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Ch'osh (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, an old professor of mine studies "folk ontologies". I.e., non-technical ontologies that are part of a culture, as opposed to devised for a particular classification system. When he did studies on Navajo, he found that they had a term that basically meant "mammal" (as opposed to their specific terms for prairie-dogs, wolves, etc.), a generic term for "bird",... and I remember one generic term that was less easy to translate: it was "ch'osh", and I'm pretty sure it included snakes and bugs. As such, it's a 'non-natural' class, like "vermin" in English. I'm not sure if it included ants (of which there are very very many in Navajoland), or fish (of which there are none), or frogs/toads (which are here and there in Navajoland).
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Re:Ch'osh (Score:1)
Of course, when the Bible uses a term like "four-footed creeping things," it's immediately lambasted as a contradiction with known science because for some reason it's expected to use future knowledge of scientific classification instead of terms the people of the day would have used. :)
BTW, I think I once heard one or more tribes of Native Americans (maybe Navajo?) had a legend that the ground was made of ants. (It was somewhere in the SimAnt manual, actually.)
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
Re:Ch'osh (Score:2)
I've never heard that from Navajos, but I do dimly remember that the Navajo creation myth involves some of the first humans having to migrate from realm to realm looking for a world that was liveable, and at least some of the earlier (before this one) realms were unliveable because of scary ants that can shoot "zigzag light