2978: Different Terms for Male-Female Animals: Why? Feb 15, 2025

There are cows and bulls, pigs and sows, and even in some cases a hypernym such as where ‘horse’ is neutral and further specified by ‘mare’ and ‘stallion’ all of completely different etymologies, so too with sheep, ram and ewe. The phenomenon of gender-specific animal terminology is prevalent across many languages, but not with most animals, rather most often with domesticated ones.

In Portuguese, for example, the terms ‘cavalo’ (male horse) and ‘égua’ (female horse) have distinct etymological origins, the former having denoted a workhorse. Beyond Portuguese and English, languages like Arabic demonstrate analogous patterns, as seen in Arabic  jamal (جمل)  [male camel] and naqa (ناقة) [female camel] from a root meaning ‘to suck’ (i.e. here probably ‘nurse’). There is no equivalent in English with regard to having unrelated terms for camels in particular because they have never been common enough to allow for it. 

The persistence of these distinctions arises as pragmatic necessity in agrarian and pastoral societies where these distinctions bore more significance. Now, ‘mare’ and ‘stallion’, and for that matter ‘hen’ and ‘rooster’ are less commonly used relative to ‘horse’ and ‘chicken’ respectively. The fact that these terms come from completely unrelated etymologies, as opposed to having gender markers as many languages—including Portuguese and Arabic —use, is reflective more of the way that these terms tend to reflect roles as opposed to simply gender. For instance in Hebrew the cognate gamal (גמל) feminized as gamla (גמלה)—though now uses the Arabic borrowing naka (נאקה). Aside from this, there is no reason per se, except for clarity in farming etc..