Talk:Homo sapien

Shouldn't it be emphasized a little stronger that this form of usage is not correct? By now it looks like it's a normal, even though a colloquial usage form.

At least I'd remove the part with the “(plural Homo sapiens)” since the “Homo sapiens” is in singular. DaemonDice 02:58, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

It appears to me that "Homo Sapien" or more specifically "Sapien" is not a word. Homo Sapiens is both the singular and plural much like its taxonomy class Species. Oxford online does not even return any results for Homo Sapien. Should Wiktionary be updated to correct this common misconception? It is marked as non-standard but shouldn't it be removed completely?— This unsigned comment was added by Benjamin.Dobell (talk • contribs) at 12:58, 17 February 2009.

We intentionally have many misspellings and alternative spellings. If a language learner's first encounter with the name is one of the common misspellings or alternative spellings, should we offer no help? DCDuring TALK 13:08, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Alternative spellings are used by educated English speakers, while misspellings in no wise are. Mine opinion about misspellings tallies entirely with Benjamin.Dobell's in the assumption that misspellings ought to be removed altogether. Additionally methinks that Wiktionary should shew people how to spell properly words in lieu of how to spell them as an ignoramus. Bogorm 09:05, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Note, however, that this is not a misspelling but a misconstruction. The problem isn't that people mean to write "Homo sapiens" but accidentally or ignorantly write "Homo sapien" instead (even for a poor speller, the final "s" is hard to miss)... Rather, they are construing "Homo sapiens" as a plural and deriving a novel singular form. An educated speaker could certainly do this for jocular purposes. Of course we should provide the correct information about usage, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't document this usage, even though it currently happens to be considered incorrect. -- Visviva 10:16, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd have thought that sapiens is Latin for wise, sapient in English. Mglovesfun 21:36, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Visviva: keep and proscribe. Homo sapiens ought to have a usage note explaining that the word is first and foremost a species name but that it can also be used as an ordinary noun meaning a specimen of that species (i.e., a human being), in which case the singular form is homo sapiens, whereas the plural is homines sapientes. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 17:41, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

What are we going to do with XXX(deprecated template usage) homo sapianXXX? Already 36 hits on b.g.c. DCDuring TALK 19:07, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I got 28; 21 verified and 7 rejected ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7]). The doubly-erroneous ‘-an’ form is 20–30 times less common than the singly-erroneous ‘-en’ form, which is itself over ten times less common than the standard ‘-ens’ form, so (deprecated template usage) homo sapian is at least a couple of hundred times less common than the correct spelling/construction; this is just an uncommon member of the class of misspellings deriving from <a>–<e> confusion of unstressed vowels (pronounced [ə]), as is the case with independence–(deprecated template usage) independance. I don’t think (deprecated template usage) homo sapian is worth noting, TBH, but if it gets an entry, it is clearly a misspelling-cum-misconstruction. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:59, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The term Homosapien comes from the "two" Latin words Homo and Sapien. Homo, meaning "man" and Sapien meaning "wise." The "correct" English spelling of Homosapien is obviously a straighforeward corruption from the Latin. There is no argument or disagreements by linguists regarding the introduction of this word into the English Language. The change to "Homosapian" is a further missspelling and corruption of the English word. 65.26.177.239 19:50, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I should have said raw b.g.c. hits. We could avoid wasting effort on some misspelling entries if we would agree on what levels of absolute and relative frequency justified inclusion of a misspelling or misconstruction, and what warranted labeling something with any prescriptive marking. One might infer that homo sapien was sufficiently common in absolute terms to be deemed "common", but homo sapian was not. I am less clear about what makes something a misconstruction or misspelling rather than alternative ones. Excluding typos and scannos etc, most "errors" seem to reflect the application of a different rule-set (weak vs. strong conjugation, English vs. FL pluralisation, etc.).

I suppose that a dictionary that relies on inherently backward-looking attestation and is administered by cognoscenti will always take a somewhat prescriptive stance. Evidently many users want us to as well. DCDuring TALK 15:45, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I don’t think that we’re going to get very far if we depend upon “levels of absolute and relative frequency” alone — many misspellings are more common than some very rare words, yet the former are derided whilst the latter are praised; clearly, not all words are created equal. We need to try as best we can to get into the heads of quoted language users; for example, looking over the twenty-one quotations in Citations:homo sapian, I note that a lot of the publications pertain to India (written by non-native speakers?), a few have a grammatical error or two in the same quoted sentence (badly-written / -edited text?), and others seem to ignore some aspects of formal style (like the wholly uncapitalised, unpunctuated, and erratically set out poetry at the bottom and the 2005 quotation’s awkward parenthesis), all of which lead me to believe that these are not sources we can rely upon when we consider whether something is a legimate alternative form. Also, I wish to mention the mistake–error distinction I explain hereat; in the case of (deprecated template usage) homo sapian, I think we can call this a simply mistake, as I explained above with reference to (deprecated template usage) independence–(deprecated template usage) independance. † ﴾^(u):Raifʻhār ^(t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I was hoping for a less labor-intensive and less potentially subjective approach usable as a guideline at least. Also, I noted the relatively large share of Indian authorship and wondered whether there was something in the pronunciation of Indian English that made "homo sapian" seem more plausible. DCDuring TALK 17:14, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

A possible factor is the Hindi vowel system, where there is a short vowel /ə/ – regularly transcribed as ⟨a⟩ in Latin – but no short vowel /e/ or /ɛ/. Vowels of this type are always long in Hindi. Hence, the habitual and obvious way for a Hindi speaker to spell a schwa-like vowel is ⟨a⟩, while transcribing a short vowel as ⟨e⟩ is distinctly unusual. Especially after a syllabic ⟨i⟩, presumably. Hindi-isms in Indian English (or even global English, such as brahman) would thus distinctly favour ⟨an⟩ over ⟨en⟩, thus strengthening the non-India-specific factor that the ending ⟨ian⟩ is vastly more common than ⟨ien⟩ in English. (Note: Added after the move from the Tea room.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:12, 10 July 2014 (UTC)