Translating Deer Terms

A long time ago, while travelling through Europe I found myself in Richmond Park, in London. I saw a number of deer of three different species: red, fallow and roe. Not being a local, I didn't really know what the distinction was, but I had just started speaking French and was curious about how to translate these into French. So I looked them up in my tiny travel-sized bilingual dictionary (I did say it was a long time ago), but that really wasn't much help. On my return home, I looked them up in my mother's much larger bilingual dictionaries and, to my surprise, the translations were not symmetrical; that is to say, when I tried to reverse the translation, I did not end up where I started. I can no longer remember the details, but the dictionary appeared to be confused about what a deer was.

Now I am not a hunter, nor a zoologist, nor do I have any particular fascination with deer, but in my naivete this bothered me as I had not yet reached a level of proficiency where this sort of asymmetrical terminology was commonplace. So I decided to be methodical about it and create this table to help me out. To do it, I could not rely any more on Wikipedia's translations than I could on the dictionaries, but with Wikipedia at least I had one sure-fire way of figuring out which animal was which: by comparing the the scientific name across the different entries.

While thinking and working on this little problem, I made a few interesting discoveries, the most important of which being that while in English we tend to call everything "deer", the animals are considered distinct in French to the point that there really is no common term for them, apart from the zoological family cervidae. Thus a roe deer, seemingly just another deer like the red deer, is not at all thought of as being just the same but different. My bilingual dictionaries, probably more out of omission than error, had led me to believe that the generic French term for deer was simply cerf; "Ce n'est pas un cerf, c'est un chevreuil," was the response I recall getting when I suggested this to a French colleague.

The other major discovery was just how many different names for deer there are which depend on their age and sex, and this is true in both languages—though of course, the distinctions are different! It makes sense I suppose that there should be a rich terminology as deer were, and still are, an important game animal. Indeed, Richmond Park, it turns out, was established by King Charles I as a deer park.

This was, for me, an interesting exercise in translation, and more importantly a lesson in how language and meaning do not translate one-to-one from one culture to another. Indeed, in later visits to England this became abundantly clear as terms I had more-or-less grown up with suddenly took on a flesh-and-bone meaning which they had never had before, for as much as the language was my mother tongue, the land was completely foreign to me. I may have occasion to write about this at a later date. For now, I am publishing this table here as both a record for myself, and, for those that share my quaint sense of wonder, as a curious artefact of how intrinsically tied to culture language is.

It should be obvious, but don't take this table too seriously—few people can actually name all of these animals accurately unless they live among them; and as for the more fastidious divisions by age and sex, well I can honestly say I've never heard anyone ever refer to a bréhaigne or a havier. Nor have I ever heard anyone describing anything as being cervine. Buck, stag, hart, doe, hind and fawn are all commonly understood in English, however, even if the speaker is vague on the specific attributes of each.

A note on pronunciation: in standard French “cerf” is pronounced without the f, though in the south, or at the very least in the south west, you will hear the f pronounced by some locals.

Almost everything here is sourced from Wikipedia.

ENGLISH			FRANÇAIS
Related terms:			Termes apparentés:
Antler (usually antlers);			Les bois (m)
Hummel (Northern England and Scotland: stag which has failed to grow antlers)
Male	Female	Young	Mâle	Femelle	Petit
Generic terms:			Termes génériques:
Deer; a group is a herd, adjective is cervine.			Cervidae, cervidés, cerf
Buck; sometimes hart; sometimes bull for larger species. Gelded male is a havier.	Doe (sometimes hind; cow for larger species)	Fawn (sometimes calf for larger species; sometimes kid for very small species)			Le faon
Cervus elaphus
Red deer			Cerf (cerf élaph)
Stag or hart (the latter especially over 5 years)	Doe or hind (the latter especially after 3 years)	Fawn	Le cerf; entre 6 mois et un an le hère; entre 1 un et 2 ans le daguet	La biche; entre 6 mois et un an la bichette	Le faon
Capreolus capreolus
Roe deer			Chevreuil
Roebuck	Doe	Fawn	Le chevreuil; le brocard	La chevrette; vieille et stérile elle est la bréhaigne	Le faon; entre 6 mois et 1 an un chevrillard
Dama dama
Fallow deer			Daim
Buck	Doe	Fawn	Le daim; le jeune portant des débuts de bois est le daguet	La daine	Le faon
Cervus canadensis
Wapiti, or Elk in Anglo America (Called elk in North America but distinct from European elk, which are essentially the same as North American moose, but see the entry on alces alces. Very similar to red deer and only recently considered a truly distinct species.)			Wapiti (Auparavant considéré comme une sous-espèce du cerf élaphe mais maintenant des études génétiques semblent prouver que ce sont deux espèces distincte.)
Bull	Cow	Calf	Pas de nom spécifique (mâle, femelle, petit)
Alces alces alces and alces alces americanus
Elk, Moose in North America (There is much confusion over this - some consider them two different species, others different subspecies. In either case, the British English word elk and American English moose can be considered interchangeable, the latter being derived from an Indian language and used in distinction to elk which in North America was applied to the Wapiti. Apparently since there are no elk in Britain and most English speakers had consequently never seen one, the notion of what one was was cloudy when the first British settlers discovered the large deer native to North America. Various now obsolete names such as grey and black moose have been used in early descriptions.)			L’élan (m), l'orignal (m) en Amérique du nord (Il parait que certains les considèrent comme étant deux sous-espèces de alces alces, tandis que d'autres les considèrent comme étant deux espèces distinctes, les sous-espèces en Europe formant une espèce à part de l'animal nord-américain. Le mot orignal entra en français du mot générique basque pour indiquer l'animal nord-américain grâce aux premiers francophones à s'y rendre qui apprirent le mot des pêcheurs basques.)
Bull	Cow	Calf	Pas de nom spécifique (mâle, femelle, petit)
Rangifer tarandus
Reindeer, Caribou in North America			Le renne, le caribou en Amérique du nord
Bull	Cow	Calf	Pas de nom spécifique (mâle, femelle, petit)

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