Naming animals

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LinguistCat
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Naming animals

Post by LinguistCat »

How do you guys normally name animals in your conlangs, especially for non-Earth cultures?

I know there's always just making a root that can't be further broken down and assigning it to some critter you made. And of course some cultures on Earth have dropped the original name of a creature and derived a new one from some attribute the animal had, assuming the "name it after a feature" principle wasn't the original way of naming them in the first place. Then there's taking the name of something more common (like a cat) and naming things that are related or just have superficial similarities after that animal. (Ex: 1. bobcat, a relative of domestic cats and while not sharing their genus do share both family and subfamily groupings, and 2. civit cat, which is cat-like, but is only related to true cats at the suborder level of feliformia.)

I guess I'm wondering if there are other ways to go about it and what most folks prefer to do, or if it's more dependent on the feel of the language. Plus, if they're nonhuman, maybe there's no reason to follow common naming schemes humans would use but then, what would they use? I only have a human brain to work with. [;)]
Salmoneus
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Re: Naming animals

Post by Salmoneus »

Well, you... just named the three ways to name ANYTHING. That's how words work:
- they're unanalysable morphemes
- or they're descriptions of appearance or behaviour [for non-animals, also descriptions of what they're made of]
- of they're analogies from other words
- oh, or they can be onomatopoeiaic

In the case of animals, in most languages most common animals will simply be unanalysable morphemes, because of course they'e super-common words in a pre-modern society. But most languages will have exceptions, where the original word gets replaced (reasons include taboo avoidance, child-talk or cultural references). And there are some languages where most will be analysable - but those will be languages in which most nouns of any kind are analysable.

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Why not look at English for an example?

Leipzig-Jakarta has the six essential animal words: dog, louse, fish, bird, ant and fly. Their etymologies are:

- "dog" is of unknown modern origin, but is probably a diminutive. Sense may be 'dark', 'trusted', or 'muscle-y'. Replaced an unanalysable PIE word
- "louse" is unanalysable. Either dialectical PIE or an Old European substrate word (only clearly found in Celtic and Germanic)
- "fish" is unanalysable. Either dialectical PIE or an Old European substrate word (only found in Celtic, Germanic and Italic)
- "bird" is unanalysable, of unknown origin in Old English. Replaced a word ('fowl') that probably meant 'flying thing'
- "ant" probably derives from an agent noun meaning "biter", though some think that's a folk etymology for an unanalysable loanword. Replaced an unanalysable PIE word.
- "fly" derives from an agent noun meaning "flier"
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MissTerry
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Re: Naming animals

Post by MissTerry »

Yeah there aren't many ways to name animals. You either use a single label/title/word/name for an animal like: Dog, Cat, Mouse; or you use descriptors: Jellyfish, Starfish, Earthworm; or you use analogies: Sea cucumber [which is not actually a cucumber], Flying Fox [not actually a fox], Sand Lion [not actually a lion], Dragonfly [not actually a dragon], House Fly [not actually a house]; or you borrow terms/words/names from other languages.

In my conlang, the general rule of thumb is: 1) if an animal is native or indigenous to general area where my conpeople lived or where the conlanguage developed: the animals get a single label derived from Sanskrit. 2) If an animal is foreign or alien to the conpeople or inhabits lands far from the region my conlang developed: then generally such animals get descriptor-names or analogous names. My conlang is mythically a sister language of Vedic Sanskrit, spoken by a people/tribe who lived around the Indian subcontinent. Such people living in such place have never ventured up north far enough to ever see a walrus. And so, thousands of years later, when they do finally see a walrus, what would they call that creature? In my conlang, the word for "walrus" literally means "Blade-Toother."

If a people/folk/race/tribe have never seen a certain kind of animal before, most likely they will produce a descriptive name for it because there simply does not exist a single word to name the alien/foreign creature; or they will borrow the name of the creature from another language that has a name for such creature. I'm pretty sure that ancient Anglo-Saxons had never seen a cobra anywhere around the British isles. And so, Anglo-Saxons back then simply had no word [nor did they need one] for a cobra. Centuries later, Anglo-Saxons conquered and annexed India into their British Empire, and they did encounter a snake with a hood. Not having a word or name for it in their English language, they borrowed the word/name "cobra" from the Portuguese descriptor "cobra de capello" which means "serpent of hood."
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Threr
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Re: Naming animals

Post by Threr »

Deyryck uses optional local keys when referring to animal specific to a region of the world. So we'd be using the "har'" key for earth animals and other keys for other animals. (In some cases more specific keys could be found)
At the same time, it has words for generic kinds of animals and some context specific transformations can be applied to them.

For instance, feline, whilst not being necessarily common in the universe, is divine race and, thus, famous kind. So there is a word "manaka" for them. So coming to earth, a Deyryck speakers would probably talk about cats (since they're the most common felines) as "manakan" even though there is the specific earth keyed word "har'myûwa".
As for dogs, they could use the earth keyed specific word: "har'rarka". Or they could go for "sôz'manaka" or even "monaka", both being somewhat "opposite of feline", since we tend to oppose dogs and cats a lot in our cultures.

As for how the keyed words are chosen, that is very unpredictable.
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LinguistCat
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Re: Naming animals

Post by LinguistCat »

Thanks I'm surprised I forgot onomatopoeia. Cat in Japanese <neko> was once <nekoma> where <ne-> came from nya/nia the sound cats make + <koma> which likely meant beast or 4 legged creature.

Fortunately, from the human side of things, some of the creatures either convergently evolved to look similar to Earth fauna, or had a similar niche, or both like in the case of velvecats which are small, domesticated ambush-predators that take care of pest populations on Helssi ships, and look somewhat like velvet worms from Earth. My difficulty was what the Helssi themselves would call them. Which likely means it will be unanalyzable, at least in the modern language (as I'm not sure yet these creatures would communicate with sound to make an onomatopoeia from. But maybe something could be made of how they move or some other detail).
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Re: Naming animals

Post by Khemehekis »

Plants or animals can also be eponymous: Przewalski's horse, Grant's zebra, kemp ridley sea turtle, Adélie penguin, dahlia, bougainvillea, gardenia, zinnia, St. John's wort.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

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31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
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