this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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[–] sbbq@lemmy.zip 70 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That was the sirens, not mermaids.

[–] starik@lemmy.zip 38 points 2 days ago (2 children)

And the bottom half of mermaids are fish

Depending how you butcher them you should be able to get surf and turf with one piece of meat.

[–] BunScientist@lemmy.zip 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

where I'm from those two are the same word

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

While some versions have depicted Sirens as woman-headed birds, other versions depict them as mermaids.

The sirens of Greek mythology first appeared in Homer's Odyssey, where Homer did not provide any physical descriptions, and their visual appearance was left to the readers' imagination. By the 7th century BC, sirens were regularly depicted in art as human-headed birds. Apollonius of Rhodes in Argonautica (3rd century BC) described the sirens in writing as part woman and part bird. They may have been influenced by the ba-bird of Egyptian religion. In early Greek art, the sirens were generally represented as large birds with women's heads, bird feathers and scaly feet. Later depictions shifted to show sirens with human upper bodies and bird legs, with or without wings. They were often shown playing a variety of musical instruments, especially the lyre, kithara, and aulos.

The tenth-century Byzantine dictionary Suda stated that sirens had the form of sparrows from their chests up, and below they were women or that they were little birds with women's faces.

Originally, sirens were shown as male or female, but the male siren disappeared from art around the fifth century BC.

Some surviving Classical period examples had already depicted the siren as mermaid-like. The sirens are described as mermaids or "tritonesses" in examples dating to the 3rd century BC, including an earthenware bowl found in Athens and a terracotta oil lamp possibly from the Roman period.

The first known literary attestation of siren as a "mermaid" appeared in the Anglo-Latin catalogue Liber Monstrorum (early 8th century AD), where it says that sirens were "sea-girls... with the body of a maiden, but have scaly fishes' tails".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_%28mythology%29

[–] BunScientist@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm saying the distinction might not be done everywhere, if you click the language thing on your wikipedia link and select spanish it will lead you here https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirenas_(mitolog%C3%ADa) , if you then click to go back to english from there you'll end up in the mermaid page

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

What you're talking about is an important part of the challenges of translation between cultures and languages. Words for categories don't always translate neatly.

Take, for example, the English words for Lemon and Lime. Many languages don't distinguish between the two, and at most will call the lime a green lemon.

The word for "seafood" in many other languages may inherently exclude freshwater fish, or all fish, whereas in American English it usually includes all fish.

The two English categories of "bread" and "pastry" map onto three categories of "pain"/"viennoiserie"/"pâtisserie" in French, because enriched breads aren't considered bread.

Many languages don't have a different word between red and pink, and instead just call pink "light red" or something. Some languages distinguish light blue from blue, and may define the demarcation between green and blue differently.

I'm pretty sure there are languages that don't distinguish between alligators and crocodiles, goats and sheep, turtles and tortoises, too.

With cultural mythologies, it's especially interesting on whether we decided to use the same words for the different culturally independent myths: dragons, vampires, zombies, ghosts, demons, devils, gods, demigods, fairies, wizards, etc.

And so when talking about whether a culture or language distinguishes between mermaids and sirens, or whether they're considered the same thing, is just an extension of the broader observation that not everything translates neatly into the same categories across all languages.

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

you can correct that misalignment by linking it back to the siren mythology page and we would be grateful to you

[–] Zwiebel@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That still doesn't mean spanish society differentiates between sirens and mermaids tho

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Right there, in the first paragraph of your link:

Originalmente, en la Antigüedad clásica, se las representaba como seres híbridos con rostro o torso de mujer y cuerpo de ave

Que no tengamos dos palabras para los conceptos de sirena de pez y sirena de ave no significa que no seamos capaces de reconocer que al hablar de sirenas de la mitología griega, que es de las cuales el meme está hablando ya que está referenciado a la Odisea, son quimeras de cabeza de mujer y cuerpo de ave.

Macho que hay un apartado enterito sobre las sirenas griegas y romanas con bien de fotos. No tendremos dos palabras pero si que diferenciamos.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 1 points 23 hours ago

I don't think they meant ‘can't tell difference’, more like ‘don't use different words for siren and mermaid

[–] oxideseven@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

Oh dang. Sounds like harpies... Weird