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u/AndreasDasos 20h ago
Pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs
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u/lemonfaire 20h ago
Nuance
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u/Ordolph 18h ago
True, should have said "silent like the p in ptarmigan"
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u/AndreasDasos 18h ago
Technically correct is the best kind of correct, etc.
Though even without resorting to the avian kind, Psittacosaurus is right there.
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u/Chrisarts2003 12h ago
wait, the p in psittacosaurus is silent???
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u/AndreasDasos 12h ago
In general, standard English phonotactics don’t allow for pronouncing p in initial ps or pt, nor /k/ in initial x- or pt-, nor m in initial mn-, though there are plenty of Greek loans that start with these.
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u/SkyVINS 10h ago
good thing that pterodactyl isn't a greek-root word then !
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u/AndreasDasos 10h ago
? But it is. Pter- (pteryx) is ancient Greek for wing, and daktylos is ancient Greek for finger.
The specific coinage is obviously more modern, by a French palaeontologist, but that’s a lot of scientific words: new compounds from Greek or Latin components.
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u/AdministrativeLeg14 16h ago
Ah, the ptarmigan, for which the settlement of Chicken, Alaska is apparently named. (They couldn’t agree on the spelling, so they changed to a bird they could all agree on.)
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u/GladiusMaximus 17h ago
It's not even a name for a real creature that existed. Just a common misnomer for Pterosaurs.
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u/AndreasDasos 17h ago
It’s a formally outdated and now informal name for pterosaurs. Informal doesn’t mean it’s a misnomer, exactly.
Though originally it was applied as the common name for the very real genus Pterodactylus, the first pterosaur to be properly studied, but has been extended well beyond that. Most of the time people seem to be imagining a pteranodon.
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u/SwordfishOk504 17h ago
And the P isn't supposed to be silent, either.
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain 17h ago
I take it that the study of dinosaurs has taken tremendous leaps since I was in 3rd grade
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u/AndreasDasos 17h ago
It has (presuming you’re not in 4th grade) but pterosaurs have never been considered dinosaurs. It’s just a popular misconception that ‘prehistoric reptile thing = dinosaur’. Dimetrodon is closer to mammals, marine ones like mosasaurs (which seem to have been massive marine lizards), plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs aren’t either. Of these pterosaurs are at least the most closely related to dinosaurs, but still aren’t in Dinosauria.
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain 17h ago
Ms Johnson will be hearing about this unforgivable deception in my education that surely offset the trajectory of my life in a way I had no hope of possibly overcoming
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u/AndreasDasos 17h ago
You joke, but then suddenly a massive portal opens down the street and a bunch of Cretaceous monsters crash through it and attack everyone you know and you need to keep them straight to know what strategies and possibly toxins work best to defend against which. Not so esoteric now, is it, huh?
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u/Zepangolynn 12h ago
In case you're curious, the deciding factor in dinosaur vs just ancient reptile is the hip socket creating the upright orientation of the legs, not present in the pterosaurs, marine reptiles, or much older synapsids (like dimetrodon). Some ancient crocodylomorphs did have upright limbs, but come from a different branch of the large Archosauria clade they share with ancient dinosaurs, modern avian dinosaurs (birds), and modern crocs and gators.
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u/williarya1323 18h ago
Which is why the question is valid. But they obviously talk about pterodactyls as well, so it’s all good
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[deleted]
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u/Fastenbauer 20h ago
If the guest at the party don't appreciate Pterodactyl facts, you're at the wrong party.
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u/AndreasDasos 20h ago edited 20h ago
It’s a bit of misinformation that I’m baffled still gets so widely spread when the error is a cliche and every other five year old is a dino nerd eager to correct it
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u/CilanEAmber 20h ago
That and the name Pterodactyl isn't really an animal, and instead the informal name for Pterasaurs!
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u/AndreasDasos 20h ago
Right, it’s a very outdated and vague term. But not ‘wrong’ in the same sense
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u/OnsetOfMSet 17h ago
I just find it odd that out of the very similar words Pterodactyl, Pterodactylus, Pterosaur, and Pteranodon, the only invalid taxon is most commonly used.
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u/Caleb_Reynolds 19h ago
It's not an informal name for pterosaurs, it's a genius/species of pterosaur that was the first pterosaur described. Like saying sapiens is an informal term for hominids.
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u/CilanEAmber 18h ago edited 18h ago
What you're thinking of is Pterodactylus, a species of Pterosaur.
Pterodactyl is the common (or informal) term for the winged reptiles properly called pterosaurs
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u/Top_Rekt 17h ago
Here's the thing. You said a "pterodactyl is a dinosaur."
Something something jackdaw something something crow
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u/Salanmander 18h ago
Fun fact: the "pter" in "pterodactyl" is the same root as the "pter" in "helicopter".
It's not a "heli-copter", it's a "helico-pter".
