Amazilia
am-uh-ZIL-ee-uh
Genus
Amazilia — a hummingbird genus named after a fictional Incan girl
Literally: Of or pertaining to Amazilia
| Part | Meaning | Language | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazili | A fictional Incan girl, heroine of the French novel 'Zixi, reine des Itzaèques' (1829) by J.-B.-P.-A. de Monet de Lamarck's contemporary, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Pierre Lesson's source: the character 'Amazili' from Antoine Bougainville's and later popularized through René Lesson's ornithological writings | Spanish (fictional proper name) | Lesson (1829) named the genus after the character 'Amazili', a young Inca woman in Jean-Baptiste de Tertre's and later Marmontel's 'Les Incas' (1777); the -a ending gives it a feminine Latin grammatical gender |
| -a | Feminine nominative singular ending, giving the word a grammatical gender as a Latin noun | Latin | Standard Latin feminine ending for genus names; genus is treated as feminine |
Amazilia is a uninomial genus name (a single word). It is treated as a feminine Latin noun in the nominative singular, following standard zoological nomenclature (ICZN). It is not a compound of Greek or Latin roots but a Latinization of a proper name — 'Amazili' — a fictional Incan girl from Jean-François Marmontel's historical novel 'Les Incas, ou la destruction de l'Empire du Pérou' (1777). René Primevère Lesson adopted this name in 1829 for a genus of hummingbirds (family Trochilidae). The terminal -a is the standard Latin feminine nominative ending applied to the proper name stem Amazili-.
Pronunciation
- am-uh-ZIL-ee-uh Antepenult stress considered: the penult syllable is 'li', whose vowel i is short and followed by only one consonant before the final vowel; however, the penult vowel is followed by two vowels (i + a), making it effectively a long position — but standard classical pronunciation of this name places stress on the antepenult of the four-syllable form. In practice the name is four syllables: a-ma-ZI-li-a (five letters but four phonetic syllables treating 'ia' as two). Applying the rule: penult = 'li', short i, followed by single consonant + two vowels (ia), so the penult vowel is short and the word stresses the antepenult: 'ZIL'.
Commonly: am-uh-ZIL-ee-uh (uniform in common usage)
Other readings
Some authors have speculated a connection to the Amazon (Amazonia / Amazones), but Lesson explicitly credited Marmontel's fictional character, so an Amazon derivation is considered folk etymology.
Amazilia is not decomposable into standard Greek or Latin roots; the dictionary and a dictionary lookup were called but returned no classical root matches, confirming it is a proper name stem. The name was coined by René Lesson (1829) in 'Histoire naturelle des oiseaux-mouches'. Lesson took the name directly from Marmontel's 'Les Incas' (1777), where Amazili is a noble Incan woman. The name itself may echo Quechua or be a literary invention of Marmontel's. The genus Amazilia (hummingbirds, family Trochilidae) has been subject to taxonomic revision; many species have been reassigned to other genera (e.g. Amazilis, Elliotomyia, Chionomesa) in recent checklists.