Many Arabic terms for mammals are obscure and poorly defined

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For years, while studying Arabic and living in Arab countries, I was baffled by the multiplicity of Arabic terms for mammals. I came across five different words for “sheep” and seven different words that were all rendered by my Arabic-English dictionaries as “camel.” I felt that I would never acquire skill in Arabic unless I could solve this puzzle. I also found a set of color terms that applied only to the coats or the wool of animals but did not know exactly what they meant. By writing this article, I have tried to reduce my perplexity and, hopefully, help other students of Arabic. When I examined the Arabic words for mammals closely, I realized that many of them are, in effect, technical terms for biologists. Some of them are defined very precisely (ex. Bakr, “juvenile male camel that has passed the age when the central incisor teeth erupt”). This reminded me of the discoveries by the famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who stressed that the descriptions of the natural world made by people in non-industrial, “simple,” societies are frequently very exacting. Although not scientists, their analyses of biological variation are careful and systematic. Their keen observations are embodied in their vocabulary, which expresses many fine distinctions in form, age, and behavior. I was gratified to find the same precision in the Arabic lexicon that Lévi-Strauss found in the vocabularies of the indigenous Amazonians when he carried out fieldwork among them.

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