• gerryflap@feddit.nl
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    2 days ago

    Uhmmm maybe it’s because I’m not native English or just dumb, but this wording confused me greatly. I figured that young goat was the only interpretation that made sense since the image didn’t show a human kid, but for non-native speakers like me it’s a bit of a weird sentence.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      How common would you say knowing names of baby animals in English are for most Dutch speakers (I’m assuming that’s what you speak because of your instance)? I’m guessing kitten and puppy are pretty common, but what about farm animals like calf, foal, lamb, piglet, or chick? And then you’ve got forest animals like cub, fawn, or kit.

      • gerryflap@feddit.nl
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        17 hours ago

        Not sure tbh. I think I’m quite a bit above Dutch average, though definitely not amazing at it either. From these I’d know kitten, puppy, calf, foal, lamb, piglet, chick, cub and fawn. Though kitten, puppy, calf, and lamb are similar or equal to the Dutch word. No idea what “kit” is. But I wouldn’t use some of these words myself because they’re not really part of my normal speaking/writing vocabulary.

        • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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          10 hours ago

          Ah interesting, so you pretty much knew all the common ones except kid. I guess it’d be a lot easier in general if English just had an affix for a baby animal. I’ve been trying to learn Japanese because I live in Japan, and they just attach ko- to something to make it a baby (like dog is inu and puppy is koinu).

          Although Japanese has its own set of weird naming conventions because you can’t just use numbers to count stuff, and instead you have to say the name of the group the object falls into. Like “one pencil” would be “pencil one long thing” and “one dog” would be “dog one small animal (non-bird/rabbit) thing”.

          BTW a kit is a baby fox, beaver, rabbit, squirrel, and a few others.