Talk:phalaena

RFV discussion: October 2015–April 2017
Latin. May be attested in New Latin to mean "moth", but I'm not sure what else. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:46, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
 * See 🇨🇬, alt form of ("whale, moth, monster"), related to 🇨🇬, cf. . I don't know quite how to sort this out. DCDuring TALK  00:54, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
 * To start with, we don't have Ancient Greek sections in either of those entries. As far as I can tell, the one with the double letter is the original form, but it has been displaced by the later form with the single letter, which was also borrowed into Classical Latin, except the "ph" changed to a "b", for some reason. I think we're dealing with two different, but homographic words in Ancient Greek, with only the one meaning whale making it into Latin. The one meaning moth is used in taxonomic Latin, giving rise to the obsolete generic name, and appearing in compounds such as . Even if this spelling exists, it should be changed to an alternative form of balaena, which was the only form common enough to have descendants among the Romance languages. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:20, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
 * So far I've only been able to find this and this. Note that both are discussing Ancient Greek word use in Ancient Greek texts. This is a mention in an English footnote that seems to say that phalaena is found as a variant in one manuscript that contains a fragment of a Latin text. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:23, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

I found the following on Google Books:
 * Appearances in a commentary (looks like just uncapitalised Phalaena), a quote (second hit), an entry about a mite, an endnote and in a translation (translating φάλαγξ it seems)
 * Appearances in a translation and several endnotes

The sense "whale" is quite hard to find. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 14:21, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, [P/p]halaena seems to be a name of a genus of moths when it is actually used as a word (and not a mention/transliteration) in Latin. The only times I have found it used in the context of whales is in discussions of the ancient link between the sense "moth" and "whale" in the Greek term (where the whale is called phalaena marina, the moth of the sea), but it isn't ever used without qualification to mean "whale" in Latin texts outside of these discussions of the Greek term. (The link is apparently that both appear to be attracted to light: whales, unlike other "fish", expose themselves to the sun - like a moth to a lamp - to breathe.) See this quote, for example (and follow the link for the full discussion, it's only 1.5 pages for the entry of balaena):
 * 1789, Johann Gottlob Schneider, Synonymia Piscium Graeca Et Latina Emendata, Aucta Atque Illustrata, p. 156:
 * "la"

- Sed alii grammatici, quos Tzetzes ſequitur, phalaenam marinam nomen inde accepiſſe volunt, quod mari egreſſa in ſole apricari ſoleat, (tradente Oppiano) ut papilio phalaena lucem amat lucernisque ideo advolat.


 * It uses phalaena to mean moth (perhaps lowercase as a mere transliteration and not referring to the genus per se), and calls the balaena a phalaena marina in the context of a discussion of Greek (!) authors who subscribe to the moth-whale link described above. I'd suggest to keep the entry as an alternative case-form of Phalaena, with a note mentioning that it is sometimes used to transliterate Greek . — Kleio (t · c) 15:01, 26 April 2017 (UTC)


 * "Whale" rfv-failed. I've changed the definition to "moth", adding two citations and noting the existing of many more at (even after sifting out the ones that are using it only in taxonomic names in non-Latin texts, there are many uses in running Latin). - -sche (discuss) 20:29, 30 April 2017 (UTC)