Re: Male and female animals

* Herman Miller said on 2002-10-28 02:42:33 +0100
> I'm starting to come up with Lindiga words for different kinds of animals,
> and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to have distinct words
> for males, females, and young of some species. English even goes as far as
> having distinct words for immature males and females in a few cases.
>
>          male     female   young    yng. m.  yng. f.
> horse    stallion mare     foal     colt     filly
> human    man      woman    child    boy      girl
> deer     buck     doe      fawn
> (bovine) bull     cow      calf
> sheep    ram      ewe      lamb
> pig      boar     sow      piglet
> chicken  rooster  hen      chick
> dog               bitch    puppy
> fox               vixen    kit
> duck     drake             duckling
> goose    gander            gosling
Uh, tabstops larger than eight? Now that's rare.

> Different languages have specific words for males, females, and young that
> aren't distinguished in English; [..]
Anyone collect these? More datapoints in that case:
English:
cat      tom               kitten

Norwegian:
ulv, varg (wolf):
    f.: ulvinne, ulvetispe, vargtik, hunnvarg, hunnulv, ylve, *ulve-binne
    young: ulvunge, vargunge, ulvehvalp
bjørn (bear):
    f.: binne, bere, hunnbjørn

Furthermore, you should perhaps not overlook the terms for collections
of the (young) animals, like "litter of kittens" etc., although I
understand that having zillions of these is an English (and Chinese?)
phenomenon.

> [many more examples]
>
> On the other hand, it might be interesting to do without specific words
> entirely, even for humans! So "woman" would be "she-human" (urvi^va) and
> "buck" would be "he-deer" (mi^vo.^sa).
That's what Taruven and its ilk does. There's not even a specific word for
"mother", only "parent" IIRC.


t.