Talk:Chimera (mythology)

Female monster

Is it known that the Chimaera was female? Or is it merely a guess from the "-a" at the end of its name? Χιμαιρα is Greek for "billygoat".

I agree -- the line "The word Χιμαιρα is Greek for billygoat" seems to be a non sequitur

This article currently says that it's male "yet" it has a mane. That implies to me that it used to say "female despite a mane" and someone changed part of it. It currently makes no sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.122.63.142 (talk) 21:47, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Chimaira is generally regarded as female despite the mane. I've made the change. ==Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 22:02, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Parentage

There seems to be different versions about the parentage of the Nemean Lion and the Sphinx. One version is that it is Orthus mating with his mother Echidne rather than his sister Chimaera (this and this, so Chimaera plays no part. Pantheon.org(here and here), a generally reliable source for these things, says that Typon and Echidne are their parents. I found other versions, which the original writer seems to have learned from, that Chimera and Orthus are the parents.

Clarification, please.

Chimaera and Cimmerians

Many historians believe that mythical monster "Chimaera" is a posterior "monsterization" (by ancient Greek myth-makers) of Cimmerians, an ancient warlike people lived (or invaded from Scythia of Eastern Europe) in southwestern Anatolia (Lycia?).

--IonnKorr 13:12, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

I would call Lycia SW Anatolia myself; can you remember specific historians?Septentrionalis 04:04, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

---

Why do you need to put that its a Greek myth so leave it alone.

---

Displaying s-cedilla character

The character that Xollob has just kindly reinstated at the end of "Yanartas" (I presume it is a s-cedilla but can't tell) displays on my screen as a little square. Is there anything I can do to get it to displeay correctly? TobyJ 15:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Try switching your computer's base font to unicode; but this is a question whether non-portable characters, even when correct, are desireable. Septentrionalis 19:52, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Complaint

IT'S actually spelled CHIMAERA NOT chimera and its very complicated to search if thye cite has the wrong spelling

This edit by an anon seems a valid complaint; I post it here for the record. Septentrionalis 22:00, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

It's spelled both ways, ae=>e in later Latin orthography...if it's hard to search for, learn to search better, I say...--Josh Rocchio 15:01, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

"Chimera" is, nowadays (I believe), the preferred spelling. At least in the US...dunno how those wacky Brits might spell it :) (chimæra?) Applejuicefool 19:34, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

But he has a point, its exactly spely "Chimairia" as it is in Homer (the iliad). Just thought you would like to know that. reagrds. METALFREAK04 13:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I have two questions about grammar and spelling. As mentioned above, "Chimera" is a correct US spelling. (Why an international project like Wikipedia should use a US-exclusive spelling like this is another question for another day.) But why do we sometimes have the spelling Chimaera and sometimes Chimera? The fish, for example, is listed as "Chimaera", while "Chimera" is the disambiguation page and other Chimaera articles follow the US spelling.

Second question. Is Chimaera a proper noun (like Cerberus) or a common noun, albeit a unique one (like the Lernaean Hydra)? If it is a proper noun, we should not use a definite article; if it is a comon noun, we must. I've always heard "the Chimaera" except in this article, and as far as I could spot, all of the sources directly quoted in the article use the definite article as well.

My final question (not about grammar or spelling) is where the Chimaera appears in Harry Potter. Is she alluded to in passing? I certainly can't recall her making a direct appearance. Q·L·1968 ☿ 09:39, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Having heard no answers to my second question, I have reinstated the definite article, following all of the attested usage I could find (apart from Evelyn-White, the lone dissenter). Cheers, Q·L·1968 ☿ 11:23, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there are proper nouns that take the definite article. E.g., the Oresteia, the Iliad, the Hague, the White House, the Kremlin, etc. Such proper nouns can be called strong proper nouns; the ones that don't take the article can be called weak proper nouns. My intuition is that the Chimera/Chimaera is a strong proper noun (when we're talking about the mythological creature). But I'm looking at West's commentary on the Theogony and he seems to use "the Chimaera" and "Chimaera" (without the article) somewhat indifferently. So I'd say that we can find examples of Chimaera both with and without the definite article, and the Wikipedia text can use whatever editors think sounds right. --Akhilleus (talk) 12:31, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

In Latin, it would have been Chimaera, not Chimera. Replacing AE with E is an American habit. An encyclopaedia should spell it the same as the Ancient Romans, not modern Americans. (WP Editor 2011 (talk) 04:19, 1 October 2011 (UTC))

Duplicate content?

