Talk:Apollo Sauroctonos

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Lizard killer?

Sounds more like "lizard stabber". Can anyone translate the -tonos suffix? 70.179.20.157 (talk) 01:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mosaic is Dionysos not Apollo

The mosaic looks like it depicts Dionysos, not Apollo: panther, hunting boots, thyrsos, grapevine coming out of a wine vessel. And Dionysos has the epithet Kolotes, "Lizard." 157.131.79.138 (talk) 12:45, 21 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 22 November 2024

It has been proposed in this section that Apollo Sauroctonos be renamed and moved to Apollo Sauroktonos.

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Apollo Sauroctonos → Apollo Sauroktonos – most of the sources that are currently in the article, as well as external sources not on the page, refer to it as 'sauroktonos' instead of 'sauroctonos'. additionally, the letter 'c' does not exist in the attic greek alphabet and using a kappa (k) is a more appropriate transliteration. however, a few sources do use the form with a 'c' so it is an appropriate redirect 2A02:C7C:2DCE:1F00:9C41:7BD2:C8D1:758 (talk) 00:44, 22 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support. The spelling with a "k" does appear to be the more common. Google Scholar returns 411 results for "Apollo Sauroktonos" vs 180 for "Apollo Sauroctonos" and the ngram viewer suggests that sauroktonos has been the more common form since the 1940s. It's also the spelling used in the collection catalogues of the Liverpool Museums and Cleveland Museum of Art, the two English-language museums which hold a copy. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:19, 22 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: there are also a significant number of results under Sauroctonus, which would presumably have been the standard transliteration instead of Sauroctonos. An n-gram of all three forms shows that the two Latinate transliterations combined accounted for as many or more published mentions in English until around 1995, and they still make up a significant amount of all mentions. Most English-language reference sources will be older than this, even if the article currently cites only newer sources. English traditionally uses Latin rules for transliterating Greek, and in Latin 'K' is rare and used only before 'A'; 'C' is the usual equivalent and before a consonant it yields the same pronunciation in Latin and English; Greek '-os' becomes Latin '-us'. The re-transliteration of Greek directly into English seems arbitrary a bit like "recentism" in the field of antiquity. P Aculeius (talk) 15:38, 22 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I didn't have a strong opinion on this before the IP suggested it, but I don't agree that "we should use the spelling which has been more common than any other individually since the 1960s, and more common than all the others combined for the past 30 years" is particularly arbitrary: it's Wikipedia's usual practice. It's not like Achilles where Akhilleus is still a spelling adopted by a tiny minority of classicists. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:22, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support, mostly per Caeciliusinhorto, as well as a bit of extra searching. The Google Scholar results seem to indicate that the combined usage of the forms "Sauroctonos"[1] and "Sauroctonus"[2] is less than that of "Sauroktonos"[3]. The ngrams[4] also suggest that their combined usage has been less than that of "Sauroktonos" since the 1990s, and that "Sauroktonos" has been the most popular of the three since the 1960s. While we might use some sources from before 1960, for Greek mythological art it's generally not necessary to go earlier than the 1980s, at least not when it comes to well-known representations; the most authoritative source on the topic is of course the LIMC, the volumes of which were published in the 80s and 90s, and Ridgway's three-volume survey of Hellenistic sculpture was published in the early 2000s, with other important works I can think of (eg. Pollitt, Schefold, Spivey) also being produced either in or after the 90s. As an aside, the LIMC[5] and Ridgway[6] (which are the first sources I thought to check) both use "Sauroktonos". Choice of transliteration should be based upon which form is most common in reliable sources, and "Sauroktonos" seems to be. – Michael Aurel (talk) 20:52, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]