I’m not even sure right now what the tensei would be for “Pirate Monkey Astronaut Goes to Jupiter-Two (The Bigger One)”
Selkie
Love, Life, and Fishies
I’m not even sure right now what the tensei would be for “Pirate Monkey Astronaut Goes to Jupiter-Two (The Bigger One)”
Oddly enough, “Monkey” might be the hardest word in that title to translate into Tensei.
Well, they’re aware of at least one species of monkey. Although if they derive their term for the entire order from their word for “human”, some people might take offense…
No, we’re apes. Monkeys are a completely different kind of primate.
Wrong!
The definition of “monkey” which excludes apes is taxonomically unsound (formally: “paraphyletic”), because the so-called “Old World monkeys” (Cercopithecoidea), found across Africa and Southeast Asia, are actually more closely related to the apes than too the “New World monkeys” (Platyrrhini), found in South America – something that shouldn’t be particularly surprising, given that the apes also have an Old World distribution (except for humans, which eventually made it to the rest of the world). Modern science discourages the use of such arbitrary “X except Y” terms as obscuring real evolutionary relationships. If you claim that apes aren’t monkeys, you might as well claim that humans aren’t apes (after all, many humans would dislike the comparison).
Now, there are times when proper scientific classification clashes so much with common intuition on what animals should be included in a particular term that you can reasonably argue it warrants an exception to strict scientific rigor. For example, birds were traditionally considered a class-rank taxon (alongside mammals, reptiles, and amphibians), which got awkward once we discovered birds’ real position deep inside the reptile tree (more closely related to crocodiles than to other living reptiles). Or, any monophyletic definition of “fish” that includes both sharks and coelacanths would also include humans. The thing is… monkeys are clearly not an example of this. Correct or otherwise, it’s very common for people to refer to creatures like gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, or chimpanzees as “monkeys”, suggesting that this is a classification which makes intuitive sense to us. The fact that annoying pedants so often feel the need to “correct” people who treat apes as monkeys shows that people do, in fact, tend to assume this by default until “corrected”.
As a final note, languages drift over time. The cognate of “ape” in Germanic languages other than English (German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc., also reconstructed in Proto-Germanic) actually refers to all monkeys (including apes), and it’s only in English that the word has even been narrowed to referring specifically only to the tailless monkeys (and the new word “monkey” brought it to refer to the larger group). In most other Germanic languages, if you want to talk specifically about the apes, you have to call them “tailless [monkeys/apes]” or “humanlike [monkeys/apes]”. Now, yes, the meaning has shifted in English, I don’t try to deny that, and so if I had to translate a Dutch text with the word “aap” into English, I would translate it as “monkey”, not “ape”. But it adds an entire additional level of silliness if the best way of translating “aap” into English is specifically taken to not even include what English calls “ape”, rather than merely being a broader but overlapping group – and this is completely avoidable by just defining “monkey” in a more sensible way. Also, again, the fact that most languages define “ape” this way indicates that it’s a natural, intuitive grouping.
When all three of scientific reasoning, common intuition, and linguistic etymology agree that it makes more sense for “ape” to be considered a subtype of “monkey” rather than a separate group, then there are no reasonable grounds for claiming otherwise, the matter should be considered done and settled, and I recommend that anyone who persists in perpetuating the “apes aren’t monkeys” myth be introduced to flung poo.
The amount of new words that are going to have to be added into Tensei is probably going to be quite extensive if they don’t know too much about space along with different types of land. I can’t imagine that they would know too much about deserts for one thing, or any non-aquatic animals. Even ocean animals they might not know much about. I don’t know how much the general public was kept in the dark about the world outside of the lakes, but I can’t imagine that any of those terms were in general use.
I wonder if they will turn English words into a Tensei ones like “Wasei Eigo”, make a rough definition equivalent from actual Tensei words or just make a completely new word?
Nevermind not knowing about deserts or non-aquatic animals. They’re not even going to know about the freshwater animals of lakes on other continents.
…….Wait until they learn about other continents, full stop!
Heck, wait until they learn about AUSTRALIA, and how even the Land-Dwellers are terrified of it at times (the more so the further you live from it)…
*Sits back & chuckles in Australian…*
I grew up in an area where you really didn’t want to go outside in the spring because the blackflies, mosquitoes, and ticks won’t leave anything left of you. Swamps and bogs are fun for that. While the insects in Australia are huge and look terrifying, there are a lot of other places in the world where the insects are out to get you because you are tasty.
Speaking of which, I do wonder what the blood sucking bugs would think of Sarnothi blood. Also what happens with bacteria and viruses with their sudden exposure to them.
Typically when a culture encounters something new that is introduced to them by a different culture, they use the same word (thought it will be spelled in a way to be phonetic for that culture).
has selkie ever done an allnighter?
This isn’t possibly going to end badly. Not with THAT look in Selkie’s eyes….
whydid i think of the smolder after yousaid that and i looked. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa ─=≡Σ(╯°□°)╯︵┻┻
If Selkie were being sensible, she would recognize Te Fahn’s behavior as a sign that Te Fahn and George are already on track to getting together even without her intervention, and meddling is only liable to make matters worse.
Kids these days just have no sense of history. Jupiter 2 was the name of the spaceship from the series Lost in Space. Remember “Danger Will Robinson, danger!!”
Does a culture that lives underwater even pay attention astronomy?
I mean, they could, if they swam to the surface occasionally, but if that were common then humans would have noticed them sooner.
They’ve probably noticed the sun and moon, at least, but Jupiter is another matter.
It just occurred to me–what is their visual acuity like out of the water? Is astronomy even accessible to them naturally?
I don’t recall them ever having trouble seeing stuff, so I assume their eyesight is similar to humans.
Which, now that I think about it, is noteworthy, as the differing refractive indices of water versus air means that eyes adapted to one tend to work poorly in the other.
Eyes that are optimized to work underwater tend to be farsighted in air, and eyes that are optimized to work in air tend to be nearsighter underwater. (Nearsighted humans can actually see better underwater than ones with “proper” vision!)
Some fish (the genus Anableps) actually have two pupils in each eye, one adapted for seeing in air and one adapted for seeing water. Though, this is to be able to see in both air and water at the same time while swimming at the surface. Merely switching between the two might be doable merely by having a normal-looking eye undergoing subtler changes, even if it’s not something humans are capable of. I’m not sure about the details. (How do amphibians or seabirds handle it?)
Perhaps they can adjust their eye-lens well enough to operate in both situations? Their bodies are obviously capable of fully functioning both in & out of the water, perhaps their vision has adapted to switching between “underwater view” and “out of water view” when needed?
Our eyes have a lens in the “black spot” up front which gets stretched to focus on what we’re trying to see, and I HAVE noticed everyone on this page & others of their species have cat-like vertical slits where we have circles in our eyes. Cats have their vertical slits so they can open them right up at night & see well in the dark, maybe Selki & her people have them for “underwater mode” and “out of water mode”…?
According to Wikipedia, scientists still aren’t sure exactly why some animals have slit pupils. It’s definitely possible to see well in the dark without it. Apparently a leading theory is that it helps with depth perception? But mostly for smaller animals, not something that stands at human height.
In terms of the comic, it was probably just meant to give them a predatory look, since most animals with vertically-slit pupils are carnivorous, while most animals with horizontally-slit pupils are herbivorous (but with some exceptions – note the octopus, which actually lives underwater…).
Not that this is really relevant to the point you were trying to make.
Stars can be a convenient visual indicator of the time of year, so if any of the natural resources they use vary seasonally (like migrating or breeding fish), astronomy could be a useful way of tracking when to stock up. It might be a more specialized branch of knowledge than among humans though.
Eh, it’s a specialized branch of knowledge among humans too. Far more people have seen NASA photos of Jupiter on a book, poster, or website than actually know how to locate Jupiter in the night sky with the naked eye. Before we’d built probes capable of taking such photos, most people who weren’t professional astronomers didn’t care much about outer space, to the point that astronomers had to invent the “astrology” scam as a way to make their work relevant to Earthly concerns in order to justify their studies and secure funding.
However, some people have been looking at the sky with enough attention to map many stars and identify the “moving stars” or planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – but not Uranus or Neptune, which are just too far away to see with the naked eye) as far back as the earliest civilizations which left written records, thousands of years before even the invention of the telescope. Anyone who really wanted to know more about the subject could probably look it up, and philosophers talked about them a lot because it gave them a way to sound smart.