The list under "Chimera in popular culture" is almost identical to that on the Chimera disambiguation page, though the latter is broken down into separate categories - fiction, games and music. Maybe this list can be merged into that one, as this article is supposed to be specifically on the Chimera in Greek mythology, and other uses of the term should probably be kept to the disambiguation page? Miss Lynx 17:52, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

No Chinese Chimera's descriptions

I know a Chinese ancient imagined animal is translated to Chimera. I don't know if anyone could give more detailed descriptions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.170.68.49 (talk) 16:03, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

So what is it?Zheliel (talk) 12:54, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I added a link to a paper on that topic. Vmenkov (talk) 23:20, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

It's the Qilin and it doesn't really resemble the Chimaera anyway. (WP Editor 2011 (talk) 04:24, 1 October 2011 (UTC))

Mission Impossible 2

Well, I thought that Mission Impossible 2 also included the Chimera/Chimaera/Chimaira in the movie.Zheliel (talk) 12:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Popular culture/ references

Thought maybe adding its appearances in popular culture such as Final Fantasy Series, or Full Metal Alchemist. Popular culture? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.89.224.6 (talk) 04:39, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Excalibur?

Why is Excalibur linked? It seems to be a total non-sequitur. The only reason I can think of is that both are mythological and both appear in Final Fantasy. --174.16.159.172 (talk) 06:25, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Primary topic

Since this is the primary topic, which the fish genus is named after, shouldn't this one be moved to Chimaera? FunkMonk (talk) 19:41, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Comment

Its good

Winstondinesh (talk) 12:18, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Requested move 22 October 2019

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus. There is a clear absence of consensus for this proposal at this time. bd2412 T 22:31, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

• Chimera (mythology) → Chimera
• Chimera → Chimera (disambiguation)

– Primary topic by longterm significance. The scientific term Chimera (genetics) was named after the mythological creature, as were all other terms on the disambiguation page. A hatnote will suffice for those who type in Chimera hoping to reach the scientific term. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 05:18, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - primarily based on pageviews which do not show this is the primary search topic as the genetics and virus articles have similar results. There is no value in forcing a primary topic competition here. --Gonnym (talk) 08:51, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose, no clear primary topic. —Xezbeth (talk) 12:34, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support. This is a title that ought to be primary for one of its topics. The guidelines for determining a primary topic do not give a single criterion or even a list of criterion that absolutely determine whether a topic is primary; neither usage nor long-term significance is necessarily determinative, and other factors may be considered. Looking at these common measures, it seems that the mythological beast has slightly more pageviews on a daily basis over the last ninety days; this would not make it primary based on usage, since it is not far more likely to be searched than other topics, much less than all other topics combined. However, it is far more likely as a search target than nearly all of the others, and more importantly all of the others, including the genetic anomaly, are named after the mythological chimera, which has appeared in literature for more than two thousand years—whereas the concept in genetics was virtually unheard of before the 1970s, and still tends to be restricted to those researching genetics, while the mythological chimera is well-known in the popular imagination. This distinguishes it from the requested move for the moon Callisto, where more people are likely familiar with the name for astronomical reasons—which date back centuries—than the relatively obscure figure from mythology. People who've never studied mythology have heard of the moon, but people who've never studied genetics know about the chimera. P Aculeius (talk) 14:08, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Could you explain how you've determined that the creature is "far more likely as a search target" when the page views say otherwise? How are users searching for and finding that topic without it resulting in a page view? -- Fyrael (talk) 16:19, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Page views say exactly what I said they did. There are sixty-five entries on the disambiguation page; all have fewer pageviews than this article, and nearly all of them have fewer than 20 per day; most have fewer than 10; several don't even have articles of their own. The genetics article is the only one that has more than half the page views of this article, and the one after that—an order of fishes—curiously has twenty times the number of page views of the genus of fishes for which the order is named; I suspect the great majority of page views for that are actually people expecting to find this article. But as I thought I said clearly, page views considered alone are not determinative in the question of whether there is a primary topic. In fact, they're highly misleading in this instance. Nearly everyone learns about the mythological chimera in school; nobody learns about genetic chimeras in school, unless they're pursuing a college degree in biology. One possible explanation for the page views would be that a much smaller number of people are viewing the genetics article repeatedly.

