English has too many words for animals
Yall should remove some of these animal words and instead add different words for like the 5 different meanings of "spring"
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Comments111View original on lemmy.world
Yall should remove some of these animal words and instead add different words for like the 5 different meanings of "spring"
I always thought turtles mostly live in the water and tortoises mostly lived on land.
The good ol' "All tortoises are turtles but not all turtles are tortoises"
plust tortoises are mostly herbivirous while, turtles are omnivirous, and will eat anything that moves.
Like with squares and rectangles
True, in British English! American English doesn't differentiate.
Well, it’s fine for the Americans to be wrong again :)
That's not true at all. American English absolutely differentiates them in exactly the same way.
I don’t seem to ever get corrected, chewed out, or bitched at when I call the animal with shell and legs a turtle, and I talk about turtles a lot. More than you’d ever know.
All tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. Generally tortoise implies that it is mostly land based, but it's not a rigorous definition. You can call all of them turtles all day long and still be correct, but that doesn't mean that American English doesn't still have the same connotations for turtle and tortoise that British English does.
Now do terrapin.
A terrapin is a student of the university of maryland. ezpz
I just do in English what I’d do in Japanese: see turtle? If feets, land turtle. If flippers, sea turtle.
🐢
In common speech Japanese conflates way more animals than English does, including turtles/tortoises. I just had to look up rikugame because I'd only ever heard kame before. If you're a scientist or at a turtle conference I'm sure the distinction gets used, but otherwise it goes along the lines of pigeon/dove, alligator/crocodile, rat/mouse, etc.
I grew up speaking Japanese. I know this already.
I’m choosing to believe that rather than explaining my own language back to me, that you’ve made that comment for the sake of audience notes, so people who don’t speak Japanese can follow along from the comfort of their own toilets.
Otherwise it’s kinda cringe.
Simple!
Turtle: pretty chill dude cruising the East Australian Current
Tortoise: teaching Pandas Kung-Fu
Damn kids, in my day turtles lived in the sewer eating pizza and doing ninjutsu.
shakes cane
Those clearly were tortoises though :D
Technically they're (mutated) terrapins (specifically red-eared terrapins).
Teenage Mutant Ninja Terrapins
Teenage Mutant Ninja Terrapins
Teenage Mutant Ninja Terrapins
Heroes in a half-shell, Terrapin Power!
So, tortoises, and thus also turtles...
But terrapins are not tortoises, since they're semiaquatic, but are differentiated from common turtles by their presence in brackish water.
Fuck paraphyletic groups. All my homies hate paraphyletic groups.
Tortoises are Turtles, but not all Turtles are Tortoises.
This isn't an English thing, this is a taxonomy thing. It should be the same in any language, just with different words used.
Both are translated "tortue" in french However to be fair, it could be specified "Tortue marine" and "Tortue terrestre"
But tortoise sounds like a French word
Tor-twas.
And its counterpart that stays only on land: Tor-twasn’t
A turtle lives in water, a tortoise lives on land. A turtle's not a tortoise, it's not hard to understand.
But they are turtles, like every crow is a bird.
And every jackdaw is a crow!
Here's the thing...
in dutch theyre called landschildpad and zeeschildpad (landshelltoad and seashelltoad)
Shelltoad is a fantastic name for them
But zeeschildpad doesn't include things like box turtles that live near bodies of water but not all the time, right? I guess here in Belgium we just use "schildpad" for everything.
It also sounds cooler to translate it to shield-toad lol
idk what a box turtle even is 😭 but here in the netherlands we call all of them "schildpad" too. literally no normal human here will say "look a zeeschildpad" (except for biologists probably)
Tuuuurtle turtle-urtle-urtle, turtle urtle urtle urtle. GAH, IT'S NOT A TORTOISE
Wait wait wait. Have we been lied to? Are Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and Leonardo tortoises?
Most humans live above ground level, you sound like your live in your mother's basement. Doesn't make you a different species, does it?
So you're just admitting you don't understand taxonomy
Technically this is nor taxonomy, since we aren't talking about relatedness. This is just linguistics.
::: spoiler explanation Land dwelling evolved multiple times in turtles, like in box turtles, which are not in the clade of tortoises, but would fit the common definition of tortoise. :::
Simple. One can be thrown into water and it'll be OK. The other...not so much.
So an ordinary witch test?
Depends. Is the turtle made of wood?
Could not then weigh it against a duck 🤔
No, but part of his stuff is:
🤔 hmmmmm
That's how I remember it. Cursed Reddit post...
German: that toad looking thing has a shield on it
Dutch as well, schildpad literally translates to shielded toad.
French: Was tortured.
Det är samma för sköldpaddor.
But also my Swedish is terrible, so that might be completely wrong.
Hungarian: that frog looking thing has a trough on it.
Easy! A turtle is flippy flips and a tortoise is clompy clomps.
Thank you random internet fae of wisdom
Tortoises are land animals. Simple.
Frogs and toads might be a better one - there's no systematic difference except toads are ugly.
This is your reminder that taxonomically fish and trees do not exist.
Wat
Fish belong to the family of clouds (i.e. floating), trees belong to the same group as rocks (see sudowoodo)
flippers and feet.
