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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 December 12

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December 12

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Common animal names

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With mammals and fowls, the common name is usually as specific as a species, but with other kinds of animals, the common name is usually something less specific than a species. Why?? (Please note the word "usually".) Georgia guy (talk) 16:44, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What are some examples? <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 18:35, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And, is this a question about a particular language and/or region, or are you claiming it is more general? --ColinFine (talk) 21:32, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
English to be specific. For example, dog is a single species, but frog (an amphibian) is not. Georgia guy (talk) 21:33, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You are probably after "basic-level concepts" or "basic-level categories", a concept developed in cognitive linguistcs. Here is a research overview. Fut.Perf. su 22:06, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Georgia_guy -- Dogs are very intimately involved with humans, while frogs are off in ponds and such. Everyone in areas where there are wolves can tell apart dogs from wolves, but to those who have no special reason to know about frogs, different frog species may seem much the same... AnonMoos (talk) 00:17, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Cat is a single species, while parrot has 92 species and people often just say "bird", which has zillions more species. Yet both are very common pets. People don't usually get down to the specifics of animal names unless there's a good reason to. Some pet types just happen to be a single species, others not. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 01:44, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And why don't we call the pets by their species rather than a more generic word?? Georgia guy (talk) 01:52, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Because I know that nobody will understand me when I speak of my pet Carassius auratus. HiLo48 (talk) 01:58, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Right, unless they realize that a Carassius is a carp and that aurum is gold. <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 02:53, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I generally don't talk about my pet gold carp either. HiLo48 (talk) 03:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If your audience doesn't know that a goldfish is just a colorful carp, then they don't need to know. <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 04:06, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's the same with most things: "How did you get here?" - I drove my car, NOT I drove my Bentley Continental V8 Super Sports GT Deluxe Edition Sedan Coupe. Or whatever. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 03:17, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Only if you're bragging. As in, I'm going to walk my dog vs. I'm going to walk my pure-bred Boston Terrier. <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 04:06, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This seems to be something similar to why we have words such as "invertebrate", "foreigner", "animal" (in the sense of "non-human animal"); and perhaps to why Europe is a "continent" but India isn't. --ColinFine (talk) 21:23, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The continent names were defined by ancient Greeks when no one knew much about continents in the modern sense -- "Asia" was the land you reached by sailing east (i.e. Anatolia or "Asia Minor"), "Libya" was the land you reached by sailing south for a longer distance (later changed to "Africa" by the Romans), while Europe was basically what was left. In any case, Europe as now usually defined has a greater land area than Australia, while the Indian subcontinent is much smaller... AnonMoos (talk) 00:12, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To add to that, etymologically, "continent" means "continuous [landmass]", and the continents as conceived by the Greeks were separated by major waterways: either the Don or the Phasis between Europe and Asia, and the Nile between Asia and "Lybia". If they had explored (and probably more importantly regularly travelled) to the sources of these rivers, they would probably have realised they didn't make sense as continental boundaries, but the names were in use long before that happened. Iapetus (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You can see more about this at T and O map which is an ancient style of map showing the (then three known) continents, and their divisions: the Mediterranean Sea (Mare Magnum), and the Don (Tanais) and Nile (Nilus) rivers. --Jayron32 19:18, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Three biologists walk into a McDonald's. The first says "I'll have a Filet O'Fish". The second says "I'll have the McBird Sandwich". The third says "I'll have 100 grams of ground mammal."--Wikimedes (talk) 00:56, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is pure speculation, but it may be due to the fact that with farmed animals (and even with hunted animals) you know what you are getting before you get it, but when fishing its often luck as to what you catch. (Also, historically, "animal" or "beast" often was often used to mean mammals, as distinct from fish or birds, and "meat" is still often used to mean meat from mammals, as distinct from fish or poultry, so the difference in terminology might not be so strict anyway). Iapetus (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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