On Wednesday, January 24, 2024 at 1:12:49 PM UTC, Robert Carnegie wrote:
I'm not addressing your topic directly, but I want
to say that I have a definite impression that let's say
when I was born, "marsupials" weren't considered
to be "mammals". Now, they are.
I was born before 1976, but I may be only describing
my own confusion and ignorance. I used to think
that dogs are male and cats are female - of course
that's before I received a version of an understanding
of why there are males and females, and it seems to
be a common mistake. I still misgender dogs and cats
sometimes.
It's very common, and has been studied by cognitive
psychologists. Here a pop sci
version:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/canine-corner/202201/why-people-think-all-dogs-male-and-all-cats-female
In languages with grammatical genders,
"dog" is typically male, "cat" female - as e.g. Mark Twain
observed for German:
"Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and
systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. [..] To
continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are
female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male,
cats are female -- tomcats included, of course"
Twain is wrong though to think that German is unusual in this respect.
For dogs and cats, the same pattern is is found e.g. in Czech and Slovak.
Pes (dog) is male, and kocka/macka (cat) is female.
In Welsh, ci is masculine and cath is feminine. As
can be seen when an adjective is added - that then shows in
the feminine gender soft mutation of the first consonant:
Ci mawr = a big dog
Cath fawr = a big cat
In Scots Gaelic however, "cu" and "cat" are both
masculine (though piseag, kitten, is feminine, and
cuilean, puppy, is masculine) .
In romance languages, names for animals that live in close
proximity to humans often have two forms, so that biological
sex and grammatical gender align more - cattus/catta in Latin,
perro/perra and gatto, gatta in Spanish etc . "Canis" by contrast
IIRC in Latin is epicene, that is is used for both male and female
dogs (just as "felis" is female but used for male and female (wild)cats)
But the gender becoems visible again with the adjectives and
their gender agreement, so "canis laetus" and "canis laeta" for
male and female dogs respectively.
I don't often associate with them socially,
so it isn't a big problem for me.
The marsupial thing may be mine or intellectual
society's mistaken tendency to see evolution as
a teleology leading up to the appearance of ourselves.
We are placental mammals, and they come later,
and so we think that they, we, are better. But in fact
many mammals are not good citizens. Still, I think
some of us may regard marsupials as embarrassing
cousins that we prefer to overlook. I think I would
like to find that professional scientists did not
suffer from this bias and misunderstanding.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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