Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 194 posts

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#41

Post by cupofpython »

colechristensen wrote: post #28
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…

There’s no right way. 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. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling…

so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold.

so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive!

Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is)

Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species

Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s

Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#42

Post by DFHippie »

adrian_b wrote: post #30
mc32 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought it was virus and virus given its root.

All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been viso…

> the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora

This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#43

Post by GravitasFailure »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #13
dharmab wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to get really pedantic, use Octopodes :)

> If you want to get really pedantic Well that certainly got our attention. Please, continue.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...

The full thing is worth a read, but when you steal a word from one language that it also stole from a third, the pluralization rules are pretty much anything goes.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#44

Post by smcl »

cupofpython wrote: post #41
colechristensen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no right way. 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. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling…

so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no…

I feel like there has to be one of those "galaxy brain" progression memes for Octopuses -> Octopi -> Octopodes

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#45

Post by lolc »

> “The environment for these specific octopuses is such that they have this interaction between individuals,” she says. “It’s communication, in a way.”

Watching it, I immediately classify the behavior as aggression. Why they would stop at "communication" is not clear to me.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#46

Post by rhn_mk1 »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #6

As a counterpoint, The Atlantic ran an interesting article[0] yesterday suggesting that it's not really clear what the Octopuses' aims are when they do this, and that we do really like to anthropomorphize them. [0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/gloomy-o...

It's as much as the article says:

> “We weren’t able to try and assess what the reasons might be,”

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#48

Post by ant6n »

cph123 wrote: post #36
bananarchist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.

7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#49

Post by adrian_b »

DFHippie wrote: post #42
adrian_b wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been viso…

> the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri , not viroris .

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 seldom used words.

Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum").

Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension.

Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.

Re: Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

#50

Post by staplung »

bananarchist wrote: post #9
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…

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

The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.
Post reply on HN