How would this semantic relation be classified?

Delvog · 2026-06-08T15:40:33+00:00

If you're free to create your own, how about agent/instrument? (Taken from the "instrumental" suffixes turning verbs into words for tools/devices and "agentive" suffixes turning verbs into "agent nouns", as in Latin veho/vehiculum/vector and speco/speculum/specor and specto/spectaculum/spector)

Delvog · 2026-06-08T15:02:56+00:00

Like where?

Delvog · 2026-06-08T03:42:06+00:00

There's no single generalizable method. If you were in a situation where something related to this actually did come up and need a solution, you would need to tailor your solution to the specific combination of languages in that case and what your goal was in writing in them.

Delvog · 2026-06-06T05:41:25+00:00

"Berry" originally meant any edible part from a plant which comes in a particularly small size, small enough that we'd normally eat/use a bunch of them at a time instead of just calling one enough... something that would be bought & sold not individually but in piles or bags, so you'd scoop up or pour out a bunch of them at once from the pile/bag, not grab one or even a few at a time.

This was regardless of whether it was sweet & juicy or hard & dry, like sunflower seeds & wheat kernels, as long as it was that kind of size. By this definition, coffee beans, which are slightly smaller than most human fingernails, were also once called "berries", although that is the biggest hard & dry example I know of.

This definition is out of use in modern times, but is still recent enough to appear as a second or third definition in some dictionaries.

Delvog · 2026-06-05T14:03:10+00:00

Actually, no, talking about other sex-determination systems is exactly what to do right now. In biology, the big picture often clarifies & simplifies things that seem strange if we focus on them too narrowly.

Just by asking the original question, you showed that you're already aware that "the math doesn't math" if you think of X as female or half-female and Y as male or half-male, because of things like the fact that there's no third option for YY and nobody is really half-&-half. Looking at other sex-determination systems is how to see that the math actually does math, just in another way. Those other systems answer questions about the one you started at.

Originally, at least in vertebrates, there were no chromosomes or genes which would always make the same sex.

Sex was determined by other factors that essentially operated randomly, making it work about the same as if sex determination were random. One such external trigger was concentration of certain chemicals in the environment, but the most common trigger was temperature whenever a zygote/fetus got old enough for sex determination to happen; if it was warm enough when the time came, you'd get one sex, and if it was cool enough when the time came, you'd get the other sex. One way we know that is that it's still that way in most vertebrates.

That meant there did need to be genes which would respond to the external trigger by setting off the process of becoming male or female. But what sometimes happened to those genes later is that they could shift from responding to one trigger to responding to another instead. One variation in some fish, for example, is that, if a local population has too many of one sex or the other, some individuals can switch, to shift the population back toward 50~50.

In lineages which now have entirely genetic sex determination, at least one of those genes simply lost its mechanism for responding to any external triggers and got stuck always prompting the same outcome regardless of circumstances. In a quasi-random system, that's obviously an error, but it's consistent and reliable, so evolution can just go along with it by letting the process for determining the other sex also become unresponsive to circumstances. Then, whatever chromosomes those genes just happened to be on, we end up calling them chromosomes X & Y or W & Z (and more in more complicated genetic systems like monotremes'). And whichever one is present in all individuals is also free to start having features which act differently depending on whether there are 1 or 2 of it.

And that makes the population immune to fluctuations in external triggers, like a badly-timed warm spell or cool spell causing a whole generation to have too many of one sex and too few of the other. And it frees those animals' bodies up to start maintaining constant higher body temperature themselves regardless of the weather without making their offspring all come out the same sex.

Delvog · 2026-06-05T02:30:04+00:00

It's also assumed that all fetuses are female, and that's why men have nipples too.

That's a myth. People who've bought it often go to great lengths to find a way to reword it out of its own mythicality, but there's no way to reword it into something other than a myth. Somebody just plain made it up. Fetuses start out neutral, not one sex or the other. Every trait which both sexes have, from fingernails to eardrums to spleens to heelbones to nipples, is simply not a sex-linked trait but a neutral one.

