Naming Nature

Från butterflies and hummingbirds to narwhal and leopards, Naming Nature celebrates our wondrous natural world by exploring the language we use to describe it. Take elephants, for instance. African languages often focus on the power of the animal; Tswana and Tsonga refer to ‘the unstoppable one’ and Zulu ‘one crashing through’. In ancient European languages however, elephants were seen as commodities. When Homer and Hesiod wrote about elephas in the seventh century BCE, they simply used the word