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Comment by nightpool | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep spelling it "Mastadon"? It's such a strange spelling to me, it's not how it's pronounced and it doesn't really make any sense to me (unlike some mispellings where the "wrong" spelling clearly makes more sense then the actual spelling). But this is just a bog-standard greek root, right up there with masticate and smilodon and all the other -odon prehistoric animals of the world. is there some kind of connection here i'm missing? It's so common that I feel like there must be some kind of underlying logic driving it

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Probably because they're parsing it as masta+don rather than mast+odon, and word-final schwa[0] is written with a "a". Compare eg "arenadon", "pastadon", or other somethinga+"don" psuedo-portmanteaus.

0: I assume they don't pronounce it as mas-TO-don, since that would be a rather bizzare stress pattern, so the "o" generally gets weakened to a schwa as is typical for unstressed vowels.

> somethinga+"don" psuedo-portmanteaus.

See, I think this is definitely why I'm confused, because I can't for the life of me think of anything that fits this pattern. Are you talking about japanese onamonapias, like kabedon? that's the only word I can think of with an ending that might possibly be analyzed like that. a quick search of wiktionary for words ending in "adon" doesn't turn up anything obvious that might fit that pattern either. Could you give some examples?

> I's not how it's pronounced

I pronounce it rougly /mæstədan/ and I imagine many other people do as well. That sounds is closer to "a" than "o".

> But this is just a bog-standard greek root

So is "helicopter", but you don't typically break it apart as "helico" and "pter" in order to pronounce or spell it.

lol true enough! when I say "greek roots" I mean "the class of thing vaguely thought of as greek roots when parsed/analyzed by english language speakers". I think my confusion lies more with the presumed "masta" prefix then it does with the bracketing itself. It just looks very very strange to me.

Some people just actually pronounce it as Mastadon over Mastodon.

First, most people are not aware of greek/latin or any roots of words we use.

Second, language is fluid... if you think it shouldn't then good luck policing that.

Third, I feel your pain. I groan everytime I hear "which begs the question".

I think there is a lot of topics one might discuss online that you don't talk with others AFK with, and then the connection between spelling<>pronunciation never gets cemented.

I see the same thing all the time with Etherium/Ethereum as well for example.

I had the same problem when NGINX first came out. It wasn't until maybe a year later after starting to use it that I actually talked with another person AFK about NGINX, and they said "engine-x" which I had never heard of.

I work with a Russian guy who still pronounces it the same as hijinx.

The sounds are not as different as you believe they are. It's the same reason people write Tobasco.

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