VMs: Sheep vs. Goats

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> [Pamela:] So, is your VMs author a person from another continent
> who stayed close to home, or a European who does not get around
> much? Or a well-travelled person from another contient who has
> settled in Europe yet managed in his travels to avoid seeing any
> sheep?

I'm not intending to pick on Pamela, so my apologies to her if I seem to
be!  I just picked her comment by chance to attach mine to.  Sheep and
goats are, of course, quite distinct, both biologically and in other ways,
but they are also rather similar biologically and in terms of the way in
which they are used and managed.  I doubt anyone involved regularly with
herding them could fail to distinguish the domestic varieties, but being
"pre-Modern" or "closer to nature,"  doesn't in my experience imply either
(a) paying strict attention to plants and animals and their ways, or (b)
using precise terminology for these.

My suspicion is that many people in mediaeval times were about as vague on
sheep vs. goats as most modern folks are and might very well confuse them
sufficiently to attach a picture of one for the other.

I don't have specific mediaeval examples, but the common English names for
the wild sheep and goats are considerably shuffled, sheep vs. goats, and,
more generally, Colonial Anglo-Americans instituted a considerable
suffling of the terminology even for fairly common sorts of animals -
granted that in some cases the first species encountered in various
families had no precise equivalent in Britain of the 1600s.

In addition, I was surprised to learn that older Omaha-Ponca speakers with
who I worked often conflated rather different species under single or
similar terms, e.g., mice and weasels.  These were individuals who had
been raised in rural settings.  The fact is that folk taxonomies often
work along quite different lines from those adopted by Linnaeus.  A good
deal of taxonomic lumping, often of Linnaean dissimilars, is to be
expected in irrelevant or unfamiliar areas, and sometimes the salient
taxonymic characteristics are very non-Linnaean, and include such factors
as edibility, living in holes, colored shoulder patches, occurring in
swarms, similar shapes, etc.
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