Monday, March 26, 2018

So what do you call a winged unicorn or a horned lion?

A recent addition to our cultures' repertoire of fantastic beasts is the winged unicorn or horned pegasus, a hybrid of pegasus and unicorn. There is no standardized name for this fantastic beast, so what exactly do you call it? (Beyond the obvious, of course!)

© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Deceptions of winged horned horses appeared in ancient Assyrian art dating from over two thousand years ago. One appeared in the 1907 play The Unicorn from the Stars by Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Most recently their popularity has exploded with their appearance in the My Little Pony franchise.

In Greek mythology Pegasus was originally a proper name meaning "of the spring" (referring to his birth by springing from Medusa's neck stump and his connection to watering springs). Other winged horses were simply called "winged horses" in Greek (hippoi pteretoi). However, it is fairly common for singular monsters in Greek mythology to sire or bear races named for them: in Pegasus' case this gave rise to the plural pegasi.

Addendum (May 4, 2018): Pegasus carries more weight in English as a proper noun, so English-speaking writers have often deigned to use other names. The New Latin synonym pterippus (pl. pterippi) is a neologism that appears to have been coined on the internet in the late 1990s. The word is probably derived from hippoi pteretoi and patterned after taxonomic names like pterodactyl ("wing finger") and eohippus ("dawn horse"). Curiously, the Ethiopian Pegasi were mentioned by Pliny as having a pair of horns; they were never given a distinct name. 

There are various informal portmanteaus of pegasus and unicorn: pegacorn, unipeg, unisus. The historical word alicorn has seen reuse as a term for a winged unicorn, believed to have started in the work of fantasy author Piers Anthony. The English alicorn has a fairly interesting etymology. It comes from Italian alicorno, a regional variation of liocorno, itself a blend of lione (variant of leone) +‎ unicorno, ultimately derived from Latin leō, leōnem ("lion") + unus (“one”) + cornu (“horn”).

Thus, an alicorn is a lion-unicorn... at least according to a literal interpretation of the etymology I was given on Wiktionary. I have no idea how the word came into existence and the dictionaries I read provided no hint. Anglicizing the original Italian liocorno, or taking from the original Latin, would produce leocorn ("lion horn").

The word alicorn has distinct archaic and historical meanings entirely separate from its literal etymology. The word first referred to some kind of wildebeest with oddly curved horns in medieval bestiaries. Later on, it came to refer to a unicorn's horn and/or to a powder made from said horn. Most recently Piers Anthony used it to name a winged unicorn, and this usage was popularized by a 2012 episode of My Little Pony.

During my research, however, I came across the claim that alicorn is derived from Latin āla (“wing”) + cornu (“horn”). This is an erroneous folk etymology, but the odd thing is that semantically it makes perfect sense and people have run with it. Since alacorn was coined some years ago, a number of people on the internet have claimed it is more accurate than alicorn.

It does not help than English has way more vowels than Latin and Italian do. Using the American Heritage Dictionary pronunciation key, {alicorn}, {alacorn} and {leocorn} would be pronounced /ă-lĭ-kôrn/, /ā-lə-kôrn/ and /lē-ō-kôrn/, respectively.

Addendum (May 4, 2018): The bicorn, from English bi- ("two, paired") + Latin cornu (“horn”), appears in the Megami Tensei series of video games. As the name implies, it is an equine with a pair of horns.

Research links

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