Adjectival Animals and Related Topics
Friday, September 29th, 2006
Another unexpected disparity in English is the difference between the names of animals and the adjectives referring to them, e.g.
Noun | Adjective |
cat | feline |
dog | canine |
cow | bovine |
sheep | ovine |
horse | equine |
crow | corvine |
bird | avian |
snake | ophidian |
thrush | turdine |
Other languages derive adjectives from the nouns. Here are a few from Russian, a language I happen to know well. Most of the phonological differences between the adjectives and nouns reflect regular derivational changes in Russian.
Noun | Adjective | Meaning |
sobaka | sobachij | dog |
koshka | koshachij | cat |
loshad’ | loshadinyj | horse |
korova | korovij | cow |
ptica | pticij | bird |
So what is going on here? Does English simply have no adjectives corresponding to the nouns in the first table above? Well, no, we do—for most of them at least—as the next table shows.
Noun | Adjective |
cat | catty |
dog | doggy, doggish |
cow | cowish |
sheep | sheepish |
horse | horsy |
In keeping with my last post, they seem to have gone on to serve pejorative or demi-pejorative functions. A catty woman is not a nice person and sheepish grins and horsy smiles are not complimentary. It is as though we had to adapt a new set of French adjectives in order to have a neutral way of referring to the qualities of animals. The result, however, was a set of words that sound too academic or scholarly to use in ordinary conversation.
Despite the fact that Larry Brady’s comment shows that he does not buy into the theory that we use familiar animals as lexical scapegoats for our own foibles, “direct similes” support it. What are “direct similes” other than a phrase I just made up? Let’s call similes without as or like “direct” and see what they show us. Here are a few based on familiar animals.
John is a dog
Mary is a cat
Tom is a (clothes) horse
Lucy is a cow
Phi is a sheep
Lorn is a chicken
Sam is a snake
Not a pretty sight, huh? These examples could also be called “semantic similes” because they compare the subject of the sentence not with the entire animal, but with only one perceived trait of that animal, a trait that is always negative. Even Fido, whose name accents our love for him because he is so faithful, comes out nasty in this test! How do you explain that?
It does leave room to think that “[f]amiliar animals come off as ‘scape goats, beings that can carry our sins away with them, making similes a vehicle of atonement, among its various other functions,” as I concluded in my last blog.