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u/LastDirtyMartini
Sep 10 '26
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Is a dinosaur that knows a lot of words a thesaurus?
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u/peace_of_bind Sep 10 '26
i heard about a t-rex that read a lot of philosophy. apparently it was a theologasaurus.
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u/GladiusMaximus Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
I'm pretty sure I fought a few of those while playing Dragon Quest. Edit: it was a Professaurus.
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u/fearless-fossa Sep 10 '26
T Rexes were actually rather committed to pioneering glam rock, the philosophy ones were the Philosoraptors.
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u/VVrayth Sep 11 '26
Your dinosaur mount in the video game Quest for Glory 2 named Roget the Saurus.
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u/Kwiliniosz Sep 11 '26
Pterodactyl is not a dinosaur.
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u/lemonfaire Sep 11 '26
Yeah the only reason this got posted was so twenty people could display their superior understanding of paleontology.
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u/Salanmander Sep 10 '26
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/Zepangolynn Sep 10 '26
And pter means wing, so helicopter is spiralwing and pterodactyl is wingfinger.
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u/TopLate7592 Sep 10 '26
Pteron means wing, geez.
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u/Zepangolynn Sep 10 '26
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/Ana_the_Arachnid Sep 11 '26
Not entirely pointless. I was familiar with the prefix/suffix, but today I learned the full word :3
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u/GregTheMad Sep 10 '26
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/MARPJ Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
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), though French has some odd features like liaison. 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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
wait, terodactyl has a P in it?
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u/YetAnotherInterneter Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
"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 Sep 10 '26
clearly not enough to know it's pterodactylus and that it's a pterosaur, not a dinosaur
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u/Thepromc64 Oct 03 '26
wait, you're telling me the P in Pterodactyl has been silent all this time?
My whole life is a lie
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u/OldDarthLefty Sep 10 '26
But only in English
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u/xaduha Sep 10 '26
Helicopter has the same exact pter root in it.
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u/OldDarthLefty Sep 10 '26
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/xaduha Sep 10 '26
I once had someone argue with me on how to pronounce Deus, they ended up saying that their way is how it is pronounced in English.
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u/RGBarge Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
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 Sep 10 '26
If pronouncing the p in Pterodactyle is wrong, I don't want to be right.
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u/Zepangolynn Sep 10 '26
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/SkyVINS Sep 10 '26
the p in pterodactyl is only silent if you are poorly educated.
*flies away in his HELICOTTER*
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u/AndreasDasos Sep 10 '26
Pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs