Hence my final sentence
.
I think there is something else operating in English's absorption of Latin that has to do with the willingness to have many different words that mean the same thing, or that provide a way to describe something in minute detail rather than use adjectives.
So we have:
Cow = Female Bovid
Bull = Male Bovid
Beef = Can be used to describe Bovids in general, or the meat that comes from them.
Calf = Baby Bovid
Steer = Neutered (male) Bovid
Heifer = Female (?) Bovid.
Another insight on this tendency in English is the need to create a separate word for every group of dfferent species of animal (pod of whales, murder of crows). It seems like when this was discussed over at the rack, this turned out to start out as a parlor game and not any kind of official scientific nomenclature.
It is like whether there is something about Arabic that encourages those stories with paradigmatic motif evolution (Similar to Goldilocks and the 3 bears). Whereas Chinese folk tales hardly seem like stories so much as shorthand transcripts of actual events that happen to involve immortal elements.
That's the trouble with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the idea that language makes up more of your identity than it seems. It is not the case that every language affect the same part of your identity (like, say, math ability). So it gets rather messy.
