Many animals have an adjective attached to them that means “like this animal.” For instance, if someone exhibited a grace you would associate with a cat, you might call it “feline.” A man of extremely impressive size and bearing might be said to “have an almost ursine appearance,” meaning he’s a lot like a bear. I know these ones:
My question is, do ALL types of animal have an adjective form? Is there a word like this for, say, snails, or are you stuck just calling them “snail-like”?
As for the other examples you’ve given, those are the Anglicized versions of the Latinate taxonomic mammalian classification. Most are families, but some are not. Snails would be Gastropods (from Gastropoda).
It’s probably legitimate to coin such words based on the genitive form of the genus name. Most of the ones on Rick’s and Gary’s lists are formed in that way, e.g., Bos -> bovis -> bovine; Elephas -> elephantis -> elephantine. I know “hominine” is quote often used in paleoanthropology to mean “of or relating to one of the forms in the human ancestral line (and offshoots).” So “tachyglossine” would mean “characteristic of echidnas”; “macropodine” would signify “characteristic of kangaroos”; “struthionine” likewise “of ostriches.”
Define “type”. For certain definitions, the answer is no, of course not. There are probably millions of animal species, subspecies, breeds, etc.; surely they can’t all have their own unique adjectives. I doubt there are different adjectives for African and Indian elephants, for example. Even some more general taxons probably don’t have their own adjectives, at least in common parlance.
You’re probably right, but English is equipped to coin words that will be clearly understood, at least by the intended audience. To manufacture one on the spot, I’ll bet that nobody has ever had occasion to distinguish diurnal and nocturnal animals, taken together, from those active predominantly at dawn or sunset (“crepuscular” animals, paralleling “nocturnal animals” and “diurnal animals”), but the proper term would be noncrepuscular. Made up on the spot as an example, but would be instantly clear to anyone with an interest in animal behavior patterns.
In the event I were writing something for Colibri, Darwin’s Finch, and their colleagues, and wanted to refer to a characteristic of African elephants (and perhaps their extinct close relatives) not shared by their Indian cousins, the proper term would be loxodontine, from the genus name for African elephants.
As I noted above, English seems to have largely used -ine affixed to the stem of the genus name for this purpose-- two other useful related suffixes are -id and -oid, both clipped from the “official” Latin endings for family and superfamily, -idae and -oidea respectively. To help clarify this, canine would refer to characteristics of dogs, or possibly of dogs and their closest relatives (wolves, coyotes, the dingo, etc.); canid would reference all doglike forms in Family Canidae, including the foxes, the jackal, and some peculiar South American and Southeast Asian forms most of us have probably never heard of; canoid would reference the larger group of dogs, wolves, foxes, bears, raccoons, coatimundis, pandas, wolverines, weasels, skunks, and all their allies, in contradistinction to feloids such as the cats, the cheetah, the mongooses, the aardwolf, the hyenas, the fossa, etc.
By the way, the term for such words is collateral adjectives.
That term does not necessarily apply just to animal adjectives though. For example, lunar is the collateral adjective for the Moon.
There are no doubt many lists on the Internet of such words and this guy’s site
seems to have a good selection.
You’ll have to scroll about ¾ of the way down to find the list.
Well now that explains the phrase “he has an aquiline nose”. I’d always assumed that the phrase was a reference to the person in question having a nose like some historical figure named Aquila (Roman emperor?) whose nose was so distinctive that it became the basis of an adjective.
Not really, it’s more a case of taking the Latin words, which just happen to correspond to the Genus name for most common European animals. For other animals it doesn’t hold true. Most ducks are not of the genus Anas, most mice not from the genus *Mus *. In some cases, such as the hyaena, the genus name isn’t the Latin name at all, so the English adjective in hyenine, rather than the crocutine you would get if you affixed -ine to the genus.
The associated flaw with this derivation is that different species share the same genus. So for example if you wanted to describe something as being like a wallaby then, by your derivation, you would describe it as being macropodine, the word you use for describing something kangaroo-like. Of course this occurs because the Romans never had separate words for kangaroo and wallaby, or indeed any word.
Which brings us to the third flaw, which is that the word macropodine already means macropod-like rather than kangaroo like. So it refers to anything from the bettongs, wallbies and tree kangaroos through to the true kangaroos.
Sticking -ine at the end of the genus name works, but only if the genus name is also the Latin name and only if the genus is fairly narrow.
Those are Greek terms with a rather specific meaning. They only correspond to taxonomic endings because they share the same Greek meaning. Both stem from the Greek eidos meaning shape. So saying that something is -oid means that it shares a similar shape, not a similar characteristic. For example, a boat might be referred to as piscoid or cygnoid, but it would not usually be correct to refer to them as piscine or cygnine. Similarly a nose can be referred to as aquiline if it has shared characteristics with the nose of an eagle, but if you call it aquiloid you are saying that it is literally shaped like an entire eagle.
Which highlights the problem, because wolves and dogs share the same genus: Canis. However something wolf-like is lupine because the Romans had a different word for wolf: lupus.
Simius in Latin means both monkey and ape. By the way, English is, to my knowledge, the only language that has a separate word for ape. In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and German, there is only one word to designate both types of primates.
