zompist bboard

A polygraph disambiguator is something used in stupid writing systems where a given combination of graphemes can represent both a single unit and a sequence of two and you need something to keep these cases apart. Like, say, an apostrophe or a diaeresis used like <a'o> <aö> to indicate it represents [a.o] and not [ɯː]. Or something.

That's just a fancy word for, or possibly subcategory of, diacritic then.

Are subcategories outlawed now?

You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

Birds are paraphyletic with dinosaurs Dinosaurs are paraphyletic with birds; birds are not actually dinosaurs. According to your logic, humans are a kind of fish.

Your use of "paraphyletic" is backward.

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

No, unless accent = diacritic, in which case I invite you to take an extended course on subcategories and their contextual use.

Rhetorica wrote:

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

Birds are paraphyletic with dinosaurs; they are not actually dinosaurs. According to your logic, humans are a kind of fish.

What Legion said. You don't stop being part of your grandmother's family because you have a family of your own.

Inversion wrote:

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

No, unless accent = diacritic, in which case I invite you to take an extended course on subcategories and their contextual use.

Wait, wait, are we arguing over terminology now?

Everything is not everything, my boy.

Drydic wrote:What Legion said. You don't stop being part of your grandmother's family because you have a family of your own.

A taxon is not a lineage, nor is it a family. Birds aren't dinosaurs, even though they evolved from them, and you are not a fish, even though you evolved from an aquatic vertebrate generally described as one.

I suggest you read up on taxonomy. Here, I'll give you a link to the proper wikipedia article.

The clade Aves (aka birds) is made up of descendants of the clade Dinosauria, and therefore Aves is a part of Dinosauria.
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And your edit

Rhetorica wrote:

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

Birds are paraphyletic with dinosaurs Dinosaurs are paraphyletic with birds; birds are not actually dinosaurs. According to your logic, humans are a kind of fish.

still gets the definition of paraphyletic wrong.

Yes, Drydic is absolutely right. Humans, by the way, are not fish, because fish are defined as a paraphyletic group that includes all members of the clade except tetrapods. If you go by common ancestors, though, then yes, humans are fish.

The best solution is to reserve terms like fish and reptiles only to informal speech and to use properly defined clade names in all technical circumstances. "Reptiles" are particularly tricky since people insist not calling birds and mammals that. So to preserve the colloquial meaning of the word, you have to specifically exclude both Aves and Mammalia from it. This is a bit of a special case and for Dinosauria there is no such tinkering. Incidentally the most common definition for Dinosauria that I've seen describes it consisting of Triceratops horridus, Passer domesticus, their last common ancestor and all its descendants. I like this definition since it explicitly pulls birds under the clade name.

I understand that calling birds dinosaurs might need a bit getting used to, but I find that it gives a big boost in getting kids interested in their natural surroundings. I also like the sound of going to a dinosaur sanctuary to view some wildlife.

("paraphiletic with" doesn't mean anything; a group is just "paraphiletic", or it isn't)

This is what I get for reading history of science papers for too damn long.

Legion wrote:("paraphiletic with" doesn't mean anything; a group is just "paraphiletic", or it isn't)

Not quite—a parent group is paraphyletic with respect to the monophyletic groups that have been removed from it. Try Googling the phrase "paraphyletic with respect to" and you'll see a wealth of hits.

Drydic wrote:The clade Aves (aka birds) is made up of descendants of the clade Dinosauria, and therefore Aves is a part of Dinosauria.

Here's how things got messy:

Aves is a class. Reptilia used to be a class but isn't, and now contains superorders. Aves, but not the rest of Dinosauria, is a monophyletic group that is exluded from Reptilia, just like the superclass Tetrapoda is excluded from the unranked taxon Craniata (i.e., fish).

Depending on who you ask and when, Dinosauria is either an unranked clade, a suborder (Owen, 1842), or a superorder (Seeley, 1887).

