Once again (cf. 2016, 2019), I was looking something else up in my three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary when my eye was caught by an odd entry:
кагуа́н а m zool common cobego (Cynocephalus variegatus).
I had never seen the word кагуан [kaguan], and indeed it does not occur in the Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language); I had also never heard of the cobego, common or otherwise, and indeed the OED is unaware of its existence (an advanced search failed to turn it up even in the citations). But Merriam-Webster has it (etymology: “modification of Malay kubong”), defining it as ‘flying lemur’ and saying that the latter is “called also colugo” (which is “perhaps from a language of the Philippines”). Meanwhile, the Russian word is said by Wiktionary to be from Cebuano kagwang.
A Google Books search turned up plenty of hits for cobego (1901: “found that it was a female cobego”; 1905: “Thus the cobego feeds upon leaves”; 1914: “It was that curious animal, the cobego”; etc.), so it surprises me that the OED has managed to ignore it for all these years.
At your “flying lemur” link, one of the use examples is: “The flying lemur doesn’t fly and isn’t a lemur.”
What’s a body to believe ? Forget the lemur bit – is this nitpicking about what “flying” requires ? Do flying squirrels not “fly”, but “glide” ? Do birds stop flying when they glide ?
the more official шерстокрыл sounds dramatic too. As does Polish lotokot
For what little it may be worth, they are not lemurs, and they can’t fly.
“ Description
Tail Length : 24-25cm
Weight: 0.9-1.3 kg
Colugos are mammals from an ancient lineage, with just two species comprising the Order Dermoptera. Confusingly they are also called ‘Flying Lemurs’, though they are not closely related to the Lemurs of Madagascar. They can glide long distances, however, as they possess a thin membrane stretched to the ends of the tail and each limb.
Generally they are mottled grey or green-grey in colour, with dark banding, but some specimens are reddish to yellowish-orange. Their diet includes leaves and young shoots. During the day they rest high in the trees, clinging to trunks or hiding in tree holes. At dusk they become active, gliding from trunk to trunk like sheets of paper blown on the wind. The young are carried clinging to the flight membrane.
Colugos range from Burma, Indochina and Southern Thailand to Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java. They also occur througho Borneo. A second Colugo species inhabits the southern Philippines.”
There are some fine shorts of them on YouTube.
Frequent flyer credits are worthless, since airplanes only glide.
“Fly” and “jump” are expressed by the same verb in Western Oti-Volta languages (though not elsewhere in Oti-Volta.)
No great confusion seems to result from this.
Frequent flyer credits are worthless, since airplanes only glide.
Airplanes, birds, bats, and many insects fly because they provide their own energy during flight and can stay at the same height or climb till they run out of fuel or get tired. Gliders, colugos, flying squirrels, etc. can only glide because the only energy they have is the potential and kinetic energy they had at the start, plus anything from external sources such as updrafts. Albatrosses and some gliders use dynamic soaring, which is totally cool.
Through the magic of language, a bird that’s gliding or soaring is still flying. If a bird is flying on motionless wings and its wings and tail are fully spread, it’s soaring; if they’re not, it’s gliding. (There’s a half-soar too—I think the wings are fully spread but the tail isn’t.)
“Fly” and “jump” are expressed by the same verb in Western Oti-Volta languages … No great confusion seems to result from this.
A translation of “go take a flying leap!” into such a language might be ambiguous as to meaning “flying jump” or “jumping fly”.
I learned only recently that a poupée de son is not a talking doll. son here is wood shavings. France Gall can’t sing worth a damn. That’s a “tube” she’s performing.
Isn’t it ambiguous in English also? The flight is short, but the flyer may consider it worthwhile.
The fixed expression “go take a flying leap!” is not ambiguous. It means what it means.
My point of departure was DE’s statement that in WOV languages “the same verb expresses fly and jump”. Let’s call that verb “walla-walla”. The translation of the English expression might be “IMP. walla-walla walla-walla”. I imagined that could be understood in two different ways. In other words it might be ambiguous in a given WOV language, or even in fact unintelligible.
An idiomatic way to express the dismissive exhortation “go take a flying leap!” in a language other than English might not involve any flying or jumping at all. Something like “go climb a tree and stay there!” Or “scher’ dich zum Teufel!“.
In Kusaal, I think you’d disambiguate (should you wish) by just saying something like Kem sa ian’ad wʋʋ niiŋi ian’ad si’em! “Go away, jumping/flying like a bird jumps/flies!”
Or you might say Kem sa ian’ad wʋʋ ninsaali ian’ad si’em! “Go away, jumping like a human being jumps”, although in that case, the adjunct seems somewhat superfluous.
I am afraid that I do not know the Kusaal for “penguin.”
I have never made any very profound study of Kusaal invective. More research is needed.
Actually, now I think of it, Anthony Agoswin Musah’s A Grammar of Kusaal has an prolonged poetic flyting as one of the texts at the end. A sample:
“You went to the lepers’ market yesterday and bought pus and drank.”
“Your head is like your father’s front yard tobacco.”
“Your stomach is like a lizard’s porridge bowl.”
“You are tight like a bush pig in a pair of shorts.”
“You look bloated like a Bisa leper died on a farm bed.”
“My only fat female chicken!”
There is also the philosophical
“The problem is the god of your head.”
And the mysterious
‘You are straight like the thigh of a frog.”
And flying does feature in
“You are the little witch of this town who cannot fly.”
Ooh! Burn!
(The last insult presumably refers to the ancient African tale Kiki’s Delivery Service.)
Why a Bisa leper? Is there some antagonism between the Bisa and Kusasi? Or a joking relationship (like Kanuri nə́ŋgi, Hausa barkwanci, Mooré ràkɩ́ɩre, Manding sanankuya, etc.)?