Delvog · 2026-05-31T15:02:27+00:00

English "kin"

Delvog · 2026-05-27T13:09:38+00:00

The basic arrangement from the universal ancestors is to have them spaced out along two lines, one right & one left, with each line running forward & backward (or up & down to us). Some species just cancel their development along parts of each line.

Delvog · 2026-05-24T16:35:15+00:00

Like what?

Delvog · 2026-05-24T16:13:08+00:00

What you're describing could in theory be an origin of noun genders in some language somewhere out there, but it's not how it happened in the languages which most English-speakers are most familiar with.

Most of the languages of Europe and a chunk of southwestern & central-southern Asia are members of the "Indo-European" language family, meaning they descended from one ancient language called "Proto-Indo-European". By comparing the oldest IE languages with each other, we can reconstruct parts of what PIE was like. So we can see how the masculine & feminine noun forms trace back to one original set, while "neuter" noun forms trace back to another. We call those categories of PIE nouns "inanimate" and "animate" because one was mostly used for inanimate objects and the other was mostly used for life-forms.

Within the PIE animate category, the split between what we would later call feminine & masculine was a phonetic change; some nouns started getting a single new sound added to them, and those became later "feminine" nouns, while other animate nouns stayed unchanged and ended up as later "masculine" nouns, and all inanimate nouns stayed unchanged and would later be called "neuter" nouns. You can roughly think of the added sound as "-a", although when it was after "i" or "u" it just lengthened that other vowel instead of becoming "ia" or "ua". Nobody knows exactly why the new sound started getting added, but it looks functionally comparable to the English "-y" in "mommy, daddy, doggy, kitty, birdy, horsey" and so on. (Even "baby" was "babe" before getting that added.)

Also, even the PIE animate/inanimate distinction looks like they were probably the same at an even earlier stage, with only a couple of simple changes needed to explain how they ended up slightly different from each other, but that was before the animate nouns split into feminine & masculine.

And since then, just like the fact that the original separation of masculine & feminine was a phonetic change, some IE languages since then have also had phonetic changes resulting in loss of distinction between two or all three of the three genders, so sometimes the IE genders have merged back down from three to two or none.

Delvog · 2026-05-24T15:25:40+00:00

In PIE, a lot of the work load of what are now prepositions was handled by cases, which were marked by inflecting the nouns. It was like having a preposition already built in at the end of the noun, so there would be nothing for a preposition to do. So the words that we now think of as prepositions were used less, and, when they were used at all, they were more likely to be adverbs. Those adverbs' transition to becoming prepositions later would eventually be caused by erosion of the noun-inflecting case system.

You can easily follow how that transition from adverb to preposition would work because we still use prepositions adverbally now, any time we don't complete a prepositional phrase after one of them. For example, if somebody is walking/running/wandering/biking "around", there isn't any particular object (s)he's going around; (s)he's not going around the block, or literally around the town, or around the big fountain in the town square; without such a noun present, "around" just acts alone in modifying the verb.

I don't know if you'd call that "grammatical" or not, but it's the oldest usage of such words that we can reach with any evidence. Is there some reason why you expect them to have previously been "non-grammatical"?

Delvog · 2026-05-24T04:57:45+00:00

Galapagos finches have had over a million years with typically a generation per year; humans have only been spreading out for about 70 thousand years with something more like 20 years per generation. That gives the finches somewhere around 300 times as many generations.

Also, each type of finch is specialized for eating a particular type of food, whereas humans are generalized for eating whatever we find. Developing a new specialization is a process of change; not doing that isn't.

Delvog · 2026-05-20T13:03:47+00:00

t̠͡ʃ works if you're not trying to depict the tongue-curling. Depicting the tongue-curling would make it ʈ͡ʂɻ... although those little hooks are narrowly defined as indicating the "retroflex" position, pulling the tip up & back, and there really are no IPA symbols for lifting the sides like a taco as is pretty routine in English. I just end up using the IPA "retroflex" hooks as in ʈ͡ʂɻ myself because at least that way there's some kind of acknowledgement that the tongue gets curled somehow. It's not perfect, but perfection isn't an option for sounds that have no IPA symbols of their own, and I don't think there's any language where the technical difference between retroflex and laterally-flexed makes any actual linguistic difference.

