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Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

nature.com

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Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#171

Post by martopix »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #4

May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circles: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi , just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that i…

As a person who studied both latin and ancient greek in high school, Octopi makes my eyes bleed.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#172

Post by thaumasiotes »

nerdponx wrote: post #110
bananarchist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)

Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should…

> The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura".

What's irregular about that?

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#173

Post by thaumasiotes »

permo-w wrote: post #66
daveslash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are…

one that I often hear foreign speakers struggling with is “hair”. 1 hair, 2 hairs, a whole head of hair. seemingly, if it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form. but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural. English is an absolute mess

> but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural.

That's not an uncountable. It's the count form, explicitly being counted by the count-noun-exclusive determiner many. (The mass form of many is much.)

The entire difference between "the hair on my head" and "the hairs on my head" is that in the second one you're counting the hairs.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#174

Post by thaumasiotes »

DFHippie wrote: post #84
adrian_b wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus". Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen. Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain…

That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.

That understanding is basically correct. But the history of Latin is quite long, and the rules change over time.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#175

Post by nerdponx »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #172
nerdponx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should…

> The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". What's irregular about that?

Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#176

Post by Matumio »

threads2 wrote: post #139
Matumio wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read that book, yes, "Octopuses are cool" is a pretty good summary. It's worth reading it for that. On the biology part, if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be, but no "solution" really. And you'll learn that an octopus is a ten megapixel screen, but that's just the first point again. If you only want that first point, th…

> if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be Can you expand on this? I think I kind of understand where you're going with this: consciousness might be an efference copy of our actions? (so our actions don't "surprise" us? rather than consciousness creating actions?)

No expert, but the way I remember it from the book, it's one idea how an evolutionary path towards consciousness might start.

First it's just a nerve-path to prevent flinching back from the contact with something you wanted to manipulate. But once you have a fancy neural path that tells the visual cortex what light/objects to expect after you move your head left/right (maybe flee if it's unexpected), it's only a small evolutionary step to re-purpose this path, "execute" the same path while suppressing the head movement. So now you can process further what you are expecting if you move left vs right. Which could be interpreted as a step towards being conscious of your surroundings. (This is not 100% what the book says, but the idea I got from that chapter.)

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#177

Post by abudabi123 »

anthk wrote: post #88
euroderf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. I recall reading that back in the day, there were criticisms that the neologism "television" would never catch on ... because it combined Greek and Latin roots.

>because it combined Greek and Latin roots. Romances in a nutshell.

Is it true the majority of imperial Rome personal names had -anus endings and they are not in vogue in Modern English for the obvious soundalike to Uranus?

And given the time available to an octopus while she waits for her eggs to hatch, what is the recommended reading list from the Loeb library for the octopus's consciousness if there were a universal translator babelfish she could use?

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#179

Post by thaumasiotes »

OJFord wrote: post #140
harshbutfair wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia we would never refer to pizzas as pies. Is this a US-only thing or does it happen elsewhere?

It's American to my British ear. I think they sometimes distinguish 'pizza pie' as being the deeper-pan Chicagoan style, which to be fair is a lot more like what I would call a pie than what I would call a pizza. (But also not really either.)

"Pies" is most certainly not American. I have heard that it is supposedly specific to New York, but if you watch Friends (set in New York), you'll see frequent references to the Joey Special, "two pizzas".

It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigners. Or there might be weird foreign people doing it right now. It's hard to know.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#180

Post by OJFord »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #179
OJFord wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's American to my British ear. I think they sometimes distinguish 'pizza pie' as being the deeper-pan Chicagoan style, which to be fair is a lot more like what I would call a pie than what I would call a pizza. (But also not really either.)

"Pies" is most certainly not American. I have heard that it is supposedly specific to New York, but if you watch Friends (set in New York), you'll see frequent references to the Joey Special, "two pizzas". It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigne…

Not? I'm confused who you're saying does call pizzas 'pies' (or 'pizza pies') then?

I assure you some Americans certainly do, wherever they got it from, 'American' or not. I've only been exposed to it via American film/TV, including food shows - most recently Somebody Feed Phil in Chicago.

I've never heard it in the UK. I'd be surprised to learn that Italians call them something else too that in other contexts translates as 'pie', but I'm not sure how relevant that would be anyway.

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