Simians

Andrew Mason · 07 Jan 2011, 19:46 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 19:46:15 +0000
Subject: (urth) Simians
Message-ID: <AANLkTike+o9VFFteOQMH02Ajs76LJ8t9KUXw+PC7eV_p at mail.gmail.com>

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.)

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