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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1718204" data-attributes="member: 6929">Ehh, time to beat a dying horse. I trust you'll indulge me.Cyclops: from the Greek Kuklos (round) + Ops (eye).Griffon: from the Greek Grups, OED unclear on meaning (if it's changed at all). Probably means vulture, if I'm reading between the right lines.Heracles/Hercules: 'Glorious Gift', if Babynames.com can be trusted.Two of these are therefore compound words invented and used at the time the legends were invented (or thereabouts), similar to 'king tyrant', 'arm lizard' and all the rest. And, in fact, the scientific dinosaur names are becoming more and more vernacular; if I said teerex, you'd know what I meant, although the word bears only a passing resemblance to its original meaning-laden form.Most words start off as combinations of others. They may eventually be forgotten; my name's Benjamin, and you'd be hard pressed to say what it means, but in Protohebrew it had a specific meaning still recorded today: Son of my Right Hand. What common word is your name?Anyway, those words that don't start off as combinants are often based on onomatopoeia (some generations down the line). And it's difficult to mimic the cry of something with lungs bigger than you, so combinants are probably how dinos are going to get named by common people (there's no caste of people speaking an elitist language in fantasy worlds rushing out to discover them first, or if there are, there are enough common folk around to forget them and start calling them Bonesplitters or what have you).To sum up: I don't mind descriptive names. They have more linguistic consistency.</blockquote>

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