Osmeteria through history...

[Guy Van de Poel]

I'll throw in my (Belgian) 'frankske' too,

> Ian Thirlwell is, of course, correct: 'osme' is Greek. And
>'osmeterium' rather than 'osmaterium' would be the correct version.
>I still wonder why the older works used 'osmaterium'. Surely it's not
>because they were ignorant of Greek?


Osmaterium is Latin because it has a Latin ending (in Greek it would be
...terion).
So probably when latinising a word, you have to latinise all the parts of
it, so osme (which is feminine) would get the feminine Latin -a ending,
making the whole: osmaterium.
For what it's worth.

Guy.

Guy Van de Poel
Guy_VdP at t-online.de

Royal Entomological Society of Antwerp
http://www.freeyellow.com/members/fransjanssens/index.html