Simians

António Pedro Marques · 07 Jan 2011, 20:37 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:37:28 +0000
Subject: (urth) Simians
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTike+o9VFFteOQMH02Ajs76LJ8t9KUXw+PC7eV_p at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTike+o9VFFteOQMH02Ajs76LJ8t9KUXw+PC7eV_p at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D277988.3040106 at gmail.com>

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.

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