Aywasfun

#2 I'd like to thank Frey, honestly, for being so kind and NOT freaking out at me or reassigning the list I was working slowly but steadily at completing and for being so kind to understand the situation. 

I know it must be so frustrating to see something sit there and not be complete, but sometimes, there's a really reasonable answer for it. 

It may *not* be mine, and this may not be the explanation, but if it was, I hope you understand too. 

But I hate our team name and our matching icons and banners..

I didn’t help form the team, but came in on a later year, when they already had ugly graphics and a really stupid team name.

I want to apologize to those users who will be losing/lost their Lisunes (and getting warned part…shit!) because other users failed to mention or follow through with letting you know of the species’ rules.

Any user who innocently bought or was given an inbred pet has been told that they have NO NOTE on their account. That they did no wrong. 

Any user who submitted a breeding on their account, but was not the breeder (for example a pendant owner or the one who ran a contest) they received a friendly reminder, that if the breeding is done by them please do due dilligence and make sure rules are followed. 

The only users who have or will receive a warning are users who actively bred the pets, who by virtue of breeding the pets actively broke breeding rules. 

Funny and bizarre German animal names

The German language is famous for some really long nouns (Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän comes to mind). This is because German nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives are like lego bricks; you can stick them together in almost any way to create new words that encapsulate new concepts. This gives the language a special ability to name just about anything. You could call it the German language’s lego brick-like quality, or Legosteineigenschaft (see what I just did there?).

But why does German rely on such an elaborate process to name things as simple as squirrels? When broken down into their separate components, the names of familiar animals mutate into bizarre new creatures.

The Uncanny X-Tiere

Comics are full of heroes with names like super, wonder, iron, ultra, bat or cat followed by -man, -woman, -girl or -boy. A lot of German animal names work the same way, where Tier – the word for animal – is preceded by a word describing that animal’s “super power”.

Stinktier – stink animal (skunk)

Faultier – lazy animal (sloth)

Gürteltier – belt animal (armadillo)

Murmeltier – mumbling animal (groundhog)

Schnabeltier – beak animal (platypus)

Maultier – mouth animal (mule)

Trampeltier – trampling animal (bactrian camel). The verb trampeln means to trample or tread upon, whereas the noun Trampel is a clumsy oaf.

Sometimes suffixes get more specific than -tier, but still tend to describe the wrong animal:

Schildkröte – shield toad (tortoise)

Waschbär – wash bear (raccoon)

Nacktschnecke – naked snail (slug)

Fledermaus – flutter mouse (bat)

Seehund – sea dog (seal)

Tintenfisch – ink fish (squid)

Truthahn – threatening chicken (turkey). Trut is onomatopoeic for the trut-trut-trut cluck of a turkey, but it’s also been hypothesized that the name comes from the Middle German droten which means “to threaten”.

No, I’m Pretty Sure That’s A Pig

Swine seem to be a popular yardstick in German animal taxonomy.

Schweinswal – pig whale (porpoise)

Seeschwein – sea pig (dugong). Not to be confused with the Seekuh, or sea cow, known in English as a manatee.

Stachelschwein – spike pig (porcupine). The English word is actually just as literal; porcupine sounds a lot like “pork spine”.

Wasserschwein – water pig (capybara)

Meerschweinchen – ocean piglet (guinea pig). The ending -chen denotes something small. Add it to the end of Schwein and you get a little pig, or piglet. Since the stems Meer and Wasser are often interchangeable, it’s most likely that Meerschweinchen actually means little capybara.

Just Plain Weird

I’d like to end this list by giving one animal a category all to itself: the humble squirrel.

Eichhörnchen:

little oak horn: Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little)

oak croissant: Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant)

alternate names:

Eichkätzchen (regional name) and Eichkatzerl (Austria) – oak kitten

Calling a squirrel a “tree kitten” is reasonably literal, but where does “little oak horn” come from? It seems that the answer comes down to a misplaced h: Eichhörnchen comes from the Old and Middle German eichorn, which has nothing to do with oak trees or horns. In this case, the eich comes from the ancient Indo-Germanic word aig, which means agitated movement, combined with the now obsolete suffix -orn. Somewhere in history a superfluous h was added (along with the diminutive -chen ending) but the original meaning remained. Today, Hörnchen is a category of rodents that includes all squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, prairie dogs and flying squirrels.

Similar things hapened to:

the mole; originally it was a hill thrower (muwurf), which then got folk etymologised to earth thrower (multwurf) before being re-analyed as snout thrower (Maulwurf)

the seal; originally *selhaz (from which seal descends and which may be one of the few Uralic loans into Germanic), which became Seel before being compouned into first Seelhund (seal dog) before being analysed as Seehund (sea dog).

the marmot/groundhog; it was originally a Romance loan murmuntin from mus montanos ‘mountain mouse’

the mule is also not a ‘mouth animal’ originally; it was a loan from Latin mulus (whence also mule) that got another clarifying compounding treatment with -tier

Also note that as for the sloth/Faultier, English was actually so lazy while naming the sloth that i couldn’t even be arsed to add an ‘animal’ there.

As for the racoon, apparently its English name is a loan from Powhattan meaning ‘one who rubs, scrubs’.

(◕‿◕✿) facts about divorce for feminists and MRAs:

in most (51%) of cases, both parents decided on their own (out of court) that the mother was to receive full custody

in 29% of custody cases, the decision was made without any third party involvement

OMG I just got these lovely LBC babies as well!

At first I figured they were just growing pains and the admins would have them figured out in a month or two, tops. Now I’m waiting for the site to fail.