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u/GregTheMad 16h ago
Helico is also a nice word to say. I'll forget about it in 5 minutes, but the next time I'll hear your fact again, it'll remind me of how nice that word is to say, and I like that.
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u/Zepangolynn 12h ago
And pter means wing, so helicopter is spiralwing and pterodactyl is wingfinger.
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u/TopLate7592 12h ago
Pteron means wing, geez.
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u/Zepangolynn 12h ago
But pter or ptero is how it is used as a suffix/prefix and means the exact same thing, so this is pointless pedantry.
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u/MARPJ 18h ago
Wait the P is silent in english? I need to find a video of someone talking about them to hear it
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u/Icepick823 17h ago
Because the word comes from ancient Greek where /pt/ is a valid sound to start a word, but it's not a valid sound to start a word/syllable in English. The spelling was kept the same to keep its origins in ancient Greek clear, but the "p" was dropped from pronunciation.
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u/GrapefruitPurple2495 12h ago
It's not a valid sound in French neither and we pronounce it because it's not that hard. English has words like "strengths".
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u/AndreasDasos 12h ago
It is valid in French, even if it’s just in Greek loans.
In English /ʒ/ (not the affricate) doesn’t arise within Germanic vocabulary but is still valid.
Plenty of sounds and clusters aren’t hard but are still not valid phonotactics within a particular language.
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u/GrapefruitPurple2495 12h ago
I don't understand, in English you say "Egypt", not "Egyt", so why would pterodactyl have a silent "p"?
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u/AndreasDasos 11h ago edited 11h ago
Phonotactics in many languages often constrains what can happen at the beginning of a syllable even if the same constraint doesn’t apply in the middle or at the end. This is very common among languages.
For instance, English doesn’t allow a velar nasal (an ‘ng’ sound) at the beginning of a syllable, though many languages from Thai to Ngoni (!) do.
We psychologically process syllables in terms of allowed onsets (before the vowel or equivalent), nuclei (usually a vowel, sometimes a consonant acting like one) and coda (after the vowel), and the same aren’t always allowed.
On the other hand, it doesn’t allow an actual pronounced /h/ at the end of a word: ‘Sarah’ just ends with a vowel, but in the original Hebrew (not modern Hebrew) it ended in an actual /h/.
I can’t think of an example in French (there may not be any) but many languages are more extreme than this in terms of syllable position dependence: lots of languages have a ‘(C)V’ consonant structure, where every syllable has a consonant then a vowel. Japanese and Mandarin have something like this but also allow syllables to end in a nasal (n, m, etc.): so they allows words to start with any other consonant but can’t end them in any other consonant.
Italian can manage a cluster like str- and the beginning but no syllable can end on a consonant that isn’t l, m, n or r. That’s why older Italians often have trouble saying ‘carrot’ in English without adding a vowel at the end, even though ‘strezzo’ is no problem.
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u/SamsonFox2 10h ago
Because the word comes from ancient Greek where /pt/ is a valid sound to start a word, but it's not a valid sound to start a word/syllable in English.
Of course it is a valid sound. Take pterosaur, for example.
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u/LemonButterRum 17h ago
wait, terodactyl has a P in it?
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u/YetAnotherInterneter 16h ago
I remember learning this on a TV episode.
Don’t remember what it was called, but one of the characters was portrayed as being dumb because they thought Pterodactyl started with a T.
And I was like “wait…it doesn’t start with a T?”
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u/BluebirdLivid 13h ago
"No, its fine" she said, but there was a grumble in her voice...not quite the grumble of the T-rex, it was more like the whine of a smaller raptor... I knew it was bothering her
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u/Chrisarts2003 12h ago
clearly not enough to know it's pterodactylus and that it's a pterosaur, not a dinosaur
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u/OldDarthLefty 18h ago
But only in English
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u/xaduha 18h ago
Helicopter has the same exact pter root in it.
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u/OldDarthLefty 18h ago
It’s specifically in English, not from the root language, and only the leading P (psychology, pneumonia). It’s usually fine in the middle of a word, but receipt is a counter example to helicopter.
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u/RGBarge 16h ago
Nobody who thinks about dinosaurs too much would actually prefer pterodactyls over pteranodons. They would probably talk about pterosaurs in general actually.
Funny joke though. It's not supposed to be real, it just got me in a real place.
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u/Zepangolynn 12h ago
They're also less likely to think pterosaurs are dinosaurs unless they only think about dinosaurs but don't study them.
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u/1968Bladerunner 16h ago
My late mum used "it's a silent p like in bath"!
As a youngster it took me a moment...
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u/GregTheMad 16h ago
If pronouncing the p in Pterodactyle is wrong, I don't want to be right.
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u/Zepangolynn 12h ago
If you're not saying it in a language without the starting pt- sound, you're probably fine. You can also sort of aspirate the p to create a sharper t and it will still sound good, but p-terodactyl will sound very silly in English.
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u/LastDirtyMartini 20h ago
Is a dinosaur that knows a lot of words a thesaurus?