I guess I’m more concerned with the inconsistency than the name itself. On mobile, elk and wapati switch on my observations. One day its wapati, the next its elk. This is without me doing anything. On the desktop, a search for wapati doesn’t return any results. It seems like the naming conventions should be more consistent, especially for such a visible animal that will the first many people enter into the app.
This is the result of the language settings on iNaturalist. Names entered for a particular species for a particular region, in a set language.
This is an issue I and other South Africans have encountered with our own region: when we set it to South Africa, we encounter a plethora of different names, mostly those in other languages - even when our language setting is set to English.
This is because someone went in, while using the English language setting and the region set to South Africa, and entered a list of names in Afrikaans, Tswana, etc for a number of species that are found in South Africa as a country. This resulted in non-English names appearing for common and well-known species, such as elephant, etc, despite the language setting being that of English. It is quite irksome and the only solution I, personally, have found is to switch my region to that of a broader region: southern Africa.
Use of the term wapiti in fairly common in Canada. But the problem is that there is a bias due to the dominance of American companies in tech, hence the prevalence of American English usage (“elk”) online.
The other issue is the British usage of the word “Elk”:
The elk (Cervus canadensis), also known as the wapiti, is one of the largest species within the deer family, Cervidae, and one of the largest terrestrial mammals in North America, as well as Central and East Asia. It is often confused with the larger Alces alces, which is called moose in North America, but called elk in British English, and related names in other European languages (German Elch, Swedish älg, French élan). The name “wapiti” is used in Europe for Cervus canadensis. It originates from the Shawnee and Cree word waapiti, meaning ‘white rump’.
In an important sense, it is much more ambiguous, at least in the US, because if I told a random person I saw a ‘wapiti’ my best guess is <5% would have any idea what I was talking about. It wouldn’t really surprise me if the % of people who understood ‘cervus canadensis’ was higher, or at least had near total overlap with people who understood ‘wapiti’. So to me, at least in the US, striving to make it unambiguous is no different from it insisting on a non-latin scientific name.
That said, because a search for ‘elk’ at least brings up the correct thing, I do think it falls in the category of ‘confusing decisions that aren’t that big a deal in the scheme of things’.
That’s probably true about recognition of the word Wapiti, which is why I rarely use it. And if I told someone in the Southwest U.S. I saw a Collared Peccary, many would not recognize that name given that Javelina is the more common vernacular name, so I tend to use the latter. (Their understanding of what I mean is also assuming they know the difference between a Javelina and a feral pig.) Bottom line is I think we’re all capable of handling more than one name for some species.
Yep, I’m aware. My point is that if entering the name elk, which people worldwide use divergently to designate both wapiti and moose, returns both those species as options, then users will be able to find them both easily. This in my mind, is the only major potential issue (ie, if users couldn’t find them), and it’s also the primary purpose of common names in general: to increase usability for users who either prefer common names or those only familiar with common names/don’t know scientific names for organisms they are looking for.
The weirdest thing to me is that iNaturalist shows a Moose as “Moose” but someone gave me the ID to the European (nominate) subspecies and that shows up as “Elk”. I am European, but not natively English-speaking and while I am aware that “Elk” - or a slight variation of it - occurs in several European languages, I have never before encountered it as a name for this animal in English.
For all of my adult life (>40yrs) I have known the Cervus canadensis found in the Canadian Rockies (Cervus canadensis nelsoni) as Wapiti because that is what the National Park Service calls them in their signage. On Vancouver Island, which is home and on the Olympic Penninsula which is across “the pond”, we have the Roosevelt Elk (Cervus canadensis roosevelti) and the highway signs tell of Elk crossing. I’m open to any term - its a big world out there.
Reading this thread was an eye-opener and just made me very sad. Having grown up in Germany (where the animal in question is labeled Wapiti on signs at the zoo) I would not have expected this name to be considered as obscure as suggested by some of the comments. However, I’ve now learned that “almost no one uses wapiti in North America” and people in the US and Canada apparently “never heard anyone using it.” Given that the name is Native American in origin and therefore the most authentic and predating any name given by European settlers, it mostly just demonstrates the cold efficiency and success of eradicating Native American culture and language from public knowledge in North America. I can’t help but think of the children taken away from their families on the reservations to be put into boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own native languages. Regardless of whether the misleading “elk” is more commonly used in the US, personally I feel it ought to be wapiti even if simply to honor the importance of these animals to the traditions and stories of Native Americans and the First Nations who were here before us Europeans. Names can change - Denali is no longer called “Mount McKinley” either.
