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Meditations on the Leo-pardus.

buy gabapentin online us While here in South Africa we have been wondering how to name the things we see here, in Latin; and one of the difficulties has been cheetah. We did not know, offhand, the Latin for cheetah. The scientific name, right now, is acinonyx, from the Greek: onyx is nail or claw, -kin- is move or moveable, with the alpha-privative: hence the name being “no-move-claws,” referring to the cheetah’s non-retractable claws, utterly unique among cats. One way or another this is not the cat’s Latin name.

dooms But I think I got a clue from Tanikwa. They claimed there that the cheetah is tameable, while leopards were not. And yet there is a long tradition in Europe of having large, tame cats which are called “leopards” – there is a Titian painting, for instance, of Bacchus in a chariot drawn by animals which I’m pretty sure Titian called leopards. But in the painting the animals are clearly cheetahs. Which also makes sense: they would be the only animals that a harness could be put onto. (I doubt they can pull a very heavy chariot, but that’s another issue). “Leopardus,” I’m fairly sure, is the Latin for “cheetah.”

This explains the odd etymology of leopardus. The Romans acknowledged three similar animals: the leo, the pardus, and the leo-pardus. The leo is clearly the lion, and the pardus is the leopard; but they also recognized an animal which they said was a hybrid between the two, with the color of the lion and the spots of the pard: and this is the leo-pardus, or cheetah, which does indeed have the lion’s color and a diminished version of the pard’s spots.  Some translations use the word “panther” to translate “pardus,” but scientifically there’s no old world cat known as a panther: there are lions and (leo)pards (several varieties, such as snow leopards etc.) and cheetahs and tigers.

In Afrikaans they use the term luiperd for cheetah. The problem is English, which does not distinguish between pard (which has mostly vanished from the language) and leopard. But I’m pretty sure when the Romans said leopardus they meant “cheetah.”

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