Result: while Drydic's original example about birds being dinosaurs is correct, biology is full of examples where descendants of a group cease being members of that group.

Inversion wrote:If you go by common ancestors, though, then yes, humans are fish.

The whole point of this conversation is that saying "humans are fish by common ancestry" is an abuse of terminology and violates explicitly defined categorical boundaries. Like it or not, academic terminology is prescriptivist; you can say "humans have a common ancestor with fish" or even the slightly sketchy "humans are descended from fish" without ruffling any feathers, but you can't say humans are fish. With the divergence of Tetrapoda, we stopped being fish, just like modern Italians are not citizens of the Roman Empire. "Fish" simply isn't a clade.

But "humans are lobe-finned fish" should be valid, with this logic (and still sounds wrong to me).

Also, somebody rename this thread, please. Confusingly, it's still named "English as Fusion of French and Anglic".

Basilius wrote:But "humans are lobe-finned fish" should be valid, with this logic (and still sounds wrong to me).

Also, somebody rename this thread, please. Confusingly, it's still named "English as Fusion of French and Anglic".

That is what the thread was originally about...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:That is what the thread was originally about...

About humans being lobe-finned fish?

As a reminder, you got here from explaining why English is not descended from French, then arguing over whether or not a diacritic should be on a particular letter in a French word, then arguing over terminology, then arguing about whether birds are dinosaurs.

KathAveara wrote:As a reminder, you got here from explaining why English is not descended from French, then arguing over whether or not a diacritic should be on a particular letter in a French word, then arguing over terminology, then arguing about whether birds are dinosaurs.

Wow, who needs a "Random Thread" when you've got this?

ObsequiousNewt wrote:

Basilius wrote:But "humans are lobe-finned fish" should be valid, with this logic (and still sounds wrong to me).

Also, somebody rename this thread, please. Confusingly, it's still named "English as Fusion of French and Anglic".

That is what the thread was originally about...

Are thread topics paraphyletic?

Rhetorica wrote:

Drydic wrote:The clade Aves (aka birds) is made up of descendants of the clade Dinosauria, and therefore Aves is a part of Dinosauria.

Here's how things got messy:

Aves is a class. Reptilia used to be a class but isn't, and now contains superorders. Aves, but not the rest of Dinosauria, is a monophyletic group that is exluded from Reptilia, just like the superclass Tetrapoda is excluded from the unranked taxon Craniata (i.e., fish).

Depending on who you ask and when, Dinosauria is either an unranked clade, a suborder (Owen, 1842), or a superorder (Seeley, 1887).

Result: while Drydic's original example about birds being dinosaurs is correct, biology is full of examples where descendants of a group cease being members of that group.

No, it actually isn't. you're mixing Linnaean and cladistic systems. This only results in misery and the profusion of confusing prefixes and suffixes on clade names.
The best proposal I've seen with some traction (since making Dinosauria class-level appears to be a non-starter, fucking ornithologists) is dividing the old blob Reptilia into 2 classes, Synapsida and Diapsida (maybe Sauropsida would be a little better but let's stick a tiny bit with tradition, shall we?). Which has the benefit of letting the mammals and birds have separate special snowflake class names from each other, while letting the crocs eat their own family when they chomp a little birdy, and still keep the world's oldest land vertebrate blood feud going when they drag a wildebeest thrashing into the water.

I'm not mixing Linnaean and cladistic systems—I'm comparing them. As someone who works primarily with prokaryotes I'm naturally inclined to regard Carl Linnaeus a non-Avian member of Dinosauria, as it were, due to the hilariously high amount of horizontal gene transfer that's made most phylogenetic reconstructions non-viable below the order level.

Which—continuing the incredibly consistent topic of this thread—brings me to another question, one about linguistic phylogeny. But I think I'll make another topic for it just to stop being a nuisance.

So discard the phylogenetics, and go back to body structure similarities.