Thanks to McCreery and R. Paul for their coments on prototypes in Lakoff and Rosch. When I was in Amsterdam, I read an ad to the local zoo that read (in Dutch), as it showed an ostrich and some newly hatched chicks, "There's always something new at the zoo". Now the Dutch word for zoo was "deer garden". Indeed, for the illiterate English -- who were so much into hunting, the _cervus cervus_ became their stereotype of an 'animal' (but not in the Netherlands, where the word is still used in its 'original' sense). There are many more of these examples, that show how via _semantic narrowing_ or broadening, it's good old stereotypes (that I prefer to the 'essentialist' prototypes of Rosch and Lakoff -- even if 'stereotype' is anachronistic. An English hunter would come home with the game, and tell the wife, or she would tell him, "Now, that's a big piece of a nice animal" And 'animal' came to be associated with _cervus cervus_ that 'deer' (which meant 'animal') became 'cervus cervus', and, at a more literate stage, they had to introduce the Latinate 'animalis' to mean _animal_ My point is that Lakoff and Rosch are just updating a phenomenon which dates back to the prehistory illiterate times of the Angles. Cheers, JL ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com