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Saturday 12 December 2009

My idea advent calendar, day 12

December 12th: Animal names

Language is a fascinating area of study, as we all know. It can also be a barrier between us, inspiring humans to come up with various ruses such as the universal language of Esperanto. I'm not proposing anything so sweeping. However, I am well aware that in every language, there are names for all the animals and that some of them are better - more expressive of the animal in question's essence -than others. My idea, then, is to choose the best name for every animal and have a universalised set for all to use. So, the butterfly may well become a papillon (French) and the hippo could be a Flußpferd (German). However, I rather suspect that English weasels, ferrets and donkeys will remain untouched.

1 comment:

Bill Chapman said...

Briefly about Esperanto: Take a look at http://www.lernu.net
Esperanto works! I’ve used it in speech and writing - and sung in it - in about fifteen countries over recent years.

For your names of animals, you may know that Latin was used for that purpose for centuries.Felix is a cat, bufo is a toad and so on.

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