# Simians *The Urth list — 5 messages, 5 voices, 07 Jan 2011* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Andrew Mason *07 Jan 2011, 19:46* Jerry Friedman wrote: . ?My feeling is that the distinction has taken hold better than most > prescribed distinctions, and the words aren't synonyms--though as you point out, > people do still refer to chimps as monkeys. This may differ a lot between languages. Terry Pratchett has a character, to whom someone referred obliquely a little while ago, who is an ape and gets annoyed when people call him a monkey. This proved very hard to translate into French, because in French the same word 'singe' covers both. I'm with Jerry - to me they are different kinds of animal. to call an ape a monkey would be like calling a wolf a dog. (Of course, that might be appropriate in some contexts; but if I said there was a dog in the back garden, and it turned out to be a wolf, that would be deceptive.) --- ### António Pedro Marques *07 Jan 2011, 20:37 · in reply to Andrew Mason* > Andrew Mason wrote: > Jerry Friedman wrote: >> My feeling is that the distinction has taken hold better than most >> prescribed distinctions, and the words aren't synonyms--though as you >> point out, people do still refer to chimps as monkeys. > This may differ a lot between languages. Terry Pratchett has a character, > to whom someone referred obliquely a little while ago, who is an ape and > gets annoyed when people call him a monkey. This proved very hard to > translate into French, because in French the same word 'singe' covers > both. I suppose 'macaque' would be too far off to be usable. > I'm with Jerry - to me they are different kinds of animal. to call an ape > a monkey would be like calling a wolf a dog. (Of course, that might be > appropriate in some contexts; but if I said there was a dog in the back > garden, and it turned out to be a wolf, that would be deceptive.) Well, good luck: dogs have been reclasssified as a subspecies of wolf (i.e. not all wolves are dogs, but all dogs are wolves, so your garden is safe), which leaves us without a word for proper wolf. If only people realised genetics and taxonomy are independent. --- ### Lee Berman *07 Jan 2011, 20:55 · follows António Pedro Marques* Antonio Pedro Marques: I suppose 'macaque' would be too far off to be usable. Heh! Too specific actually. There is broad ranging monkey group called macaques which must be distinguished from other monkey groups like langurs and vervets and of course the New World monkeys which have prehensile tails. A US politician recently lost his election for publically calling a person of Indian ethnicity a "maccaca". Anyway, mention of macaques are good in my book, since the one called the barbary ape is Inuus sylvanus which has connections to both BotNS (Inire) and Long/Short Sun (Silver Silk). --- ### David Stockhoff *07 Jan 2011, 20:56 · in reply to António Pedro Marques* Wolf wolf! (after /Rattus rattus/) > On 1/7/2011 3:37 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote: > > Well, good luck: dogs have been reclasssified as a subspecies of wolf > (i.e. > not all wolves are dogs, but all dogs are wolves, so your garden is > safe), which leaves us without a word for proper wolf. If only people > realised genetics and taxonomy are independent. --- ### Dan'l Danehy-Oakes *07 Jan 2011, 20:59 · in reply to David Stockhoff* > On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 12:56 PM, David Stockhoff wrote: > Wolf wolf! > > (after /Rattus rattus/) Or Mephitis mephitis? ``` Dan'l Danehy-Oakes ``` ---