Rend mig i røven. Milder: Rend mig i nakken.
More similar in a way: Rend og hop!/Rend og høns!.
_____________
(*) Rende is now weak, it used to be strong rinde/randt/runden which is obviously cognate to English run, formerly rin/ran/run.
(**) Nobody really knows what hønse was supposed to mean. There are theories, but for intents and purposes it’s just a thing you ask people to go away and do.
@Xerîb:
I’m not sure about a joking relationship (called dakidi’ema in Kusaal), but there is no antagonism. Bisa are the largest non-Kusaasi group within the predominantly Kusaasi area; their heartland is immediately north of this. Ghanaian Bisa use Kusaal as their local lingua franca (nobody else ever seems to learn Bisa, which is a Mande-language island in a sea of “Gur.”) Several of my colleagues in Bawku were Bisa.
Historically, the Bisa and Kusaasi seem always to have been allied against Mamprussi and Mossi empire-building. Like the Kusaasi, they were traditionally chiefless, and believe themselves to be autochthonous. They probably occupied a much greater area at one time, now largely occupied by Mooré speakers. According to André Prost, their language is remarkably similar to Samo/San, spoken on the far side of the Mossi kingdom up against the border with Mali.
The language is, like Kusaal, divided into two surprisingly different dialects by the White Volta, probably because the area beside the river was depopulated by river blindness. Interestingly, like Kusaal, it has developed a three-tone system out of an inherited two-tone system, but this seems to have happened via a different pathway, and I imagine it’s just coincidence rather than some sort of areal thing. The language has a lot of Mooré loanwords, unsurprisingly.
Tony Naden wrote his PhD thesis on it.
But what is a lizard’s porridge bowl like?
Straight, like the thigh of a frog.
But what is a lizard’s porridge bowl like?
Schrödinger’s cat may or may not know.
I wonder if either cobego or colugo originated in a script misreading of the other one.
They are suspiciously similar, aren’t they?
etymology: “modification of Malay kubong”
I mentioned the colugo and the problems associated with its various names in conversation today with my brother’s wife’s family, who come from the greater Manila area. On the problem of the form of cobego, perhaps there is another possibility. A Tagalog word for a kind of bat is kabag. Note in this regard the group of forms under Proto-Philiippines *kabég ‘large fruit bat’ in Blust and Trussel’s online Austronesian Comparative Dictionary here, especially the forms in some languages of Mindanao: Muranao, Binukid, Manobo, Tboli, and Tiruray. (The Wikipedia also notes of the Philippine colugo, “Its population is concentrated in the Mindanao region and Bohol.”) Perhaps the term cobego originated in Mindanao, and the final -o was added in mediation through Spanish to other European languages?
In regard to a possible association of cynocephalids with bats in local folk taxonomies, note for example an example of the use of kubong described in Rajindra K. Puri (2023) Deadly Dances in the Bornean Rainforest: Hunting Knowledge of the Penan Benalui, p. 274, in which the colugo Galeopterus variegatus is associated with squirrels:
And of course, we might also reckon with a mistaken application of terms for ‘bat’ in Mindanao to colugos by European naturalists.
Very plausible — I hope someone at OED is paying attention. (But they’re probably all busy trying to find ways to increase market share.)
This is the first time I’ve come across haplological monomial, and the curiosity it occasioned led me to discover that monucleosis is also attested
I have to say that naming these gliding animals “dog-heads” is what journalists call burying the lede.
Quoting Puri: It appears that salient generic terms become descriptive epithets or qualifying terms in the nomenclature of less prominent taxa of the kan ‘mammal’ life form, but note that generic terms from other animal domains are not used.
There are examples in English bird names of using the name for one group to distinguish a species or small group of species in another group, such as “hawk-owl” (the Northern Hawk-Owl is active during the day, and apparently the Boobook and Morepork genus can be called hawk-owls for reasons I don’t know), “hawk-eagle” (various small eagles), and “shrike-vireo” (two relatively big vireos). There are also examples that weren’t named by ornithologists, such as the “cuckoo owl” (formally Australian Boobook), which the settlers of New South Wales named for its call, according to Wikipedia, and the “cat owl”—from another “animal domain”—Great Horned Owl, because the tufts on its head look like a cat’s ears. One site cites its “aloof gaze” too.
@Alon Lischinsky: I don’t remember ever coming across “mononomial”, and “monomial” is vastly more common.
I see the Spanish Wikipedia uses monomio for the mathematical meaning.
I agree that Xerîb’s suggestion re cobego looks more than OED-worthy.
@Jerry Friedman: well, I’d never come across monononial either, but that would have been transparently compositional to anyone familiar with binomial or polynomial
Monomial, on the other hand, required me to check dictionary sources to make sure it was haplology and not a typo, and so I thought it worth commenting on
@Alon Lischinsky: I’m glad you pointed that out, since I’d never realized (despite teaching elementary algebra) that the word could have been “mononomial”. In fact, “monomial” came first—1706, according to the OED, and “mononomial” in 1844.
Oh, I’m not questioning the word’s chops, just idly mentioning that it made me go “oh, what is this -mial suffix?” for a moment
When xkcd what if #75 came out, in December 2013, there were long discussions on the forums about which English word really does have the most consecutive letters on the same phone key. (Randall said that the best in his wordlist was nonmonotonic with 7.) IIRC the best actual-word candidate that anyone had found was nonmonomorphic, with 9.
My own, mostly joking, contribution was nonmononomous, which (had it been a word) would have meant “having more than one name”. (IIRC, I found that even the non-negative mononomous is usually shortened to monomous.)