The names of living things seem to run the gamut from words that have been in English and its forebears for thousands of years, to names that are new within living memory. The goal of this post is to sort out what is good and bad among existing names, and to lay down a few basic guides on how we might deal with the vast variety of living things. The higher names, such as those given to larger groups, won’t come into this. Many of those names are much more modern and often restricted to use in biology, moreso the further up you the tree you go. While we might speak of monkeys and apes, few of us speak of catarrhines and platyrrhines. However, I will first work in a few words about what exactly common names should do and their relationship with taxonomy, the lore of naming and sorting living things.
What are we seeking to do when we name living things? While we give names to individuals, such as other folk, a pet dog or cat, these are personal names, for that living thing only, and not names we would think of as belonging to another unless they too had—coincidentally—been given that name. The names we give to a group of living things belongs to all those we deem as one of that group, whether current, bygone, or to come. So while we might call one cat Holly and another Fred, we would call them both cat, and know that any other living thing which is the same or greatly alike would also be a cat. We lump living things together as alike in their very being, and call them kinds or species. Each kind is given a name to tell it from another and, for the most part, the line between one kind and other is bright enough so not as to bother us too greatly whether something is or is not one of that kind. We can tell a dog from cat, and even a wolf, and so know what is what.
But therein lies a hurdle. For in truth the dog and the (gray) wolf are no so unalike. Rather they differ in a way which might seem clear to us, but truthfully is not so great. Were they newly known to us, we would have no qualms naming them the same or almost the same, with only a slight difference to tell one from another. Yet nobody now would think to do such a thing, and instead would point to some great differences between dogs and wolves, such as that one is tame and the other not. But tameness is not needfully a biological distinction, rather a social one. We tell between a dog and a wolf on their social roles which while important to us, are biologically small. How we group things in speech is not always how a lifelorer would group things, and we need to ask ourselves whether that is a worry.
Taxonomy, the lore of grouping living things, is relatively new and so most tongues do the same as English as name according to differences that may be social as well as biological. Moreover, other distinctions, such as that between butterflies and moths, may not be socially based but still biologically wrong. We could choose to forsake all wrong names and groups for living things and re–aline our names lorewisely. That may be intellectually fulfilling, but as no other tongue does that it would be odd, not to say unneeded. If our goal is to take FLaG out of English then we must steer away from an all–out “redesign” of the language. I feel that if we have an opening to choose whether or not to shift names so that they become biologically right, we must take it. However, we must put out of our minds any worry that our names and taxonomy do not match up. It is normal for a language to name living things is a way that is taxonomically wrong even though it may be unwanted.
The first thing that we must acknowledge in choosing names is that there is no reason why English should have a native name for every kind of living thing. Some animals or plants were wholly outside the lives of those who spoke English hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We cannot expect English to have a name for the kangaroo, koala or wallaby when even Australia itself was unknown to English speakers until relatively lately. For sure we could work to make up new names for all the animals that were formerly unknown, but what would this gain us? Such words would be no more true or known for being somehow native, and would still need to be learnt. Moreover, many names, such as those from Australia, come from non–FLaG sources and so are outside the worry of Roots English. We can rest well with these names and more or less leave them as they are.
But not all names of such relatively new living things are non–FLaG. We can easily point to rhinoceros and hippopotamus as names of wights which were lately unknown*, yet which do not come from language spoken in their native range. Making up new names for such animals may suffer the same hurdle as above, in that they will be no truer and still have to be learnt for all that they are native. There is also the worry that in making a new name we fall back on existing names for like animals as a base from which to build, yet bring in a new muddle between English names and taxonomy. For byspel, what if we called the hippopotamus and rhinoceros something like waterswine and hornswine, or watercow and horncow? It would it suggest that they are near kin to pigs or cows. Yet the hippopotamus is nearest to whales and dolphins, and the rhinoceros to tapirs and even horses! That won’t do. For these animals the best solution may be as I suggested in dealing with technological words, and that is shortening them in a way which fits with existing speech yet frustrates their use as a FLaG word. In this case, the two wights are already known as hippo and rhino, and some shape of those names can be settled as the only acceptable name, maybe even spelling the latter as ryno for sheer deviling.
The hardest of all names are those that are FLaG, yet by rights should be English. These are the living things which speakers of English can be fairly thought to have known and known well, yet we find ourselves with a FLaG word for their name. They must have had English names at some time, but they are now gone. For some the English name may not wholly be gone, and we can work to bring it back from the twilight. My self, as a speaker of a less common English dialect, still have some of these. I know that a robin is a ruddock and that a badger is a brock, and can say them without thinking it odd and with forethought that others might understand. But I do not know whether I could say daw for jackdaw, but it is the kind of thing that we should all come around to. Seeking out all the old names that may lie sleeping in dialect is one thing, but actually saying them is another. The boldness of using words that are clearly Roots English is something that I will speak about another time, and here it is enough to acknowledge that it can be hard but it must be done.
For other living things with FLaG names, we are not so lucky to have old English alternatives and must think up another workway for dealing with them. The best that I know comes from learning that the sycamore and maple trees are kin. As a child I thought nothing particular of sycamore trees, but did heed the shape of their seeds, which are always great fun, and that of their leaves, which is alike to the flag of Canada. It was the latter fact which made me wonder why the sycamore and the maple leaves were alike. I can’t bring to mind when I first found out that sycamore trees were maple trees by another name, but it struck me even then that the naming was a little redundant. We could easily call them both maple trees and distinguish one from the other by by an adjective of sorts. And so we actually can! For the sycamore can be called the great maple, and other kinds of maple the Norway maple, Field maple and so on. Although there is no specific English name for the sycamore alone, we can hone down a generic name to fit it.
In this way, we might begin to find names for all kinds of living things. All we need do is go upward one or two levels from the plant or wight we wish to name anew and see if there is any existing name that can be stretched in the same way as the maple. Let’s work this on the rabbit, which has a FLaG name. The name covers many kinds of animal in the kin Leporidae, but interestingly not all. Many of the other kinds are called hares, which is an English word. We might then seek to give names to all the kinds now called rabbit new ones which have the word hare in them. This may raise some objections over how we define hare and rabbit, but they are not so great and anyway have no grounding in lifelore. I have already said that we can keep names which don’t fit lifelore if there is no reason to shift them, but here there are grounds for doing so. The same workway can be used on pigeons which belong to a kin in which many kinds are called doves. This process could be so yieldful that many names we’re lacking can be worked out like this, and it only needs us to finger those names we wish to switch.
There are some wights, such as squirrel, for which this does not work. But hopefully we can narrow down the huge deals of living things to only a few handfuls that need new names. From there the work is much less, and it is softer to bring in wholly new names for only a few than for hundreds and hundreds.
*There are many things for which the name was known many hundreds of years ago and yet which knowledge of it is not so old. Ape was in Old English, yet the animals behind that word were obscure and muddled until the 1700s. We must not mistake an old word for an old understanding.
Roots English 