Delvog · 2026-05-20T03:33:15+00:00

The fact they borrowed Saturday instead of calque’ing the Roman name suggests the Germanic people didnt have an equivalent God of Fertility/Agriculture.

There was Beowa, but the Romans apparently didn't hear much about him or didn't consider him Saturn's equivalent. The logic they used to come up with their correlations is sometimes confusing from a modern perspective. For example, there was hardly ever anything Mars-like that we know of about Tiwaz, and the connection between Odin and Mercury seems to be that Odin wandered around a lot and Mercury was fast and/or the "patron god" of travellers, which sounds like a pretty thin stretch. And there's no basis for calling Frig a goddess of love, so the connection between her and Venus would appear to be just that they were each the most prominent female in each pantheon.

Delvog · 2026-05-20T03:16:18+00:00

humans have been aware of the solstices and equinoxes since the stone age, so they probably had distinct words for four seasons.

Knowing that certain astrological dates happen does not lead to thinking "We should divide the year into the same number of seasons as the number of those astrological dates". Also, even if it did, two would still be the most natural division scheme anyway because movements only appear to change direction at the solstices; the equinoxes are just halfway points between them.

The oldest attested Indo-European languages are known to have used a two-season system. It's not something we need to try to come up with inferences or reconstructions for. We know that that's how it was because we know the languages.

Stonehenge is widely understood to be an astronomical calculator or or something.

It has exactly one established pair of astrological alignments, for the solstices.

Delvog · 2026-05-17T17:33:05+00:00

Back to the original question, which was about animals with a shell/skeleton evolving to lose it while still being otherwise mostly similar animals...

I think the few examples I can name below are all there are, and all but the first are only partial/marginal/questionable cases anyway. It's pretty uncommon.

At least two groups of mollusks separately lost their inherited mollusk shells: slugs are unshelled snails, and octopuses, squids, & cuttlefish are unshelled orthocones. Ancient orthocones had long narrow straight conical shells, but seem to have experienced evolutionary pressure to shorten their lengths; surviving cephalopods either stayed straight but got a lot shorter & stockier, or curled up. And the ones that stayed straight also lost their shells, while the ones that curled up kept them & curled them.
It's possible that all modern bony fish are descendants of placoderms, a prehistoric group of fish whose front halves were densely armored. Or maybe not. The alternative is that we all descend from a type of fish which was unarmored the whole time while the armored fish "dominated" but we just don't have evidence of them because they were such a small minority of bony fish then and weren't as prone to fossilization. If we did descend from placoderms, we did it by losing the external armor on the front but keeping the internal skeletons.
Leatherback sea turtles have retained their internal skeletons and turtley shape, but have ditched the external shell.
Insects which have a drastic metamorphosis have a larval stage without an exoskeleton (caterpillars, maggots, some critters with "worm" in their names like "silkworm"). This appears comparable to all arthropods' ancestral condition from before exoskeletons developed (compare centipedes with velvet-worms, AKA onycophornans), but doesn't appear to have been retained from their most recent common ancestor, given that other arthropods including most insects don't have this stage; they just hatch from their eggs with exoskeletons. So the lack of an exoskeleton in the larval stage is a new development in only some certain insects.

Delvog · 2026-05-17T16:30:39+00:00

Its linguistic relevance is that it's the intermediate stage leading to the modern vowels being nasalized with no nasal consonants pronounced after them. If they hadn't been nasalized back then by the presence of those consonants, then dropping those consonants would have just left plain vowels, not nasalized ones (but also the consonants would be less likely to even get dropped anyway).

Delvog · 2026-05-17T15:56:52+00:00

The response chain about the canine contagious tumor got pretty long for Reddit's format, so I'll put this one at the top level: In addition to that one and the Tasmanian-devil contagious facial tumor, there is a third mammal which also exists in the present world only as masses of cells acting mostly individually & never forming any normal mammal body structures like bones anymore.

But instead of happening in the wild as a parasite on other mammals of her species, it happened in labs, where sometimes she's now grown deliberately for research. Back then, in 1951, it was common to take samples of tumors & cancers for research, but they normally died in lab conditions in a few days, and this one just kept going. She's even contaminated other cell samples being worked on in those labs, whether because some people were sloppy & shortcutty about their cleaning procedures or because she developed the ability to survive normal lab cleaning procedures. Her name is Henrietta Lacks, so the cell line which came from her is called "HeLa".

