• Redex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Who decides stuff like this? Who’s like “hmm, yeah a group of owls is definitely a parliament”

  • Lemminary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I love you, English as my second language, but you cray cray and I ain’t doing all of that.

      • fiercekitten@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Pretty much. There’s no need to learn all these terms. When in doubt, just call the animal group a group. No one is going to care otherwise.

      • davidgro@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        About the only one of those I use (besides the regular ones like ‘a flock of birds’) is ‘a murder of crows’. Usually in a statement like “We just witnessed a murder.”

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I’m Ojibway/Cree from northern Ontario in Canada

    In English - a group of moose is just ‘a group of moose’ … as far as I know, I’ve never heard of meese or mooses … or else people just say two moose, three moose, four moose, etc.

    In Ojibway/Cree - one moose is ‘moose’, because moose is an indigenous word … a group of moose in my language is MOOSUK

    • dave@hal9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Just curious, is -uk just a general suffix to make anything plural, or this is just a one off thing here?

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        Yes it is for most words.

        Goose is niska … the plural is niskuk

        Beaver is amisk… the plural is amiskuk

        It’s not a hard rule but it applies to many things, objects and animals.

  • Mycatiskai@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    I don’t know if it is still in print but there is a book that is a collection of collective nouns. The book is called An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.

    It is the same James Lipton who hosts the Inside the Actors Studio.