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everyone wants to know but was afraid to ask?

Is it kichlids or sichlids or shiznick??

I think it's more like sicklids

I believe ClownyGirl is right. I say sicklids too, 'cause that's how my LFS taught me.

Cheers
TW

Ditto. I ounce it 'sicklids', but I ounce other things strange sometimes, so my opinion might not be the correct one. Oh well, my 'sicklids' still love me anyway.

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."

Sick-lids is the proper mode of unciation.
I always giggle when I hear people call
them chick-lids.


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Thats not funny until you hear someone ask for a chinchilla. Yes, twice I have heard that one!! Go Figure!!/:'

72 gallon bowfront:Tanganyikan Lake set up
75 gallon: A. Baenschi trio,Cyanotilapia Afra Cobwe(4), copadichromis trewavase, protomelas sp. tangerine tiger(breeding pair)

Ah, the joys of the venerable Innes book.

One of the reasons why this should be part of EVERY aquarist's library, even though it's old, is because it gives unciation information for every taxonomic name of the featured fishes. It also provides etymologies for the taxonomic names - although since quite a few of these have changed, you'll have to look elsewhere for some of the modern names such as Trigonostigma.

And, the venerable Innes book informs us that the correct unciation of Cichlidae (the name of the Family) is "Sick-li-dee". Therefore, the correct unciation of Cichlid is indeed "Sick-lid".

The type Genus for the Family is Cichla (whose type species in turn is Cichla ocellaris, the Peacock Bass), and according to The Cichlid Room website, this derives from the Greek for 'Wrasse'. However, I decided to check this in my Greek Lexicon, and found that the word in question translated as 'thrush' (as in the bird species) ... however, my dictionary is the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (known as the "Middle Liddell" to those with the requisite sense of humour) and the full entry from the definitive version (known as the "Bigger Liddell" cites that there are two definitions for the word, the first being 'thrush', the second being (courtesy of this page which indexes into the full Greek-English Lexicon online):

Sea-fish, a species of wrasse ...

From The Cichlid Room, finding the etymology is a somewhat roundabout exercise - it isn't presented in the page describing the Genus Cichla (which is a strange omission) but instead appears on the page describing the Genus Crenicichla - here is the page in question.

From the form of the word in Greek, one might be tempted to conclude that the unciation should actually be 'Kick-lid', since the original Greek word begins with the letter kappa. However, there are a host of rules that apply when Greek words are embedded in taxonomic names - the Greek words are "Latinised" according to a well-defined set of rules (these should be available form the International Committee on Zoological Nomenclature, but I can't find the rules on the ICZN website]http://www.iczn.org/ICZNhomepage.htm[/link] - however, as a tangential diversion, you can find no less than 1.5 million taxonomic names of namila life forms courtesy of [link=Zoobank, which is a project maintained by the ICZN. However, thanks to my copy of another book dealing with taxonomy, namely The Scientific Names Of The British Lepidoptera: Their History And Meaning by the late A. Maitland Emmet, the rules can be summarised as follows (letter groups specified in italics below refer to the Greek letters - sadly, this Board does not support my using actual Greek characters):

• The letter group ai in a Greek original becomes 'ae' in the Latinised form;

• The letter k (Greek kappa) becomes 'c' in the Latinised form;

• The letter ch (Greek chi) becomes 'ch' in the Latinised form;

• The letter group gk or gch becomes 'nc' or 'nch' in the Latinised form;

• The letter group oi becomes 'oe' in the Latinised form;

• The letter group os at the end of a word becomes 'us' in the Latinised form;

• The letter group ou becomes 'u' in the Latinised form, unless it is a diphthong;

• The Greek letter upsilon becomes 'y' in the Latinised form;

• The Greek diphthongs au and ou, when they are present as diphthongs, remain unchanged.

In addition, when a Greek word is used in a taxonomic name, because Classical Greek is an inflected language (i.e., word spellings change according to grammatical function, for example nouns change spelling according to whether they are in the nominative, accusative or genitive case etc) the genitive stem is used as the basis for the taxonomic name, which affects the spelling profoundly when the Greek word used is a third declension noun with a genitive stem that differs markedly from the nominative stem. So, on that basis, the Greek kichle (the latter 'e' being an eta, not an epsilon by the way) becomes 'Cichla' in the Latinised form, and thus the unciation is affected.

Ah, the benefits of a Classical education.

[Edited for broken tags]

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

I worked at a LFS where a guy said he had a 55gal sectioned off with an oscar on one side, and a chinchilla on the other......bwahahahhaha! I'm serious! He said this to me...he meant cichid...but the chinchilla jokes lasted throughout the rest of the day.

I've got a fever... and the only prescription... is more cowbell!

Chinchilla? thank goodness he didn't have it in a 3ft with a chihauha... they shouldn't be kept together.

That is a great story. Thanks for sharing.

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~~~ My fish blow kisses at me all day long ~~~