Talk:Trichocladus grandiflorus

Etymology

Currently, the etymology is: "Trichocladus is derived from the Greek terms trichos (τριχός; gen. 'hair') and klados (κλάδος; 'branch') and means approximately 'hairy-branched'. Grandiflorus derives from Latin terms grandis ('grand, large') and florum (gen. 'flower') and means approximately 'with large flowers'.[2][3]" I do not have full-access to the fourth edition of Gledhill (only a few preview-pages on Google books). Does Gledhill explains in his introduction (or somewhere else) why he mentions a genitive singular τριχός? It seems unlikely that the compound Trichocladus would be derived from a genitive singular case. It is quite common to provide, besides the nominative singular, the genitive singular, as in consonant stems, the last consonant of the stem might be obscured in the (sigmatic) nominative case, but why would you omit the nominative case? I am even more surprised by the etymology of grandiflorus that mentions the genitive plural florum. Does Gledhill explicitly explains why he would mention the genitive plural instead of the nominative singular? Wimpus (talk) 22:07, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Gledhill does not give particular explanations for the use of 'τριχός' or 'florum' but does list them both. If anyone can find a reliable source with explanations or alternative roots, feel free to add them. As for leaving off the nominative cases, there's no particularly important reason I can think of to add them but if you'd like (perhaps in a footnote?) go for it! No harm in adding additional information. –Skoulikomirmigotripa (talk) 22:53, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Gledhiil similarly uses florum (or must that be read as "-florum"?) in thyrsiflorus, see here, but the Wiki-article that refer to Gledhill for thyrsiflorus writes: "Thyrsiflora is derived from the Ancient Greek thyrsos (θύρσος; meaning a 'contracted panicle, wreath, or thyrsos') and the Latin floris (gen. 'flower')" So here, the genitive plural as used by Gledhill is replaced by a genitive singular. Can someone explain this case-switching? Wimpus (talk) 22:16, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Oh, good catch on thrysiflorus the issue of 'floris' was a typo I copy-pasted accidentally. I have corrected it. –Skoulikomirmigotripa (talk) 22:53, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Floris is also present in Ageratina thyrsiflora

It is difficult to assess whether Gledhill really refers to a genitive plural or to a neuter word-forming element "-florum", as there is hyphen (but whether this hyphen denotes a word-forming element is not clear). For triflorus -a -um he writes: "tri-flora". Flora is not a case-form of nominative singular flos (-flora also in etymology of gilviflorus). And I do not expect that in triflorus he is referring to the goddess of flowers, named [1]. I am familiar with the words and recognize the case-forms, whether something is a noun, adjective or adverb, but when an uninitiated reader might try to identify the separate elements in Gledhill of a certain compound, he may become increasingly confused. Why would Gledhill mention the adjective longus for longipes, longilobus, longigemmis, while mentioning the adverb longe for longipetalus, longispathus, longistylis, longitubus? It makes no sense. Wimpus (talk) 00:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

We should ask ourself whether using Gledhill for compounds with flos is of any use, as mentioning a genitive plural florum is rather odd. Backer (1936) for example, writes: "Lat. grandis, groot; flos (flōris), bloem: grootbloemig" [= Lat. grandis, large; flos (flōris), flower: large-flowered". Here the nominative, with additionally the genitive singular is provided (as is quite common in dictionaries), the separate words are directly translated, while Gledhill does not give a direct translation of "grandis" and "florum"" in (p. 183): "grandiflorus -a -um with large flowers, grandis-florum". Readers have to check in other parts of the dictionary what the form florum might be. Wimpus (talk) 07:53, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@Wimpus: If we could take a step back here for a second and discuss whats going on here beyond the actual words in question. This conversation and your post above is emblematic of two things: why you are so useful as an editor and why you seem to run into problems with other editors. The distinctions you're making here are important and interesting from a linguistic and historo-linguistic perspective, but from a scientific or botanical perspective (or the perspective of any casual reader who stumbles upon an etymology for a species) the distinctions you're making are not important, useful, or even noticeable in some cases. 'Flos', 'floris', and 'florum' are all forms of the same word and their root meanings are all the same (flower); There are differences in them grammatically, which influences their meanings, but those differences are not important to distinguish in non-linguistic, and non-academic context. While the knowledge you clearly possess makes you very valuable for tracking down and understanding the roots in etymologies, you have to keep in mind that you need to reduce the amount of detail you are aware of to an amount of detail that is appropriate for the audience at hand and the mission of the copy you're editing. The three things an etymology in a non-academic source like Wikipedia should have (in order of importance) are:

• A definition for each component/root in the word in question, and (if it makes sense to do so) a synthesized meaning of the English word based on it's components.
• The language of origin of each component/root of the word in question
• The components/roots written in their language of origin

There should be a citation for this information (though lack of a citation is not necessarily cause for removal) and it is often nice to link to the wiki page of the language(s) of origin, or to a dictionary entry for the foreign words, though this is just going above and beyond. What etymologies do not need is to be deleted because they fail to make detailed distinctions between 'florum' and 'floris', or list a genitive case without including that detail.

Returning to this page's etymology. To answer the question, "[is] using Gledhill for compounds with flos is of any use," the answer in my mind is obviously yes. What we have in Gledhill is a source giving us '-florum' (or florum this distinction is not terribly meaningful here) as the second component of the word. It does not go in to detail about what exactly is meant by this but it does we do get that it is latin and relating to 'flower'. That is honestly detailed enough for this page. Including the extra information that '-florum' is (in one way or another) related to the latin nominative 'flos' would be useful when comparing roots across names, but all we really need here is to know what the 'grandi-' half of the Grandiflorus means and what the '-florum' half of Grandiflorus mean. –Skoulikomirmigotripa (talk) 13:17, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

It is unnecessary to create a potpourri of various case forms of the same word, without a proper reason or logic. It must be quite confusing for the uniniated reader to read that a certain epithet on -florus is derived from the genitive plural florum in a certain article, while in another Wiki-lemma he reads that the same or a similar epithet is derived from flos, while another one mentions floris, while a fourth one mentions flora (that is actually the goddess of flowers). We should stick to a standard procedure, like mentioning the nominative and additionally the genitive singular case (like the example of Backer, 1936). Wimpus (talk) 07:32, 22 May 2020 (UTC)