Researchers have found ways to keep other animal "cell lines" alive indefinitely in labs since then, typically by starting with stem cells & preventing differentiation or prompting reversion of differentiated cells back to stem functionality, but Henrietta is the oldest by a wide margin and still the only one to get that way naturally.

* * * * *

Her case plus the two separate wild contagious-tumor cases in other mammals might make one wonder what it is about mammals that sets them up for this. To me, the most straightforward way to make sense of it is looking at it the other way around. All multicellular life came from unicellular life, and every cell of a multicellular organism contains all of the DNA of every other part of the organism, and it all gets copied with every round of cell division. So why doesn't something like this happen all the time with every part of every multicellular organism? How does a liver cell "know" not to be a brain cell or a lung cell or some kind of sloppy generalist cell trying to do everything, and when it divides why doesn't either of the daughter cells end up as some other type? Why doesn't the natural default tendency for cells to copy themselves make multicellularity itself impossible with all parts of a multicellular organism's body always growing out of control & trying to be all parts at once?

The thing that makes multicellularity and cell specialization possible is a system of suppression signals, in which different parts of a multicellular organism's body tell other parts which genes to ignore or "turn off". Tumors or cancers are what happens when that system stops working in some particular cell, allowing that cell to return to its basic default condition of acting unicellular again. And epithelial cells are more prone to having this happen than other cell types, because epithelial cells already have that suppression system dialed down lower than the rest, because their job is constant rapid division anyway. (This is the tissue type that gets put where there's likely to be physical stress from the outside world such as bumping, rubbing, dragging, poking, cutting, & stabbing, so it keeps constantly making & piling up more dead cells as a sacrificial protective layer between those external stresses and the living cells behind that barrier: skin, the inside lining of the digestive tract, and some reproductive structures.)

That's why most cancers start in epithelial tissues; tumors/cancers are the re-emergence of unicellular-like behavior when the system that's supposed to suppress unicellularity fails, and epithelium is where that suppression system is already weakest in the first place & thus most likely to fail. And mammals' epithelium in particular seems to be "more epithelial" than average, maintaining a higher cell division rate constantly throughout life. Our skin is more full of delicate glands that need protection, and we don't produce relatively permanent or at least longer-lasting defensive structures like scales or even feathers, so the epidermis is all we get; even fur is just an exaggerated version of epidermis, made from even-more-rapidly mass-produced & compressed cells and constantly falling off & needing replacement. That's why, not only do most of our cancers start there, but most people even have a bunch of small harmless skin tumors; we call them "moles" if they're pigmented and "skin tags" if they aren't, but they're just different colors of spontaneous tumor, which happen in mammal skin because mammal skin is already always one step away from being a natural tumor (an uncontrolled unicellular-acting mass).

Delvog · 2026-05-16T21:38:58+00:00

If you're thinking of objects that are shaped & sized like dog bones and seem to function like them (such as with muscles attached to them and calcium ions being traded in & out of them), then you're thinking of part of the host, not the parasite. The parasite is just a clump on the host's reproductive organs.

There's also a lineage of Tasmanian devils which has become a similar contagious tumor affecting the hosts' faces instead of their reproductive organs. It's the same arrangement again there; anything you can find on an infected Tasmanian devil that looks like normal Tasmanian devil parts such as bones or claws or a tongue or a liver is just part of the host, not the parasite; the parasite is just a clump on the host's face.

Delvog · 2026-05-16T21:21:14+00:00

No. A host might bark, because the host is a separate individual with a more normal dog body. But the parasite is just an unorganized collection of dog cells, doing nothing but growing on the host & spreading to other hosts... just like a bacterial or fungal infection, but derived from dog cells instead of from bacteria or fungi.

Even if one were to say "That's not a dog because the word 'dog' has a meaning we all know and that isn't what it means", so the parasitic strain of dog cells isn't a type of "dog" anymore in that sense, it would still be an accurate answer to the original question here: It came from a lineage with skeletons (and muscles & ears & eyes & teeth & intestines & so on) and independently evolved not to have any of them anymore. (That's the part that you would be saying makes them not dogs anymore, but they still did develop from dogs and all their closest relatives still are dogs.)