However, a better indication of the disparity is this Google Books ngram: While chimera and chimaera have been in constant use since the beginning of the chart, and account for practically all usage before 1970, the phrase genetic chimera doesn't occur in significant numbers at all. Even if we assume that the use of the word in genetic contexts occurs much more often without the word "genetic", it still can't account for more than a small percentage of all uses—not unless people suddenly stopped reading Greek mythology at the same time genetic chimeras entered the scholarly literature. Determining a primary topic is about what readers expect to find when they type a word or phrase into the search window. Nobody is surprised that genetic chimeras require some form of disambiguation—even if they're not sure what form of disambiguation—because they know it's a metaphor referring to the mythological creature. That's what they expect to find when they type the word "chimera", and that's why this should be the primary topic. Although I think perhaps an even better argument might be made to move this article to chimaera, and disambiguate the order of fishes, and that's what I'll be proposing below. P Aculeius (talk) 00:58, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Yeah sorry, I somehow just skipped over the word "nearly" on my initial reading and thought you were claiming that it was a more popular target than all the others in some magical way that didn't get reflected in page views. -- Fyrael (talk) 05:42, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

• Support The mythological creature is the clear primary topic in this case. For one thing, all of the other items on the list are named after the mythological chimera. Furthermore, the vast majority of the other items listed at "Chimera" seem to be either stub articles or short entries in longer articles. The only other item on the list that might conceivably challenge the primacy of "Chimera (mythology)" is "Chimera (genetics)." The concept of a chimera in genetics, however, obviously takes its name from the mythological creature, which predates the naming of the concept in genetics by roughly 2,700 years or so at least. Furthermore, the mythological chimera is far better-known than the concept in genetics. The mythological chimera is one of the most iconic mythological creatures; whereas I doubt most people who have not studied genetics have even heard of the concept of a genetic chimera. —Katolophyromai (talk) 15:40, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose: Page views show that the creature is not significantly more sought after than any other topic. The fact that other topics are named after the creature is not really relevant for getting users to what they're trying to find, which is our purpose here. Primary topic is not the same as original topic. And while the creature has more significance in the past, the genetic term's 70ish (the article doesn't actually say when it was coined) years mean that this isn't an instance of recentism. -- Fyrael (talk) 16:31, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose fails PT In ictu oculi (talk) 23:07, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
• Proposal: instead of moving this article to "chimera", move it to "chimaera", using the more Greek spelling. This article has a far better argument for being the primary topic at that title than an order of fishes does, even based on page views: this one has more than twice as many as the fishes, and since the order of fishes is presumably named after the genus of fishes by the same name, which has only a handful of daily page views, I suggest that most people who type in "chimaera" and arrive at that article are expecting to find this article instead. How do people feel about moving this to "chimaera" and disambiguating the order of fishes? P Aculeius (talk) 00:58, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

• I don't support that proposal - it's too confusing, since it's an antiquiated term for it. I do support making Chimaera a WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT though (or if the move fails, a redirect to the disambiguation page), and I have speedied the page it was formerly at, Chimaera (fish) for a move there._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 02:16, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

