Germanic is, in stemmatic terms, unmappable with any consistency,
> >> since different features would place it in different positions: it is
> >> the duck-billed platypus of languages.
>
> > Are there different sorts of platypus ... platypuses ... platypi?,
>
> the English plural is "platypuses"; the ridiculously pedantic
> Greek-derived plural is "platypodes"; the comic (or just deeply mistaken)
> mock-Latin plural, occasionally encountered, is "platypi". Cf. "octopus".
>
> > that is, are there non-duck-billed ones? Wait:
> > The real common name of the animal is actually just "platypus", and
> > its species (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is the only living member of
> > its family (Ornithornhynchidae).
> >
> > "Duck-billed" is just a descriptor that gets added on to it in folk
> > parlance,
>
> yes, it's an appositive modifier rather than a restrictive one. there are
> various uses for appositive modifiers, and some appositive modifier + head
> combinations have become fixed as idioms.
>
> ... but about "the platypus of languages"...?
>
> arnold
>
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>


-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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