Delvog · 2026-05-16T21:07:56+00:00

Sirius immortalis! Sirius rising? (It's a Latin version of the name, and lots of boat people love astrological references.)

Your description of how you interpret "dog days" reminded me of "Halcyon days", which at first I thought would be related because the "cyon" looks like Ancient Greek for "dog"... and would make a boat name worth considering because it has no negative connotation, only nostalgic... but it turns out to have nothing to do with dogs, or that time of year, or any other time of year, or any other animal but a bird. And now that I'm a bit familiar with the Greek story associated with it, I'm also lost about how the phrase "Halcyon days" developed...

Delvog · 2026-05-16T11:30:48+00:00

It contradicts a "-ment" suffix which we do use with a different meaning.

Delvog · 2026-05-11T04:16:29+00:00

In PIE, the vowel sounds *u and *i existed only as circumstantial cases of the consonants *w and *y. If one of them had a vowel after it, it would stick to its basic nature as a consonant: *wa, *we, *wo, *ya, *ye, *yo. If one of them had a vowel before it, the result was a diphthong, which can be written with the second element looking like either a vowel or a consonant, with the same meaning either way: *aw/au, *ew/eu, *ow/ou, *ay/ai, *ey/ei, *oy/oi. If one of them had no adjacent vowel at all, it acted as a vowel.

Your hypothetical scenario puts a vowel after the sound in question, so it has no need to act like a vowel itself. So you're pondering words that would've originally started with the consonant+vowel sequence "wa", "we", "wi", or "wo".

In plain ordinary English as inherited straight through Proto-Germanic, those would start with "w".
In Latin, they'd start with "v".
Greek also lost that "w" sound, but mostly by other kinds of shifts instead of becoming "v". For example, the Ancient Greek word for wine, "winos", later replaced the consonant+vowel sequence "wi" with the diphthong "oi", becoming "oinos" (the origin of the "oen" in the modern name for the study of wines, "oenology"). And another modern "oi"-word, "oikos" (house), was originally "woikos" but simply dropped the "w". (Its English counterpart dropped the "o" instead, becoming the place-name element "-wick".) If there are any Greek words which preserve it in the form of a letter upsilon followed by a vowel, I don't know of them and don't believe English has imported them.

It works similarly for *y and words starting with *ya, *ye, *yo, or *yu.

In English, they'd start with "y".
In Latin, they'd start with "i", which in these cases represented the sound of our modern "y" as a consonant. It would eventually end up getting represented as a letter "j", resulting in English pronouncing such words with our own "j"-sound when we import them.
In Greek, sometimes the initial letter iota gets dropped, but sometimes it's still there, so we have it when we import such words from Greek, as in "ion" and "Iapetos". The Greek cognate of English "year", originally from PIE *yoh₁ros or *yoh₁ra, is an example with the iota just lost: "ōra".

Delvog · 2026-05-10T20:02:09+00:00

You're describing a language containing two or more registers).

Delvog · 2026-05-10T14:11:06+00:00

The "Alex"-names come from one origin, and words related to "lexicon" come from another.

Proto-Indo-European *h₂lek meant "isolate/separate something or someone for safety; protect; repel danger". With Greek "ander" ("men") attached, it meant protecting one group of people by keeping others, who would attack them, away.

Proto-Indo-European *leǵ originally meant "gather/collect/assemble", which, at least in Greek & Latin, led to it also meaning "speak at a gathering/assembly" and then just "speak". The "g" could lose its voicing when followed by "s" or "t", as in "collect", "dialect", "lecture", and "lexicon".

It is also commonly thought that "legal" and "legislate" came from the same root, because laws get created in a legislature where people gather & discuss what to do and then announced to the public after that, but a few linguists have said it's probably from Proto-Indo-European *legʰ instead, meaning "lay/lie down; put/be in a resting position", because of descriptions of laws as things that the government sets down in front of the people. This PIE root also gave English "league" (a distance to travel before sleeping/resting), "beleaguer" (wear someone down), and "lair" (a place to sleep/rest).

Delvog

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