Re: Country names

On Fri, 9 May 2003 13:39:20 -0400, Jeffrey Henning <Jeffrey@...>
wrote:

>North America
Coyote, raccoon, or white-tailed deer.

>Actually, I've broadened this into being a resource for anyone seeking
>to name geographical regions using animals.  So the list is a source of
>ideas.  Once all the countries have ideas, then I'll go through and pick
>my personal preferences for each.
Here's some more.
Galapagos Islands: tortoise
Brazil: boa constrictor
Chile: chinchilla
Algeria or Libya: fennec fox
Egypt: cat
Chad: scimitar-horned oryx
Malawi: cichlid fish

The problem is there's not a whole lot of overlap between animal ranges and
national boundaries. Maybe the thing to do is look for very recognizable
animals with small ranges, like the mandrill (a monkey with a very colorful
face, found in a small area in the western central part of Africa).
Elephants are very familiar, but found in scattered populations in many
different countries. You could probably find some obscure species of bat
that lives only in Togo and nowhere else, but how likely is it that your
language would have a unique word for that species?

Another problem is that range maps are scattered among dozens of books and
often don't have national boundaries drawn on them (lots of books don't
even have range maps, giving descriptions in text like "South Australia and
nearby Franklin Island, western New South Wales, possibly northwestern
Victoria" to pick a random example). It can be time-consuming to find good
examples for small countries from these kinds of sources.

I think I'll change my mind and suggest the impala as a possible name for
Tanzania or Zimbabwe; Kenya is at the northern edge of the impala's range
and might be represented better by some other animal (giraffe, cheetah,
etc.)

And now I need to start coming up with words for all these animals; I've
realized that not only I don't have a Lindiga word for "impala", but not
even a generic word for "antelope"!

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