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Charlotte lotteheartplural/Cinny cinny_heart_plural thetadelta ursaminor treblesand

the types of raccoon names

  • indigenous names with various butcherings (raccoon, mapache)
  • wash + some other animal (optional) (waschbär, wasbeer, vaskebjörn, raton laveur, mýval)
  • genet (енот)
  • fur coat (šup, szop)
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@charlotte I was familiar with the first three...the last one is new to me though. Czech and Polish respectively, I presume?

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@vikxin languages in order

english, spanish

german, dutch, norwegian (iirc), french, czech

ukrainian and russian

upper sorbian, polish

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@charlotte ahh, upper Sorbian. I saw the š juxtaposed with what looked like Polish orthography, and Czech tends to be pretty close. I guess not this time.

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Charlotte lotteheartplural/Cinny cinny_heart_plural thetadelta ursaminor treblesand

Edited 11 days ago

@vikxin the last one is a very funny case of linguistic confusion, what might have happened is that a german fur trader saw a fur coat made from raccoon fur in russia, asked what it was, got told it was “шуба” (shuba, fur coat), they then brought the knowledge home to germany where raccoon furs became known as “Schupp”. this was then adopted by nearby/coexisting slavic languages who then started calling the animal the fur is from that

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i think the wash- names mainly make sense because those languages mainly have contact with captive raccoons, who are more likely to douse

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