GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Noemon on September 02, 2006, 10:00:50 AM
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Animal Plurals, Collective Nouns, Sounds, Gender and Offspring (http://www.anapsid.org/beastly.html)
Animal Adjectives (http://www.anapsid.org/beastly2.html#adj) (and some really, really lame jokes)
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Why is English so convoluted when it comes to animals?
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Well, the weird collective terms come from parlor games a couple hundred years ago, I believe. People would sit around and come up with words for "a group of [animal x]." But I'm not sure why the terms for males and females are so different so much of the time.
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Why were their silly parlor game versions accepted by everybody else?
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I don't know for sure, but I would guess there are two factors at work: first, people probably thought those terms were very clever, so they started using them in actual speech; second, people can be extremely gullible when it comes to language—tell them that the proper term for a group of ferrets is "business," and they'll likely believe you.
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I'm entertained by those plurals, but I don't really put much stock in them. The male/female and offspring information is interesting though, and the adjective chart is handy.
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Why were their silly parlor game versions accepted by everybody else?
Most likely, they were the ones with the nicest parlours.
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Well, the weird collective terms come from parlor games a couple hundred years ago, I believe. People would sit around and come up with words for "a group of [animal x]."
This so explains the invention of television.
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:lol: