Hello All

I know this may sound a dumb question but something is puzzling me about a wonderful farm animal that we all know and many including myself love to eat.

The Male is called a Bull
The Female is called a Cow
In plural they are called Cattle

But what is the animals name in its singlar tense? Not in Latin but in English. If the word Cow refers to the female then that cannot be it, there must be another word surely!?

Wikipedia has told me much about Latin names and classifications for this animal but what is it's name is in English is puzzling me. Anybody able to help ?

Oxen?

check your favorite dictionary again; it will usually give something like this as a second meaning for cow:
2 : a domestic bovine animal regardless of sex or age [MWCD]

(in Old English the singular form of kine was cu)

Steer.

I once thought a cow was a cow and more of them were cows.
A bull was a bull and more of them was bulls.
And cattle was the whole menagery that walks on four legs together. But reading this I don't know head from tail anymore.

I wonder , LukeJavan if that steer is gonna draw you a sheep.

There is a newspaper comic here called "Boy and Cow" and the
Cow is quite intelligent. Probably could draw a sheep.

So this animal shall remain nameless.

If anybody has herd any different and it is not bull then please bring this old heffer in the barn for milking and blow the horn so we can all chew over the cud together.

Ok I'll get my suede jacket about now......

And please don't steer us wrong.

So this animal shall remain nameless - not really. In technical language (statistics etc), reference is commonly made to bovines. Bovine is a noun as well as an adjective.

How now brown cow?

A bovine is any member of the taxonomic group that includes our European-American cattle: it is not specific to our cow, but includes zebu, water buffalo, brahmans, etc. It's analogous to canine, feline, ovine, murine, and many other such -ine constructions. These are all originally adjectives, but have made the leap to nounhood. If one is referring to a cow in the singular, one says either cow or bull or steer (the latter a castrated bull,) but "cow" is occasionally used as a generic term, too, perhaps when one is uncomfortable with inspecting the subject animal too closely. Steers, when being refered to in the plural, are occasionally called "beeves," though I've never heard the singular, "beef," used to refer to a steer without an accompanying word, e.g., "beef animal" (most commonly) or "beef cow."

I'm curious if you folks out there say BO-vine or BO-veen. I've heard the latter on occasion, mostly in academic surroundings.

>"cow" is occasionally used as a generic term, too

see MWCD instance, above.
-joe (chopped cow liver) friday

It certainly is, and I've heard it applied as such, but I'd test the waters before using it, because the usage is not uniformly accepted (in the U.S.) in my experience.

People who are intimately involved with cattle probably generally call individuals by a term that covers the individual's sex and neutered status. Cow for a female, bull for an intact male and steer for a neutered male. Others are free to call them all cows.

"Cattle" also can be used in another, generic sense. I've heard it used to mean any kind of livestock (except poultry.) I understand it comes from the same ancestor word as "chattel," and originally meant anything one owned. It then (as "cattle") came to mean livestock and only fairly recently has come to mean bovine livestock exclusively.

"Corn" has followed a similar path I'm told, having originally been a generic word meaning "seed," then recently assuming the exclusive meaning of Zea mays, and that only in American English. "Kernel," "acorn," and probably others (definitely some German words) are descended from the original "seed" meaning. "Colonel" is not.

Before Nebraska became the Cornhusker State it used to say:
"The Beef State" on license plates.

It's "bovine" here.

"Corn" has followed a similar path I'm told

Corn is still generic in the UK and many parts of the Commonwealth.

But what is the animals name in its singlar tense? Not in Latin but in English. If the word Cow refers to the female then that cannot be it, there must be another word surely!?

Tense is a grammatical category of verbs.Cow is mostly used as a noun. What is the singular, generic form for cattle. Others have answered a, and it's cow. Not all words for animals in English are orthogonal with respect to sex, age, and fertility. There is a term epicene which in English is sort of a synonym for effete or hermaphroditic, but in Latin was a grammatical term for animal words which were the same form for both male and females of the species (and it still has this meaning in linguistics and lexicography).

Whatever it happens to be, I know a bunch of kids in a
school bus would point and say: "Hey look at all the cows",
irrespective of gender or grammar. How language changes.

I pronounce BO-vine, like divine. From age 8 to 12 I spent the August months on a farm up north in the country. I knew the seventeen cows by there names. Daughters were sometimes called after their mothers. There was Dora I and Dora II. I was allowed to get up at five and join in getting them from the meadow to the milking house. I love cows for their velvety eyes and patient behaviour. I don't really like to eat them. I'm not surprised at all that in Hinduism the cow is considered sacred.

We don't really use the same word for both sexes in bovines: we use cow and bull. But z hints at an answer to the original post. For sow and boar, we have pig. For mare and stallion, horse. But for bovine cow and bull, we have no comparable word, and I believe this was the point of the original post. You're suggesting that, because of the absence of the generic term in English, we use "cow" as an epicene term. I'll buy that, but, again, there are parts of the country where calling a bull a cow will at least generate a few snickers, comparable to a rube having a ride in a Rolls Royce and saying, "This here's the Cadillac of cars, ain't it?"

You're suggesting that, because of the absence of the generic term in English, we use "cow" as an epicene term.

Not really. I was just saying that language is rarely orthogonal in its grammar or lexicon. An epicene word in English would be housefly or snake. To distinguish between the sexes you have to qualify it.

No not complicated.
We have sow, boar, pig
We have ewe, ram, sheep
We have cow, bull, cattle, where cattle is always plural.

Sow and boar are pigs pl.
Ewe and ram are sheep pl.
Cow and bull are cattle pl.

