Name That Word

honestrosewater

How to play: Think of a word or something language-related. Give us some clues. If someone guesses it correctly, they go next. Any kinks can be ironed out as they turn up.

Some handy links to get everyone started: http://www.etymonline.com/
http://www.onelook.com/
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygnnnl
http://www.ethnologue.com/family_index.asp
http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/ne...res/index.html
_____


This English noun made it's way over from India. It refers to a mammal but sounds half-bird, which might explain why its plural is sometimes irregular.


_____
P.S. If anyone has any questions about languages or linguistics along the way, please ask. Please! I don't get to talk to others about that kind of stuff enough!

selfAdjoint

Mongoose.

This English word, denoting a lung disease, descends from the indo-european word for destruction, and has preserved the difficult IE consonant cluster.

honestrosewater

I haven't really gotten anywhere with this one. I don't know much about languages or how they've been categorized, so just to clarify, do you mean the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for destruction? It seems like Indo-European is the family of languages that descended from PIE.?

The difficult consonant cluster is part of the word, right? If so, that's probably the most helpful clue for me. Just looking at some lung diseases, emphysema is the only one that strikes me as having a difficult cluster, /mf/, but the meaning doesn't seem to fit (in fact, the meaning seems to be going in the opposite direction, towards breath and life).

If no one else steps in, I'd probably need another clue...

BTW, how did you get my clue so quickly? That was really fast.

matthyaouw

Hmm.. I think another clue might be needed here.

(Good game by the way!)

selfAdjoint

Starts with a p and is just about but not quite obsolete.

arildno

pforgotten??
That's a difficult conconant cluster at least.

selfAdjoint

I am going to give it up tomorrow. Any more tries?

honestrosewater

Pneumonia? I was going to guess that, but I was thinking pronunciation instead of spelling. Argh.

Jelfish

I was going to guess pneumonia as well, but couldn't see where the "decends from IE word meaning destruction" and "just about but not quite obsolete" hints come in.

selfAdjoint

It's phthisis, a synonym for TB.

honestrosewater

Cool. So do you want to go again?

selfAdjoint

OK. In geology it denotes something red, but in Heraldry it means green.

AKG

Wild guess, vermillion?

matthyaouw

I'm thinking something realating to "haem"?

arildno

Vert? Verdigris??
That's about the associations I get from "green+heraldry".
No connection that I know of to geology, though..

matthyaouw

I found it, but half by accident, with a little too much google for it to be considered 'fair play' so I'll leave others to guess. No one is close yet.

selfAdjoint

Hint. Although "vert" is the usual word for green in English heraldry, historically there were also other words, and modern heraldists have to know them to interpret old blazons (BTW, a blazon is a formal description in specialized language of a coat of arms).