I don’t know that I’d say Native American language is quite so dead - in my area a lot of place names still use native languages. I live not too far from a reservation and around there a lot of signs have text in the native language.
When I looked at the range of Cervus canadensis I was surprised as I normally am when looking at things of nature and finding out how little I know. The range map below is from the iNaturalist page https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/204114-Cervus-canadensis.
Another thing that was of interest to me was that Wapiti is supposed to have its origin in Cree and Shawnee which are both subsets of the Algic language on the map below.
The thing is that the range of the Wapiti was over many North American language ranges - many from what I understand were distinct from the other - plus the range of languages over which the animal inhabits naturally in Asia. Considering the huge range in Asia, I also wonder if the populations that speak of this animal the most don’t even consider what we call it in North America.
There has been a resurgence in Indigenous culture in Canada (I can’t speak for the US). The languages are showing up more frequently, the traditional culture is returning, and traditional rights are being upheld by the Canadian supreme court. Our Provincial opposition party has an Indigenous leader and many indigenous cabinet ministers. They are likely to form the next provincial government. There is still a long way to go for full reconciliation, but at least in some circles there has been progress.
Perhaps the most parsimonious explanation for why Elk is preferred to Wapiti, at least for Americans, is it’s short and simple. We have a tendency to go for the simplest, most convenient term for anything.
A colleague and I saw a running herd of these animals on our drive down a mountain yesterday. Neither of us shouted “Wapiti!”
What I find even stranger: the gender terms differ between the species. C. canadensis, we refer to a “bull elk” and a “cow elk.” C. elaphus, the male is a hart, the female a hind.
As you mentioned, Eland is an African antelope, Genus Taurotragus. And oddly, Taurotragus oryx is not the Oryx, which is of course in the Genus Oryx.
And speaking of African antelopes named after deer, remember the hart? Africa has the hartebeest, Alcelaphus which of course is a combination of Alces (moose) and elaphus (European red deer).
Well, that should make some of our users happy – the ones who constantly stump for using indigenous names for organisms. Although, as @bobmcd showed in the map, California is by far the most linguistically diverse part of North America, and the Tule Elk, Cervus canadensis nannodes would not have been called “Wapiti” by any of the indigenous people there.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson had it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Vernacular names are inconsistent for a whole whack of reasons and trying to figure out which vernacular should enjoy preeminence is a doomed enterprise. It’s especially strange to follow along on yet another debate about wapiti and elk when you consider how long it has taken the people who study them to decide whether or not they are actually red deer. I think that a consensus has moved away from that idea but I’m sure there are those who argue with vehemence that it’s all red deer, top to bottom, the whole world round and do so with as much conviction as those who swear by elk or wapiti as the proper name.
I grew up in an area where wapiti were long extirpated but we still learned about them at school as wapiti. It made for some confusion watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on the tube because good old Marlin Perkins spoke a different dialect of English than we employed in the northern Ontario bush. We figured it out.
The reason Linnaeus dreamt up the whole binomial nomenclature thing is to provide a standardized alternative to the confusion of vernacular terms. If it bothers a person enough that other people call something a different name than the one they’re used to maybe they should stick to scientific names. I don’t know anybody who calls it anything but Queen Ann’s lace but I’m not bent out of shape that iNat calls it wild carrot. Gray jay is annoying but not because I want it called Canada jay; to me it will always be a whiskeyjack, which is a very old name and what everybody called it where I grew up. Letting go of the notion that there is one right name for everything is maybe one of the more useful lessons to be had from the learning tool that is iNat. If unfamiliar names are a detriment to recruiting naturalists then the ABA, whose luminaries have never seen a common name they didn’t want to improve, must have driven away millions by now.
Anyway, the summary goes something like this. Wapiti is a name for Cervus canadensis that originates in some North American Indigenous languages and is apparently mostly employed in the Asian part of the species’ range where there are presumably also homegrown vernacular names. In North America it is widely (but not universally) called elk, which is a European name for Alces alces. In North America Alces alces is called moose, which is the animal’s name in Anishnaabemowin, a North American Indigenous language. Red deer are just red deer, as far as I know. Time spent trying to bring consistency to that mess is pretty much guaranteed to be time wasted.
When I first downloaded Seek, one of the very first things I tested it on was one of the easiest IDs near me at the time with a reasonable lookalike… Queen Anne’s Lace. I had a couple seconds of confusion when it appeared to be suggesting what, from the common name, sounds like a completely different member of Apiaceae…