Wiki largely has the item: Singular terminology dilemma.
cattle
"All the cattle are standing like statues"

There is something called markedness (link) in linguistics. Given two forms of a word one is unmarked and the other marked. In words that differ by sex, either the the word for the female or that for the male is marked. In cow it is bull that is marked, but in lion it is lioness.

@zmjezhd:

OK. Now the use of epicene is more clear to me. Thanks, it's a good word!

Again, @zmjezhd:

So historically (though less so lately) "man" would be the unmarked word, and "woman" is marked. Is that the right use of the word?

So historically (though less so lately) "man" would be the unmarked word, and "woman" is marked. Is that the right use of the word?

Yes. But, earlier in English, there was a complete set of words like those in Latin (homo'human being', vir 'man', mulier 'woman'): Old English mann 'human being', guma 'man', and wīf 'woman'. Ironically, guma is related to homo, the generic term in Latin; it is also the origin of the groom in bridegroom. OE wīf is also shows up in a compound wīfman which is the origin of woman.

However note that the Latin homo-, 'man' is not related to the Greek homo-, 'same'. Also, OE wīfman was masculine gender but wīf was neuter.

but wīf was neuter

As is German das Weib 'the female'. It is good to remember that grammatical gender and biological sex do not always overlap.

The match of modern German gender to OE gender in cognate words, e.g., finger, hand, stool, hound, is pretty good. It wasn't till we basically dumped the concept of gender as a grammatical concept and transfered the word over to the biological realm that we lost track of its original meaning.

We still have the actual word wīfman in a reversed version: manwijf, a woman looking and acting like a man.

Are you suggesting that humans recognized gender in language before they recognized it in the biological world, or are you refering specifically to the word, "gender?"

are you refering specifically to the word, "gender?"

All I was saying is that grammatical gender sometimes has little to do with biological sex.

@ z: I understand what you were saying. Sometimes the articles and nouns don't even match in gender, as in Spanish: el cura, la mano, el agua, etc.

I was questioning Faldage's post concerning the word "gender"

Let me rephrase my question: Concerning gender, what was the original meaning to which you refer in your post, if not its meaning in the biological realm? I always assumed it had a biological sense first, which was borrowed at some point by students of language.

Sometimes the articles and nouns don't even match in gender, as in Spanish: el cura, la mano, el agua, etc.

Latin manus, though it ended with a -us, and therefore "looks" masculine, was actually a fourth declension feminine noun. The normal historical development was a loss of final -s and a change of then final [i]u to o. Spanish agua is a feminine noun, but begins with an a, and for reasons of the use of the masculine article has to do with pronunciation. It only happens with words beginning with a that are stressed on the first syllable, like hacha, alma, etc.. If stressed on a different syllable, like amiga the article is la. There are a bunch of nouns that end in -a but which are masculine, and they all have homonyms which are feminine, e.g., el cura 'priest' but la cura 'healing'. El guía 'guide (person)', but la guía 'guidebook'.

In Latin, gender is a grammatical category of lexical items more so than one of morphological endings. Latin agricola 'farmer' is masculine, manus 'hand', is feminine, and corpus is neuter.

I was questioning Faldage's post concerning the word "gender"

Yes, I know. I was just making my position more certain.

Nuncle has pretty much explicated what I meant be gender in my "dumped the concept of gender as a grammatical concept" post. What I was saying is that we didn't connect the concept of gender to the concept of sex back in the day. The modern English use of the word gender to refer to sex is, in my opinion, a relatively recent development made possible by the total loss of gender markings in nouns, adjectives, and articles. We knew all about sex (or at least all we needed to to keep making babies and directing the baby making in our domesticated animals) long before there was any notion that gender and sex could be conflated.

The modern English use of the word gender to refer to sex is, in my opinion, a relatively recent development made possible by the total loss of gender markings in nouns, adjectives, and articles.

There are examples of gender being used to mean sex in English going back to the 14th century. Of course, Middle English had pretty much gotten rid of grammatical gender by then. In Greek γενος (genos) and Latin genus, generis, both meant primarily 'birth, stock', extending to 'kind, species', and finally in the grammatical sense gender. Of course, the fact that two of the three genders (in Greek and Latin) were called masculine and feminine, no doubt, lead to a metaphorical (?) use of gender for sex. There is an example of this in Aristotle's Rhetoric 1407b7. (I am still chasing down the citation.)

[Addendum: I have found the citation in Aristotle which I cited above, and it refers not to biological sex, but to grammatical gender. Not sure what LSJ was on about.]

That's all very enlightening, and I thank you both for the time you took to address my remarks.

In the 2 cents department... la guía is guidebook, but it also is a female guide. Context provides meaning.

Another instance of "mismatch" is when a noun is shortened. la fotografía is often shortened to "la foto", just as "la moto" is short for la motocicleta.

Thanks for the "mano" explanation. Does it work the same way for "la modelo"?

:0)

The on-line Diccionario Etimológico says modelo is from the Italian diminutive from the Latin modus, which my Collins Gem says is masculine, so no help there.

In Australia on a cattle property, we would say a "beast", which can also be used in the plural instead of "cattle" eg Is this beast for sale? and Are all these beasts for sale?

Modus is masculine? In Italian there is modella feminine and modello masculine. In Spanish not this differentiation?

Modus is masculine?

Yes. It's a second declension masculine noun. It means 'measure', and also, 'manner, way'.

I've heard that here in the Great Plains as well.
Welcome, by the way.

Apropos the 'beasts', if I could I would buy them all and call them cows. Cattle it has always been and referring to cows only.

Alan,

I'm not suede by your eloquence.