@P Aculeius: That is an interesting proposal that is worth considering, but the "more Greek spelling" would actually be Chimaira, since the name of the mythological creature in Greek is Χίμαιρα (Chímaira). Chimaera is still very much a Latin spelling. Currently, the article "Chimaira" is about some obscure defunct American heavy metal band from Cleveland, Ohio that I, living one state over from them, have never heard of; I doubt anyone could realistically argue that they are the primary topic here. We should probably, the very least, turn Chimaira into a redirect to this article and move the article currently listed under that title to something more like "Chimaira (band)." —Katolophyromai (talk) 03:17, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I really don't care for the current fad for re-transliterating words that have had a standard transliteration since antiquity. There are only two plausible spellings in English: I consider "chimera" the more anglicized/americanized version, and the one more likely to occur outside of a strictly mythological context, while "chimaera" seems more likely to occur in books about Greek myth—and is therefore perfectly appropriate for this article. I think the ngram clearly demonstrates that, while it may not account for the majority of occurrences, it's still current; and it's presumably less likely to be confused with metaphorical uses. P Aculeius (talk) 04:04, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose per... umm... the second criterion of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. "Greater long-term significance" does not mean "longer-lasting significance". It clearly means more significance. (What kind of significance? Long-term significance.) Red Slash 02:41, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I'm baffled by this reasoning. Every other use, including the genetic concept, is based directly on the subject of this article. Not randomly named after some obscure mythological personage whose qualities and characteristics are unknown to anyone who doesn't look it up, but precisely because the mythological chimaera and its characteristics are widely known to this day. That's the definition of "long-term significance". P Aculeius (talk) 04:04, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I'm equally baffled. How do you not see parallels between this and, say, Boston? Or Martin Luther King or any of a million other cases that had a tremendously significant thing take its name from a much less significant thing? Red Slash 21:04, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Because the mythological chimaera isn't of "much less significance" than the relatively scarce phenomenon in genetics, which only appeared in scientific literature within the last fifty years, and presumably owes its existence in the popular consciousness to a handful sensational news articles in the last dozen years or so. Your parallel would be much more apt if you were insisting that "Alexandria" should be a disambiguation page rather than pointing to the ancient city in Egypt, because Alexandria, Virginia, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are currently very famous. Or if you were arguing that "Martin Luther" should be a disambiguation page due to the fame of Martin Luther King, Jr. An ngram I posted above clearly demonstrates that, despite Wikipedia page views, genetic chimeras can't account for more than a small fraction of occurrences of the word in published English-language sources. Is your argument that genetic chimeras are "tremendously significant" compared with the mythological chimaera, because they've presumably existed for hundreds of millions of years, even though they were unknown to science until recently? P Aculeius (talk) 14:12, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

I think the NGram above is flawed--people writing about chimeras in genetics don't say "it is a genetic chimera" or something, they just call it a "chimera" and are done with it. You're not going to be reading Nature and expecting to read about mythological things.

Look at this one [1] This shows pretty clearly that people were writing less and less about chimeras up until about 1940, a clear trend that lasted over a century as the chimera slowly lost its grip on our popular consciousness. But sometime around the 40s, the trend started reversing. Hmm, wonder why? Red Slash 13

46, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Not a credible interpretation, since the concept of a chimera in the field of genetics can't predate the science of DNA and the potential to compare the DNA of individuals to that of their parents—something not really possible before the late 1960's at the earliest, and most of the examples cited in the article are based on studies carried out in the last 25 years. And I'd like to see some evidence that the chimera "lost its grip on popular consciousness" or that "people were writing less and less about chimeras up until about 1940". You can infer a lot about the appearance and disappearance of terminology using an ngram, but hardly anything about overall volume of writing in comparison with, say, all published literature. What you don't see is the word "chimera" together with "genetic" (and feel free to come up with some more probable formulation, that would actually pick up the concept in genetics, but exclude mythological references), or any obvious trend that would likely be tied to the concept in genetics. That's something you should see if the concept amounts to a large proportion of the word's usage in recent literature. But so far, there's no evidence of it. P Aculeius (talk) 18:13, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Add not to be confused with chimera (Grotesque (architecture))

I think this article can have a "Not to be confused with chimera (grotesque) in architecture" template at the top, or something along that sort linking to Grotesque (architecture). Somerandomuser (talk) 00:47, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Possible Pop Culture Error?

I believe that people may confuse the Chimera of having another head representing a dragon, I believe DnD was responsible for that added addition and it may confuse would-be readers. Because of the huge influence of the DnD Chimera that permeates in many fantasy settings that I think this should be pointed out, so that people understand the differences between the Mythological Chimera vs. the Pop Culture Chimera.

Personally it has happened to me when I was much younger; I always thought the Chimera had a Dragon's head for the longest time haha! 74.124.162.10 (talk) 04:09, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

"Chimaera(creature)" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Chimaera(creature) and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 22#Chimaera(creature) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 (talk) 06:02, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: HUM 202 - Introduction to Mythology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 August 2022 and 9 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Berserkz, DarkAngelSaraph.

— Assignment last updated by Rockethound (talk) 22:26, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: HUM 202 - Introduction to Mythology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 August 2023 and 8 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mythgirlie23 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Mythgirlie23 (talk) 04:10, 12 October 2023 (UTC)