[Fictionary] SURRA results

[Josh Smift]

Totally uninformed speculation: All four are from native languages, three
happened to end in an "a" sound and one in an "o" sound; since in Spanish,
feminine nouns often end in a, and masculine in o, they just ran with that.

                                      -Josh (irilyth at infersys.com)


On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 12:50 AM Jean-Joseph Cote <jjcotedsl at verizon.net>
wrote:

>
> Hutch
>
> surra, n. A camelid closely related to llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuña;
> markedly larger than the llama (approx. size of a horse). Like the llama,
> they were associated with an Aymar deity, but that deity went out of favor
> when its priests failed to predict the coming of Europeans to the Andes.
> Breeding decreased radically during Spanish rule and it is unknown whether
> any remain alive today.
>
> When I was in Chile a few years ago, and we saw guanacos (the first one
> caused great excitement on the bus, but after we had seen a few
> hundred...), I had a question for our guide:
> "*La* llama, *la* alpaca, *la* vicuña, *el* guanaco... ¿por qué? Guanacos
> son mas machos?"
> He didn't have an answer.
>
> --
> J-J Cotejjcote at alum.mit.edu
>
>
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