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What do you call a centipede?
In the chapter The Language of Numbers of his book The Number Sense, S.Dehaene mentions an arthropod that is popularly known in English as centipede while in French its name is millepattes (thousand-leg). In reality, the fellow has only 42 legs. In English there are actually two words, centipede and millipede symbolizing although related but still different arthropods. Both belong to the class of myriapods. I can't be sure but the latter term seems to originate appropriately from myriad, which is a very large, indefinite number; innumerable, with the Greek source murias - ten thousand, or murios - countless. My son has boxes of Safari Cards which parents subscribe to when their children are very young. The cards keep coming past kindergarten, grade school, and well into the college age. The number of various animals on earth being indeed enormous, the stream of cards never stops by itself. As a long term subscriber, I felt I am entitled to scan three cards with three different species in question. The exact number of the myriapoda is not properly known and their classification is very complex.
Below are the results of an escape to a Border's bookstore where I checked the Reference bookshelves.
Perhaps it's a deficiency of the dictionaries sold by Border's but only in Portuguese(2) I found separate words for centipede and millipede. Later, on the Web, I found that in German, too, there are two words: hundertfuesser and tausendfuesser (not quite as above.) In French, both words are translated as "thousand-leg." Czech, Italian(1), Spanish, and Polish are more reasonable sticking with centipede. Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish derive from millipede. Greek and Russian are champions of accuracy. They miss just 2 legs which should be preferred to the next best, 58. As usual, the Hebrews showed more wisdom than the most. Their word 
(marbe raglaim) stands for noncommittal the one with many legs but may also be translated as the one that grows legs. Latin usage (if correct) is also noncommittal and, in addition, hints that there is a lesson to be learnt from this subject.  (1) Raffaele Palomba has informed me that in Italian there are indeed two words millepiedi and centopiedi with the former being used more frequently. Which shows that one can't learn everything from a dictionary. (2) The above is true even more than I originally thought. Ricardo Pascoal has set the record straight with the remark that, in Portuguese, it is true that, mostly, people will simply use "centopeia" when making reference to any of the centipedes and millipedes, but "millipedes" (with an acute accent on the second I) does exist as translation to the latter. If anyone is interested, http://www.portoeditora.pt/dol/ is a Portuguese dictionary that contains their definitions. Fast forward to June 2009: google's translator helps verify all of the above translations, except for Esperanto, but with a consolation of the following:
Language of Mathematics, Language of Science and Plain Language
Copyright © 1996-2009 Alexander Bogomolny |
where 
is just forty. The rest must be Greek for legs.
where 
is plain forty, I must know. The rest means "a small leg."
(meaning 100 legs)
(meaning 100 legs, sounds an authentic Russian to me)
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