Would it be correct to call a chimp or gorilla a monkey?
Correct? No. Acceptable in informal contexts? Usually. If you want people to think you know what you’re talking about, use the correct term.
No. It would be sort of like calling a duck a chicken - even in informal usage it’s not a good idea. Wikipedia covers it reasonably well at a basic level (i.e. it has way more info than I know as a layman).
The gist is monkeys have tails, apes don’t. Not interchangable.
Besides, you’ll make the Librarian angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. (“OOK!”)
Except, of course, for Barbary macaques. They are monkeys without tails. Just to make thing nice and confusing, they are colloqually called Barbary apes.
Things aren’t quite that simple. First, “monkey” is a relatively new word in English (of obscure origin) and, till then, they were all apes. second, none of the languages that I am at all familiar with (French, German, Italian, Spanish) has a separate word for apes and monkeys. That says nothing about English, of course, but it does suggest that perhaps it is not a very important distinction.
When you look up “ape” in my E/F dictionary, what you get is “grande singe sans queue”. Well, that’s mostly right, but there are tailless monkeys and apes (siamangs) that are smaller than some monkeys (big baboons, for example).
Another point (which you can make of it what you will) is that cladistically, the distinction is meaningless. The basic split has new world monkeys on one side and apes/old world monkeys on the other. So while S.J. Gould once wrote an essay titled, “What, if anything, is a zebra?” and concluded that zebras did constitute a group distinct (barely) from horses, had he asked the corresponding question about monkeys, he would have had to conclude there is not a group of monkeys.
So I would conclude that there is a linguistic division, there is not a biological one.
Let’s ask the Librarian. 
But on that basis surely an ‘elk’ in North America and an ‘elk’ in Northern Europe would be the same animal, when they are quite visibly different species. Similarly, mercury would be an isotope of silver because most european langues render it as some variant of ‘quicksilver’.
Just because people used to be ignorant and that is reflected in the word derivation of various languages, I see no reason to perpetuate it.
“Apes” refers to any member of the family Pongidae. Except the family Pongidae (including Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans, and Gibbons) makes no sense, unless we include humans in the family, any group that includes both Pan and Gorilla has to include Homo. So unless we declare humans to be apes, then “ape” is just a descriptive term, not a phylogenetic term.
Same with monkeys. Any group that includes both marmosets and macaques but excludes chimpanzees isn’t a phylogenetic group. Generally “monkey” means any member of the family Primates except apes and prosimians. But logically apes would have to be an included subset of monkeys. However, we could logically exclude prosimians from the “monkey” category by arguing that old world monkeys, apes, new world monkeys, and marmosets form a clade that doesn’t include any lemurs or tarsiers or suchlike. Of course, under this definition humans would have to be monkeys.
How the words are usually used though: An ape is a gibbon, chimp, gorilla, or orangutan, and several other extinct species, but not a human or monkey. And a monkey is a primate except an ape, a human, or a prosimian.
However, this distinction seems to apply only to english. In Dutch, monkeys are called “aap”. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apen
I think it’s quite reasonable to describe humans as animals, chordates, mammals, primates and apes. If it’s acceptable for us to be the first four, why isn’t it acceptable for us to be the last? After all, we’re a lot more like chimps and gorillas than we are like a lot of other animals.
Not only reasonable, but not uncommon. I’ve heard humans desribed as “the laughing ape”," the hairless ape," and “the killer ape.”
While the geneaological perspective is interesting, to my mind it’s not particularly relevant to the question at hand. Namely, do the English words “ape” and “monkey” share a referent? The answer is indisputably no, although informal usage often conflates them to no great harm.
–Cliffy
Don’t forget the bonobo!
Humans + the great apes are usually put in the family Hominidae now, not Pongidae. Orangs are split off into the subfamily Poginae, with the rest in Homininae.
Ponginae, not Poginae. Sorry.
The distinction between “monkey” and “ape” in English is a rather new one. In Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts, one of the first bestiaries in English, published in 1607, the primary category is “Ape”, with monkeys regarded as a subgroup within this. The illustration appears to be a Barbary Ape, now considered to be a monkey, which is a tailless macaque and the only non-human primate inhabiting Europe. If there was any distinction in earlier usage, it was that monkeys had tails and apes did not.
