How do you say “furry” in other languages? by Fred Patten.
by Patch O'Furr
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
My January 2016 call for information about furry conventions for my Furry Fandom Conventions book, announced on Dogpatch Press, contained a comment from Anonymouse that I didn’t address at the time. He said:
“Russians needs to translate “furry” into their own language. For the last 20 or so years they have not been translating anything, and simply adopting more english words, writing them in Cyrillic letters. If this keeps happening, the Russian language will disappear in 50 years. Mark my words.”
Why do the Russians need to translate “furry” into Russian? I may be prejudiced because I’m in an English-speaking country, and we take pride in the English language containing so many foreign words. We call them “loan words”, but there is no sign that we’ll ever give them back.
James Nicoll’s 1991 epigram has become famous:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
A favorite observation of SF writers is that if a time-traveler from the present went a thousand years into the past, he or she wouldn’t be able to understand the English language then; it’s changed so much.
We look with amusement at the Académie française’s attempts to keep the French language “pure” by regularly issuing lists of new foreign words (mostly English) creeping into French, often with the correct French words that should be used, such as “Le chewing gum” – “gomme à mâcher” is recommended.
What should “furry” be in other languages? Here is a quick list from Wikipedia.
- Catalan – El furry fandom
- Chinese – 獸迷
-
2000 furries from 41 countries responded to a 2011 IARP survey.
Czech – Furry fandom
- Danish – furry
- Dutch – Een furry
- English – The furry fandom
- Esperanto – Ŝatantaro de felo
- Finnish – furry
- French – Le fandom furry
- German – Das furry
- Greek – To furry fandom
- Hebrew – פאנדום פרוותי (right to left)
- Hungarian – A furry
- Indian (Sanskrit) – फररी फैनडोम
- Indonesian – Furry fandom
- Italian – Il furry fandom
- Japanese -ファーリー・ファンダム (furry fandom phonetically in katakana)
- Korean – 수인러
- Norse – Furry
- Polish – Furry (with a note that this is English for futrzak or futrzastość)
- Portuguese – furry fandom
- Russian – фурри
- Serbian – Фури фандом
- Spanish – El furry fandom
- Swedish – furry fandom
- Ukrainian – фурі
- Welsh – Y furry fandom
Furry in Dutch is just Furry as well,
Een furry = A Furry
Friends and I just use furry/furries in the same way one would in the english language and I’m quite confident other dutch speakers do as well.
Some of these translations are interesting though, thanks for sharing!
I’m a Russian. There is absolutely no need for Russians to replace the word “furry” with a “homegrown” one. “Furry” has stuck and nobody wants it to go away. There is no need to go on language purity crusades. Languages do not lose their identity because of loan words.They naturally clean themselves of any unnecessary words or constructions with time and adapt to the needs of the speakers.
I personally find this whole thing to be some sort of linguistic snobism. It’s also funny how people like to defend “language purity” while using so many foreign words in their speech without knowing. I would strongly suggest any purist snob to at least try to exclude foreign words from their everyday speech and see how long they will last.
It’s interesting that the Russian and Ukrainian words for “furry”, rewritten from Cyrillic into Latin, are “furri” and “furi”. The Ukrainians have been trying to get people to write their capital city, Kiev (that’s the Russian spelling), in the Ukrainian spelling, Kyïv, but so far without much luck.
If an English-speaking time traveller went 1,000 years into the past, he or she would find England speaking Anglo-Saxon. Try reading “Beowulf” in the original Anglo-Saxon. For about 200 years after William the Conqueror brought his Norman French nobility to England, the English court spoke Norman French, not English.
Given the fact the Russian word for furry, when used as an adjective, is Пушистый (Pushistye*) it might be better to just adapt the original english word for the fandom. Plus given the fact that previous to the fandom coming there there was no word for furry, when it is ised as a noun, it might be better to adapt words that already exist. Such is the joy of translating phrases when the word type is not being used for its traditional purpose.
*I apologize if this is not the best transliteration of cyrillic, as there is, in my experience, no academically accepted way of correctly transliterating out certain cyrillic letters, there is just what is popular. Also llike you said in the above comment, there are certain words that have a preferred transliteration based on the country.
> For the last 20 or so years they have not been translating anything, and simply adopting more english words, writing them in Cyrillic letters.
Pretty much every language has been doing that for a long time, actually, especially when it comes to technical jargon. It’s quite noticeable if you listen to someone talking about a subject that has a lot of technical terms related to it, such as this video about how an air filter on a car works in Swahili. But I suppose that’s only fair, since as you said, English has always loved to shamelessly steal words from all the other languages.
One nitpick about the list, though: it seems that, in a lot of languages, the word that’s commonly used for furry characters is different from the word used for furry fandom as a whole, so if you’re planning on including a list like this in a future book, I think it would be good to ask people from different countries to clarify whether they have different words that they use in those cases.
For instance, the word I’ve always seen Japanese-speaking artists on the internet use for furry characters is “kemono”, written as either 「ケモノ」 or as the kanji 「獣」. (The literal meaning of that kanji is, in fact, a furred animal, and when written by itself, it can be pronounced either “kemono” or “kedamono”, but I’ve only ever heard the former used when referring to furry characters.) The word “kemono” is not used to refer to fans of furry characters in real life, but “kemono fan” (ケモノファン), taking the English word “fan” as a loanword, is a term I’ve seen used sometimes, such as in this press release about CyberConnect2’s (the people who developed the video games Tail Concerto and Solatorobo) presence at a comic convention called Kemoket.
Thanks for including the Esperanto translation, Fred!
In Finnish, “turri” is used.
Japanese is kinda incorrect. It’s would be ケモノ (Kemono), meaning beast. When katakana is used however, it almost exclusively refers to furries.