like imagine if “pter” were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain “pter”, but you’d probably think of “helicopter” as an atomic unit with its own unique identity
I often do chunk them, but if you’ve picked up a bit of taxonomic Greek pter means ‘wing’, so we have helico-pter ‘spiral/rotating wing’ and ptero-dactyl ‘wing fingers’ - both cases where breaking down the name tells you something about what the things are!
yeah, that was an intentional feature of the example chosen. i’d guess most people who are aware of this fact do still think of helicopter as a single unit in their head unless they choose to decompose it, because you hear each of these words often enough that you don’t really need to work out the meaning from etymology. and so if pter were pronounced the way it currently is when in helicopter but pronounced as “peter” in pterodactyl it would not actually be that much more confusing than it currently is.
I often do chunk them, but if you’ve picked up a bit of taxonomic Greek pter means ‘wing’, so we have helico-pter ‘spiral/rotating wing’ and ptero-dactyl ‘wing fingers’ - both cases where breaking down the name tells you something about what the things are!
yeah, that was an intentional feature of the example chosen. i’d guess most people who are aware of this fact do still think of helicopter as a single unit in their head unless they choose to decompose it, because you hear each of these words often enough that you don’t really need to work out the meaning from etymology. and so if pter were pronounced the way it currently is when in helicopter but pronounced as “peter” in pterodactyl it would not actually be that much more confusing than it currently is.