How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

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Salmoneus
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by Salmoneus »

Creyeditor wrote: 11 Aug 2021 20:54 Just wanted to mention that bumblebees (Hummeln) are not considered bees in German. I was also taught that they bite.
Thank you!

To reiterate: these divisions are not particularly obvious or objective. In English, they're considered bees because they're sufficiently similar to honeybees. But if you define 'bee' more tightly, then bumblebees will not be included.

EDIT: footnote: I have now looked at enough pictures of bees and wasps for the week, thank you.
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by Vlürch »

Salmoneus wrote: 11 Aug 2021 21:27Again: you live in northern Europe. You don't have many types of wasp, so can mostly just assume that anything that isn't a prototypical wasp is a bee. This isn't true in the rest of the world. It's also not actually accurate even in Europe.
OK, but it's not just assuming that anything that isn't a "prototypical wasp" is a bee when there are clearly distinct A) wasps, B) bees and C) hornets. If it's unclear, then the assumption will still be mostly accurate based on which one it looks the most like... in Finland. Climate change might change that, too, so dunno if it will be in the future. If these distinctions aren't anywhere as clear in other countries, as clearly is the case, well, then it makes perfect sense that languages around the world wouldn't have the same terminology for these insects... so now, knowing this, I agree with your point that there's literally no way to tell and that there probably won't be different terms for them or the specific insects won't be grouped based on their scientific classification.

I mean, I already knew that at least Americans call all kinds of weird stingy insects "wasps" but honestly always just assumed they're not actually wasps in the scientific sense and that it's just a common name that's technically a misnomer and as such that it doesn't count, but I guess those probably are also all wasps then. [:$]
Salmoneus wrote: 11 Aug 2021 21:27you can see it's a bit hairy
Just in case you got our arguments mixed up since we posted at the same time, it was Elemtilas who mentioned hairiness as an indicator of wasp vs bee, not me, since in Finland wasps are just as hairy as bees. I did mention hair colour, but clearly I was wrong about that as far as the rest of the world goes.
Creyeditor wrote: 11 Aug 2021 20:54Just wanted to mention that bumblebees (Hummeln) are not considered bees in German.
In Finnish they're called kimalainen and it's its own term unrelated to the words for bees (mehiläinen), wasps (ampiainen) and hornets (herhiläinen), but the common perception is that they're basically all the same except different. The words are just "pseudo-descriptive" terms like a lot of animal names in Finnish. Well, half of them are derived from loanwords from Indo-European languages, which again goes to show that Finns have never been able to name anything on our own. [xD]
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eldin raigmore
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by eldin raigmore »

Was the OP question ever answered?
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elemtilas
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by elemtilas »

Salmoneus wrote: 11 Aug 2021 19:54
stuff
I give up!

It's all honeywasps and bumblehornets from here on out, because, obviously, I have no way of distinguishing a bee from a wasp that you'll ever accept.

:roll:
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by elemtilas »

eldin raigmore wrote: 12 Aug 2021 00:36 Was the OP question ever answered?
Hehe!

I don't think so! Thread got hijacked by an emerald wasp.

At least I learnt that honeybees came over on the Mayflower!
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by Khemehekis »

I had a conversation with Tanni about the words for hymenopteran insects in this thread.

He said one might speak of wasps more than ants.

I said "ant" was a more common word than "wasp" in English. (I don't know about German.)

According to the COCA corpus, "bee" is the #4,188th most common word in English, "ant" is #5,923, and "wasp" is #10,749.

In my friend's corpus, according to the 200m-word update, "bee" is #2,040, "ant" is #2,933, and "wasp" is #5,714.

Of course, in English, the counts for "wasp" will be inflated by "WASP", the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.


Also, Africanized killer bees are obviously bees, yet they sting worse than the average wasp.
Last edited by Khemehekis on 13 Aug 2021 10:12, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by qwed117 »

elemtilas wrote: 12 Aug 2021 04:02
eldin raigmore wrote: 12 Aug 2021 00:36 Was the OP question ever answered?
Hehe!

I don't think so! Thread got hijacked by an emerald wasp.

At least I learnt that honeybees came over on the Mayflower!
I think the answer was that they’d be the same word because bees and wasps are the same thing
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by eldin raigmore »

qwed117 wrote: 13 Aug 2021 00:46 I think the answer was that they’d be the same word because bees and wasps are the same thing
While I expected that to be true, I don’t recall anyone saying it explicitly, nor saying what the word(s) is(are) in any Algic language(s), nor citing a reference.
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by eldin raigmore »

https://books.google.com/books?id=rdbE ... ee&f=false
BEE2
Almosan-Keresiouan BEE
Proto-Central Algonquian *amoa
Quilieute Chemukam muumuuma
Siciatl ma:malwe

He gives Choroti wona as a separate word for wasp, but Choroti is a Macro-Panoan language, not an Algic language.

Joseph Greenberg’s Language in the Americas was the best reference I could find about this.
Clearly it’s at best controversial and at worst unreliable or outdated to use it as a sole source. But it’s the only source Google gave me.
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by Nortaneous »

Yurok: terwermers "bee, yellowjacket"
Blackfoot: naamóó "bee", pokáámoiksi "small bees" (plural)
Arapaho: koho'ok "bee, wasp"
Cheyenne: háhnoma "bee" > tȧhpe'ȧséhahnoma "honeybee", heóvėháhnoma "wasp"
Ojibwe: aamoo "bee, wasp"
Mi'kmaq: amu "bee"

(imo a bee is anything that's yellow and pollinates, a wasp is anything that's small and doesn't pollinate, and a hornet is anything that looks like a wasp but is bigger than the type of wasp that makes its nest in your front door lights and doesn't bother anyone.)
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Re: How do you say "bee" and "wasp" in Algic languages?

Post by ThatAnalysisGuy »

Salmoneus wrote: 09 Aug 2021 23:46 I'm not sure non-scientists have any way to distinguish bees from wasps. Indeed, bees in a sense ARE wasps - a wasp is any wasp that isn't a bee or an ant or a sawfly. Apparently you can identify wasps by their branched hairs, the bifurcation of the seventh dorsal abdominal plate in females, and by certain patterns in the venation of their hind wings; but I'm not sure most Algic tribespeople would have paid much attention to the seventh dorsal abdominal plate of female specimens.

I think the main reason to distinguish is that bees collect pollen, and most wasps don't. However, in North America they actually have pollen wasps as well, which kind of makes that distinction pointless. [the rest of the world also has fig wasps, of course, but that's so weird that it must have been easy to distinguish from normal bee pollination]. Similarly, wasps are mostly aggressive and bees aren't... but that breaks down when you also have non-aggressive wasps around.

And again, in European languages there's often a three-way division (four if you count ants): bees, wasps, and hornets. Hornets are recognisable because they're really, really big - but that's less striking if you have lots and lots of wasps of all shapes and sizes.

Even in English, the distinction is breaking down somewhat in North America, where apparently they instead call conventional wasps (vespula and dolichovespula) "yellowjackets" or "meat bees", presumably because they're so infested with innumerable wasp species that just calling them wasps isn't specific enough.


So.... while I wouldn't be suprised if a north american language had more than one word for non-ant, non-sawfly hymenopterans, it might very well not exactly mimic the tripartite European distinction of bee/wasp/hornet.
In English and some other languages, wasps are classified as members of the clade Apocrita that are neither bees or ants. Together with the sawflies and wood wasps, these are classified as a part of the insect order Hymenoptera.
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