Pan Narrans, the story telling ape, is one of my favourite alternative binomials for Homo Sapiens. But I think “story loving” would be even more apt, at least in describing the phenomenon of Homo Netflixius.
I don’t speak the lingo though, beyond a handful of memorized phrases, so what would be the correctest binomal for “The story loving ape”?
amator fabularum (?)
ape = simius, simia
The storytelling ape (one word) would be simius fabulator. (You could also do simius fabulans if you want a parallel construction; the former is more “the storyteller ape” and the latter “the ape telling stories”).
Story-loving (hyphen) would be simius amator fabularum or simius amans fabulas You could perhaps make up a word meaning “story-loving”; simius amafabulas or something, but I like that less.
Both of these are the masculine form. Simia is the feminine. Pan is neo-Latin; in Latin, it would be the god Pan, whom you presumably don’t mean.
Some cautions: “simius” is often used as a derogatory term for a human that merely imitates, and “fabulare” also just means to talk, so without context it doesn’t necessarily clearly mean what you want it to mean.
Pan might be modern Latin, but that’s fine, because we’re using it in a modern Latin context. And you’d want to keep that to put us in the same genus as chimps, where (from an unbiased perspective) we belong.
Yeah, I know Pan is “ape” due to the binomen for chimps, so that’s what I’d use. And I’d love to use a single word for story-loving without making one up.
Is there a good word for audience member that could work? I suppose spectator could work in a pinch, but it feels too broad.
Audiens means “listening,” and the word for “audience” derives from it. You could also use “auditor,” with the same distinction between the agent noun and the present participle.
Could you use “fabulaphile” perhaps?
Incidentally, looking that up led me to this quote, translated from the French Wikipedia article:
This, it turns out, is not the metaphor I first assumed, but an actual collection of beans. (The kind you bake into a Mardi Gras cake.)
-phile is an ending derived from Greek. You can use it, but it depends on how Latin is the Latin you are going for. In genus and species names, it seems like pretty much anything goes.
Homo narrans gets quite a few Google hits.
Interesting. Some time ago a book on apes and ape lore in medieval thought made something of a splash (not sure why) across disciplines in medieval history academic circles. I might have flipped through it, and no doubt this was/is in here.
Are you familiar with the work? (Too lazy now for cite…)
Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Janson, H. W. (Studies of the Warburg Institute 20. The Warburg Institute, London, 1952.)
For $515, out of print, it’s yours.
Google books has it, although as usual its not clear how much is accessible.
Huh. I am not familiar with this one. Sounds interesting; I’ll ask the Warburg Institute if they have any copies lying around (I bet they do).
Are you serious (or remarking on how far a library is)? Your work/interests bring you there?
It never occurred to me that it may be used (which I still doubt) by “the public,” as are the regs of research facilities of The Morgan Library here.
Let alone the manuscripts and incunabula. I have wonderful memories of paging through a humongous gold-leaf 13th century Gradual there.
I’m serious, though on a bit of a glacial time scale. Next time I happen to be in town.
I like the sound of it, but Wiktionary lists “pupil, disciple” as one of the meanings, which is contrary to the more passive listener I’m aiming at.
I’m not against mixing Latin and Greek, since that’s not that uncommon in scientific names. But what would a lover of stories be entirely in Greek? Anything to avoid it being mistaken as a love of beans. 