The animals that are today considered to be “true apes,” the chimpanzee, gorilla, and orang, were essentially unknown to Europeans, accounts of them at best being semi-mythical at the time. Even by the time of Linneaus, in the mid-1700s, the chimpanzee was so poorly known that it was included as a species in the same genus as humans, Homo trogdolytes, rather than being aligned with apes and monkeys. (Although the description was so vague that it is not certain what animal Linneaus actually had in mind.)
The modern taxonomic distinction between monkeys and apes dates to the nineteenth century. Essentially, scientists managed to create a linguistic distinction that formerly did not exist. However, according to modern taxonomic standards, that distinction is not a real one. As has already been mentioned, the term “ape” has no taxonomic meaning unless humans are included. And since Old World Monkeys are more closely related to apes and humans than they are to New World Monkeys, the term “monkey” has no real taxonomic meaning either.
In formal contexts, I would probably continue to use “ape” for chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangs, and “monkey” for the Old and New World monkeys, with the recognition that these are descriptive terms with no real taxonomic signficance. In popular usage, I have no problem with people referring to apes as monkeys.
Unless they changed it again, it is currently organized like this.
Order - Primates
Sub orders
Anthropoidea (Apes and Monkeys) & Prosimii (Prosimians)
Infraorders of Anthropoidea
Platyrrhini (New World Monkeys) & Catarhini
Superfamily of Catarhini
Cercopithecoidea (Old World Monkeys) & Hominoidea (Apes)
Family in Hominoidea
Hylobatidae (Gibbons and Simangs), Pongidae (Orangutans), & Hominidae
Hominidae is further broken down to Genus
Gorilla, Pan (Bonobos and Chimps) And Homo (us of course)
Don’t call apes monkeys. You will make a Primatologist/Physical Anthropologist cry.
I concur with your analysis here, but I find the cladistics insistence on decrying any monophyletic group that by definition excludes the crown group but includes the rest of the clade, to be very much counterproductive. By your standard here, for example, there is no such thing as a reptile.
A monkey is a member of the suborder Anthropoidea which does not beloing to the Families Hominidae (=Pongidae) or Hylobatidae. Simple as that.
I tend to advocate being accurate in this matter, with some allowances. For example, the iconic “Three Monkeys” are often represented as chimplike creatures, and I’m not about to complain if someone calls them monkeys in that context. To call a gorilla a monkey would be stretching it quite a bit, though.
As for “ape”, more recent technical definitions of the great apes–that is, excluding the gibbons–usually include ourselves based on genetic analysis, which has indicated that there is no basis for an “ape” taxon distinct from humans. Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas than they are to orangutans, so we form a “clade” with them–a genetically based grouping of animals.
The differences between monkeys and higher nonhumans are not trivial. Go to a zoo and spend some time watching the spider monkeys, baboons, and capuchins. Then go watch the chimpanzees and gorillas for awhile and you’ll see the difference. When at rest they sit as we do, and they are accustomed to having their torsos in a more erect position than monkeys, even though like them they do not usually walk erect. Monkeys walk on all fours like your dog or cat, and their bodies are shaped somewhat similarly…torsos long and narrow but deep from back to front. Their shoulder joints do not have the free-ranging ball-and-socket joints of the apes, but more restrictive ones like those of most quadrupeds.
Indeed. By that standard there is no such thing as a fish, either.
Both “fish” and “reptile” are descriptive terms, not scientific terms.
Fish just means “lives in the water, has gills”. Heck, Melville famously argued that whales were fish in “Moby Dick”. Fish sure SEEMS like a reasonable term, but these vernacular animal terms don’t always match up with reality. Ever hear somebody argue that fish aren’t animals? I sure have.
Reptile just means “has scales”. Zebra just means “a horse that has stripes”. Pit Bull just means “a dog with strong jaws and neck and short fur”. Black just means “a human with dark skin, or who had an ancestor with dark skin”. Bug just means “little multilegged creature”.
It’s not that these terms are useless, but they can be confusing because they’re arbitrary, so we have to be careful about using them, because they often imply facts that are not true. I’m sure if pterodactyls had survived the KT extinction we’d have a vernacular term for them and wouldn’t consider them reptiles, just like we don’t consider birds or mammals reptiles. But any logical definition would consider birds and mammals just specific kinds of reptiles, it’s just that we didn’t really understand this when we started giving animals vernacular names and inventing vernacular categories.