Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 October 20

= October 20 =

Have Native American languages retained the original words for extinct animals like mammoths?
Native Americans hunted mammoths, so their languages must have had words for these animals. Count Iblis (talk) 08:18, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * So did Native Europeans, but it was a long time ago. Since it was pre-writing and a lot of language change I don't think we can ever know what these words were -- Q Chris (talk) 08:31, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily true: old orally transmitted folk tales and myths could have preserved such references, as they seem to have done in some Australian Aboriginal myths, such as the Bunyip. However, it might be very difficult to determine if a particular term refers to something wholly imaginary or an actual creature, and if the latter which one. Consider the Wendigo, for example. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.218.14.156 (talk) 11:22, 20 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, so I was focusing on indigenous populations because their culture and language is preserved. The oldest story is more than 15,000 years old. Count Iblis (talk) 11:58, 20 October 2020 (UTC)


 * NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN TRADITIONS SUGGESTING A KNOWLEDGE OF THE MAMMOTH addresses this issue. Alansplodge (talk) 16:04, 20 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Count_Iblis -- Languages can undergo radical transformations in 5,000 years (just compare the post-Schleicher versions of Schleicher's fable to any modern Indo-European language), so it's unlikely in the extreme that words for animals that haven't been around for 10,000 years or more would have survived continuously into any modern language. (Mammoths were just one of many large animals which went extinct in North America roughly around that time.)  Oral traditions can sometimes survive for thousands of years, but only in a highly schematized/folklorized way.  In any case, the "indigenous" peoples who knew the most about mammoths in recent times would have been certain groups in northern Siberia, who came across frozen mammoth carcases from time to time... AnonMoos (talk) 22:05, 20 October 2020 (UTC)