akikana.com

I Now Know Gnu

Published:

Present continuing past

Following on from my prior post regarding animalisine words, below is the list of the animals in the cartoon and their corresponding animalisine word:

Animal Animalisine Animal Animalisine Animal Animalisine
Toucan passerine Lion leonine Zebra zebrine
Panda ursine1 Penguin spheniscidine Ostrich ratite
Peacock pavonine Mouse murine Camel cameline2
Dog canine Salamander salamandrine Tortoise chelonian3
Deer cervine Monkey simian Bee apian
Bird avian4 Rabbit leporine/lapine Owl strigine
Cow bovine Porcupine hystricine Chicken galline
Goose anatine Bat pteropine Gecko lacertilian

From the foregoing, the keen-eyed will have noticed the ‘they mainly end in -ine’ rule exceptions. Well, this is English (as with any other language for that matter) for you. Rules broken by exceptions prove that rule. That paradoxical idiom will be investigated at length in a future post.

The caption to the coo picture in this post got me thinking of the famous 1950s novelty song by Flanders and Swann: “I’m a gnu”. Our friendly Muppets have a rendition for you:

This also ties back to the previously posted limerick. There are many (many) words in English that are not pronounced as written. However, gnu is not native English but comes from Africa. In cases of borrowed words from other languages you really need to resort to the original language to understand how to pronounce them. For as long as I have known the gnu song - a long, long time as I recollect listening to an original Parlophone pressing back in the 1970s at my grandparents’ house - I always assumed that gnu was pronounced as in the song (apparently I’m not the only one as this song lead to gnu’s widespread mispronunciation). The rest of the mispronounced words being the comedy element. So it came as somewhat of a surprise to find out that I have been wrong for so long with this assumption. Having done some research for gnus for this post I finally understand how to pronounce the word: the g is silent and it rhymes with new.

I’m a ker-oo, how are you!

  1. A panda is a bear and thus ursine. I know it’s a bear as the Chinese characters for panda - 熊貓 - contain the character for bear. Pandas come from China: Q.E.D.

    Breaking the characters down a little further based upon my limited study of them via learning Japanese (the Japanese originally ‘borrowed’ the Chinese characters for their kanji writing system with some of those characters retaining their original Chinese meanings in certain cases), the first character is the character for bear. The second character is the character for cat. So a panda is literally a bear-cat. ↩︎

  2. Not being able to find the animalisine word for camels, this is the closest I have. It actually relates to any material made from camel hair. ↩︎

  3. The much more interesting testudine can also be used. A testudo formation was a Roman military tactic whereby soldiers used shields to form a tortoise-shell-like protective barrier against arrows. Testudo being Latin for tortoise from testa meaning a shell. ↩︎

  4. There are many animalisine words for birds - avian being the generic term. ↩︎

#2025 #Writing #Short-Form #Language #Humour