Re: Baby animals

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Here's an interesting question that arose on Cybalist, pace the Romanian
> "Alex" --
>
> <quote>
> [Rom.] pui= baby of every animals with exceptios of these of horses, cows ,
> sheeps, goats, goose and ducks. For these 6 species are special words to
> denominate their babies. I mean here, one can use the word "pui" for the
> babies of thes animals too, but it sounds very strange to do it. BTW,
> are in other languages more/less species wherefor the people developed
> special words for denominating the babies of them?
> </quote>
>
> Food for con-thought.
>
> ObNatlang: Engl. and Eur. langs. of course have a bunch.  I can only think
> of a specific word for "piglet" in Indonesian, but then I didn't hang around
> farms very much.  They do distinguish _human_ vs._animal_ pregnancy (hamil,
> bunting, resp.)
>
> ObConlang:  So far, Kash only distinguishes the pregnancy.  It's off to the
> new-words file!
Hm, I'm afraid that none of my conlangs have any terms for animal young.
Indeed, there's a general dearth of words for animals at all in most of them.
Tairezazh leads the pack and has names for, what, five kinds of animals;
_vauf_ "dog", _zvik_ "fish", _kezel_ "hawk", _stshak_ "eagle",
_rint_ "falcon". To this may be added _aukezel_, refering to a certain species
of hawk, but if I say those bird-names arose to provide certain (fictional)
people with nick- and surnames, I think the extent of my interest in conjuring
up terms for animals is embarassingly clear.

                                                   Andreas