Distant muffled sound of Diogenes frantically strapping scuba flippers onto a Galapagos tortoise
All tortoises are turtles (but not all turtles are tortoises) from a biology point of view. Tortoises specifically being exclusively land-based members of the turtle (Testudines) order. So there is a difference.
And “spring” doesn’t really have different meanings - as per the root of the word, it always means some variant of “to burst forth”. There’s lots of different definitions for the word but they’re all rooted in the same place, from an etymology point of view.
The season bursting forth from the winter darkness and cold, the metal coil as it bursts forth when released from compression, the source of water as it bursts forth from the ground, bursting forth someone out of jail, etc.
Homographs are the real problem - when two different words, over time, become spelled the same.
Sow, lead, close, bear. All have multiple etymologies where different words eventually became spelled the same. Those are the worst!
English is a truly crazy mashup of Latin, Greek, French, German, Celtic, Norse and more.
Why did you do this
The biggest difference is that turtles live in and around water, while tortises are entirely land based.
Not to be confused with the rare tortups, which spends nearly their entire life in flight.
Would be simpler just to call them turtles and landturtles.
How about "dry shelly boys" and "wet shelly boys?"
What about mine turtles?
Hello!
They are waaaaaay different what are you talking about..
A tortoise is a kind of turtle, just like a toad is a kind of frog.
Just like birds are kind of a dinosaurs
Yes!
English: owl
German: Eule, Uhu, Kauz
French: Hibou, Chouette
This is like the hare and rabbit thing... (what are the differences?)
One is fluffy, the other is forced to listen to the dark echoes of the void
As far as I know, they are totally diferent species, that coincidentally look alike. The European hares closest relative is the roe deer(?)
But Im not a biologist. Probably someone with real knowledge can say something about it
No real biologist, but no. They are 2 different, but closely related species - certainly closer than deer!
Ah ok, do you have some easy sources on that? Otherwise Im affraid I need to deep dive into the wikipedia. "Hey Kids, Papa wont be mentally around for a while :|"
I recommend a targeted dive into Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leporidae
Roughly halfway down, just above taxonomy, is a graphic of the clade. (True) hares are only in the genus Lepus, the rest may be called hares if they are big but that's not taxonomy, just language.
There also is this helpful picture I found on the mammal page:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/OrthoMaM_v10b_2019_116genera_circular_tree.svg
Rabbits (well, the European rabbits Oryctolagus) are at the top left in blue, hares would be right beside them, as they are more closely related than the next animal group shown here, Pikas (Ochotona). Rabbit, Hares and Pikas form the group Lagomorphs. Deer are in the green category, left center, and thus distantly related.
Thanks! :)
If you think "spring" is bad, go check how many different meanings there are for the word "set".
"off" is one my favourites. The alarm went OFF so we had to turn it OFF. It means the opposite of itself.
"Sanction" is another example. Your actions were not sanctioned by us, so as retaliation we're introducing sanctions against you.
You can cleave something apart, but the halves might cleave together.
Fun fact: there's a word for words like that, they're called contronyms.
I've always liked that "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.
That's a recent
failuredevelopment, afaik, like when literally means figurativelyAs we run the run of the route in rehearsal, I run the company’s schedule so the show runs on time, the engine runs and the lights run off backup power while the road runs north along a river that runs high and the dye might run in the rain, and as the contract runs a year and a rumor runs through town, I run for office to keep the operation running smoothly, avoid a run on supplies, keep late cues from running over, prevent us from running out of time or letting costs run up, run through notes and run them by the team, run tests and run the numbers, run lines until they run together, run a tight ship so nothing runs afoul of the rules, run risks we can afford, run hot when we must, and keep the whole run unbroken.
One is an animal and the other a military formation, duh.
My box turtle mostly lives on soil, although he enjoys a paddle and soak in his water. But the main difference from a tortoise is that he's omnivorous, needing protein like bugs, whereas they are herbivores.
Fun fact, Eastern box turtles are illegal to keep as pets in Ohio if captured in the wild.
Mine was raised from the egg of a non wild turtle by someone else who found themselves unable to care for it and asked me to give it a home.
I've always wanted one, but I'm never sure if I have a safe enough large space for one
It's a long commitment,. They might outlive you, assuming you don't accidentally kill them.
One has a flat head the other has a plus sign head like the difference between crocodiles and alligators or ravens and writing desks
Well a tortoise could never become a ninja.
🤓🪤
The pedant trap has been set…
The trap has been springed
Springed has sprung
This title sentence works multiple ways. My cat is unable to speak English, because it has far too many words beyond the word meow.
The spring comment is valid.
not as much as for plants, the non-scientific names.
If you don't know the difference between turtle and tortoise then you are a monkey
Apes evolved from dry-nosed monkeys, so despite the popular wisdom, according to monophyly we are monkeys. Similarly humans are fish. The confusion arises because most people still group species by common characteristics (a grade) rather than common descent (a clade). Also known as Linnean vs phylogenetics.
I was just trying to set up a monkey/ape joke
No I'm a primate it's totally different
I'm perfectly fine with that in my native language.
Spelled differently, duh.
Turtle mostly sea living
Tortoise land living
Terrapin er not sure, water based and evil?
Terrapins move well on land and water, they have webbed clawed feets, mostly they live on fresh water.