#caaa

Mr Bennet turned to Elizabeth. ‘Lizzy? Come now, my dear — jubatus?’

‘Oh!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Yes, of course! Though the latin implies rather more of a mane than I noticed in her case, but perhaps that was the fault of the angle of observation. Or, perhaps, since we are speaking of a known individual, it is because we should more properly say she is jubata? Half the descriptions in that book begin with panthera, so it is terribly vexing to come across such a grammatical exception. He appears to be contrary in every possible way.’

‘That, I think, is for the use of jubatus as an adjective rather than a noun; but in any case it depends on whether we are speaking of the daemon alone, or the whole individual. Wild beasts male and female were generally held to belong to a single common gender by the romans, while those which were domesticated and thus bred were given separate grammatical genders — and I believe the Persians did occasionally tame such true animals as we are speaking of, Lydia, do get me that dictionary — so if seperate grammatical terms exist, as they do in this case, and we are speaking of the daemon alone, then we would use the feminine; but if one is speaking of the whole individual then the usual practice is to defer to the sex of the human concerned, both in the singular and the plural. Which is unusual, in that is it one of the few cases in which the latin is more complex than the french, as formally in that language the masculine plural always takes precedence when referring to the individual as a whole, for men and women alike, unless they are one of those cases where the sex of the daemon and human are the same, and feminine. But even then, the french usually prefer to refer only to the sex of the man or woman in question and thus include the daemon by inference, rather than elevating the daemon to the position of being a divisible part of the whole. Descartes’ philosophical insistence on regarding the human and the daemon as necessarily distinct from one another is hardly without detractors; and even he resorts to the use of diminuatives for clarification — ’