Patera Incus

António Pedro Marques · 16 Aug 2010, 14:02 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:02:17 +0100
Subject: (urth) Patera Incus
In-Reply-To: <568526.41209.qm at smtp823.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
References: <SNT123-W39C189A8CDCD1BCEA1EA51CF9A0 at phx.gbl>
	<568526.41209.qm at smtp823.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4C6944E9.30408 at gmail.com>

Mo Holkar wrote (16-08-2010 10:53):
> At 00:10 16/08/2010, Lee wrote:
>>> Mo Holkar: Just on a zoological note: a fulmar is not a type of gull,
>>> but a type of petrel. Apart from both being birds, fulmars and gulls
>>> are not related at all.
>>
>> Well, they are both seabirds comprising a smaller much smaller subset
>> than that which would include owls and ostriches.
>
> Although they are in that sense more closely culturally associated with
> gulls than are owls and ostriches, really they are no more closely
> related to them than those other birds are. "Seabirds" is not a genetic
> relationship grouping, just a behavioural coincidence of habitat.
>
> (Of course, Wolfe may have just been intending a cultural association of
>  this sort in Fulmar's name, as it might have been difficult to find an
> actual gull-based name that didn't include the obvious word "gull".)

Biological species on the Whorl need not be the same as here. It's perfectly
possible for there to be a genetically close relative of gulls there that
would merit to have its name translated as 'fulmar'.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net