[adrian_b]

No, "bison" is not an old Latin word.

"Bison" appears only in a few late authors of the Roman Empire, as a Germanic loanword, corresponding to the modern German word "Wisent".

One of the few occurrences of the word "bison" in Latin appears in Pliny the Elder. He wrote that in Germany there are 2 kinds of wild oxen, "bisontes et uros", i.e. the European wood bison and the aurochs.

There is no doubt from the description from Pliny that "bison" was applied specifically to the European wood bison and not to any other kind of wild ox. The word "bison" is also appropriate for its close relative, the North-American bison.

Pliny the Elder adds there that "quibus ... volgus bubalorum nomen imponit", i.e. the ignorant masses call both kinds of wild oxen as buffaloes, even if the buffalo is a different kind of wild ox "which is native to Africa".

Pliny was right that the 3 kinds of wild oxen, European bison, aurochs and African buffalo have very different appearances and can be confused only by someone who has not seen them previously, so for each of them, their proper name should be used, not the name of an only distantly-related species.

Most early European colonists of America belonged to what Pliny called "volgus", i.e. uneducated people, who were not familiar with the already extinct, or mostly extinct, aurochs and bison, so they have also applied the less appropriate word "buffalo" to the American bison, in the same way as many Romans called the European bison as "buffalo".

The use of inappropriate words for naming unfamiliar animals encountered in the New World has been frequent, e.g. the jaguar had been frequently named as "tiger" in the past in some places of South-America.

In conclusion "bison" and "buffalo" have not been used interchangeably in Ancient Rome and Greece.

Only the word "buffalo" was known by most ancient Greeks and Romans.

After the Roman Empire expanded in the North until Germany, some Romans learned the word "bison" from some Germanic tribes, and the word was applied correctly to the European bison, by those who knew the word.

So there was no interchangeability. Either one used "buffalo" for all wild oxen, when no other word was known, or one used the correct word for each kind of wild ox.

[jrumbut]

> Pliny the Elder adds there that "quibus ... volgus bubalorum nomen imponit", i.e. the ignorant masses call both kinds of wild oxen as buffaloes, even if the buffalo is a different kind of wild ox "which is native to Africa".

Your argument that bison is not an old Latin word and they weren't used interchangeably is somewhat weakened by this ancient Roman source, writing almost 400 years before the end of the western empire, that says they were used interchangeably.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's not often you get the "this is the most HN comment ever" feeling from a comment and then immediately from one of its replies as well.

[stevesimmons]

As someone who studied Latin at high school and a semester of Ancient Greek at uni, I appreciated this exchange enormously. It's what brings me back to HN several times a day.

[adrian_b]

Like I have already said, Pliny the Elder is not a really ancient Roman source.

At most you can say that what he wrote dates to around the middle of the time covered by ancient Roman texts, which starts hundreds of years before Pliny the Elder (who wrote during the second half of the first century CE).

There are no occurrences of the word "bison" in any Latin or Greek texts earlier than the time when the Roman Empire reached contact with "Germania" and there is no doubt that this is an old Germanic word that was taken into Latin, to name an animal from "Germania", previously unknown to the Romans and Greeks.

I have actually quoted from Pliny, precisely because he says that they were not used interchangeably. I cannot see how one can interpret it otherwise.

So again, Pliny the Elder names 3 kinds of wild oxen, 2 kinds from Germany, bison and aurochs, and 1 kind from Africa, the African buffalo.

After describing some of their characteristics, he comments that the uneducated people know a single word "buffalo", i.e. the name of the African wild ox, so they apply this name to all kinds of wild oxen, including to the 2 kinds of German wild oxen.

The 2 words were clearly not interchangeable. There are 2 cases. A Roman or Greek who did not know the word "bison" could not interchange them. Romans or Greeks who knew the word "bison" would not interchange them, because they also knew that buffaloes are from Africa and bisons are from Germany.

[areyousure]

I have no .. horse in this race, but I think I understand a point of disagreement in this discussion. You say:

> I have actually quoted from Pliny, precisely because he says that they were not used interchangeably. I cannot see how one can interpret it otherwise.

I believe the claim is that Pliny says that many people use the word "buffalo" to refer to both buffalo and bison (meaning, what other people call "bison"). 'jrumbut refers to precisely this as the words being used "interchangeably". You do not, using in part the following argument:

> A Roman or Greek who did not know the word "bison" could not interchange them.

I think this is an individual-based "interchangeable", where you say that an individual interchanges two words if, I guess, they use both words to mean the same thing. Your parent, however, refers to population-level interchangeable where if some people refer to a thing with one word and other people with another, then they are interchangeable.

For example, I think one would say that "eggplant" and "aubergine" are interchangeable even if no individual uses both words.

[adrian_b]

You are perfectly right.

The words that are interchangeable (i.e. synonymous) at the individual level are a strict subset of the words that are interchangeable (synonymous) at the population level.

In my opinion, when claiming that 2 words are "interchangeable" without any additional details, the expected meaning is that the words are "interchangeable" at the individual level.

When they are "interchangeable" at the population level, the expression "interchangeable words" does not seem appropriate, because you cannot interchange just the words, leaving everything else the same. You actually have to interchange 2 humans, who, when speaking about the same thing will use different words, like a British and an American, when speaking about something that is named differently across the ocean.

With buffalo and bison, even saying that they were interchangeable at the population-level seems a stretch, because they were never synonymous, even for different people.

For some people, "buffalo" meant "any kind of wild ox", while for other people "bison" meant "a specific kind of wild ox from Germany" (while for the latter "buffalo" meant "a specific kind of wild ox from Africa").

So even when considering the entire Roman and Greek population, it is very unlikely that it would have been possible to find 2 people who assigned identical meanings, the first to "bison", and the second to "buffalo".

The African buffalo described by Pliny was not the animal named now "African buffalo", which lives in more southern parts of Africa and which was probably unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

"Buffalo" is an old Greek word, which was much later borrowed into the Latin language. The word referred initially to some large kind of antelope from Egypt, and this is how the word was still used by Pliny (who e.g. mentioned that the body of a "buffalo" resembles more the body of a stag than the body of an ox).

Relatively late in the Greek history, after the expeditions of Alexander the Great, when the Greeks had learned a lot about the Indian animals, plants and minerals, the Greek word "buffalo" began to also be used for the Indian domestic buffalo, hence the modern usage of the word.

Many centuries later, after most people no longer had any knowledge about the African antelopes, but were familiar with the domestic buffaloes, the term "wild buffalo" began to be applied to the wild bovids resembling the Indian buffalo, including to the one named now "African buffalo".

In the case of the American bison, which is not similar to any kind of buffalo (in the modern sense), the name buffalo was applied by people for whom it had the old meaning of "any kind of wild ox".

[snickerer]

I like the deep connection through time and space between Pliny and the word nerds of today.

[db48x]

Not too surprising though. Pliney the Elder wrote the first encyclopedia, so he necessarily must have written something about virtually everything there was to know at the time.