A purely semantic question about the phrase "collection"

Dan

Dan

Well-Known Member
I happen to notice that you English speaking guys use the word "collection" a lot.

When it comes to my own language, Swedish, I don´t belive anyone would be comfortable to use this word ("samling", in Swedish) anymore. Certainly I never see it being used on Swedish zoo sites, for instance. It would be very un-PC - it would be seen as a bit derogatory; you can "collect" stamps, coins or whatever you want but you cannot "collect" animals.

Just wondering... is the word totally un-problematic in English?
 
A 'collection' in English just means a group of things brought together - you can have a 'collection' of people (as in, 'it was a very odd collection of people who arrived at the party'), so in the purest sense there is no difficulty with a collection of animals as far as I can see. That is simply what a zoo is - a group of animals brought together.

(I suspect you will find some that avoid the word for PC reasons - I don't think personally there is any need to do this)


EDIT: Out of interest, Dan, if you wanted to refer independently to the animal collection, rather than the zoo as whole, what would you say? I'm thinking of a sentence such as 'Twycross has a wonderful animal collection but not always high-quality exhibits'.
 
Hm... thanks Maguari! Very interesting!

Actually, apart from "samling" we also have the word "kollektion", I did not mention that in my first post, but those two words mean the same and both would be the direct translations of "collection" in English. Both a bit uncomfortable to use in modern Swedish with regards to living creatures, though - thus my question...

Interesting - the same word/concept expressed in two different languages, basically meaning absolutely the same, and yet there is a little bit of a difference when it comes to the cultural interpretation of them.
 
I think the word is rather old-fashioned when it's used in the context of zoos. In English we use the word to mean a personal collection, like my photos, or a corporate one like all the works of art in an art gallery or all the artefacts in a museum - which I think led menageries to use the word for all their animals.

Alan
 
OK... so still, a little bit of different interpretetions from the UK?

Do our American, Canadian, Australian or NZ friends want to chip in?

Not that this a major issue or something like that to me, it is just that I have become a bit curious about the usage of this word as I have decribed.
 
I think that is precisely what is referred Dan; a collection that is a set of things, but the zoo animals are living beings, then perhaps their discomfort by referring to a set of species as a "collection"
This it´s my opinion...:)
 
But you often here people say things like ' our male okapi is about to move to another collection'.

Interestingly British people don't say facility as much as Americans do.
 
That's true; certainly in Britain, 'collection' is also used as a catch-all for zoos, wildlife parks, safari parks, aquariums, butterfly houses, falconry centres etc all lumped together. (I would just call them all zoos, because they are!)

'Facility' is very seldom used in Britain to refer to the above. It sounds very clinical to my British ears! Might use it to refer to a private breeding facility, but not an open-to-the-public zoo, as a rule. Actually, I'd be more likely to use it to refer to an exhibit (as in 'they are building a new bear facility') than a zoo.
 
The animals at a given collection are its collection. As Dan said from the start, this comes down to semantics. :) If I was worried it would be unclear, I would use 'animal collection' to make it clear I meant the animals not the whole place, but I think usually the context would make it clear.
 
while we are on this topic, 'habitat' is almost only american and 'exhibit' is more american than british I would say.
 
Dan, how would swedish people call "all the animals in one zoo"? In Holland, the word "collectie" is also used as "a group of". Is also has a very slight undertone but usually people don't mind also for the lack of anything else.

We also use the specific word "postzegelcollectie" (= postage stamp collection) if we want to give it a specific negative undertone.
 
In answer to jwer and others:

I am actually not quite sure if we have one single word in the Swedish language that would be appropriate to use. At least I can´t think of one right now.

We would use phrases like "our animals" or "the animals in the zoo".
 
Just thought of the fact that the dutch have the word "verzameling" (ie "sammlung" in german and "samling" in Sweden) that we would also probably not use for animals. I think it's the same for german, they would use "kollektion" for animals and not "sammlung".

Funnily enough, the English only have one word that is a direct translation to both words. No wonder you can't understand anything we say :)

I think that both in germany and the netherlands only real green-winged people would feel discomforted by using the word collection for animals. Is that fundamentally different from Sweden? Would also be nice to hear another opinion from sweden (where's swedish zoo-boy when you need em...) and/or germany...
 
Dan said:
In answer to jwer and others:

I am actually not quite sure if we have one single word in the Swedish language that would be appropriate to use. At least I can´t think of one right now.

We would use phrases like "our animals" or "the animals in the zoo".
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I totally agree with this way of calling to the animals that live in a zoo as a whole.:)
 
I use it primarily because animals are not always held in zoos... private, refuge, park etc all can be denoted by calling them collections. Sadly many of them are collections in a way not to dissimilar to a collection of anything else, they are there after all because we want them to be, few serve an entirely justifiable existence through conservation, education etc. This is not a dig, I love good zoos and have parted with plenty of entry fees to view them but collections they are.
 
jwer said:
Just thought of the fact that the dutch have the word "verzameling" (ie "sammlung" in german and "samling" in Sweden) that we would also probably not use for animals. I think it's the same for german, they would use "kollektion" for animals and not "sammlung".

Funnily enough, the English only have one word that is a direct translation to both words. No wonder you can't understand anything we say :)

I think that both in germany and the netherlands only real green-winged people would feel discomforted by using the word collection for animals. Is that fundamentally different from Sweden? Would also be nice to hear another opinion from sweden (where's swedish zoo-boy when you need em...) and/or germany...
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Thanks everybody for indulging me on this subject! Some very interesting examples there from jwer! BTW, I would also be very interested to hear from Toddy on how this word is interpretated/used in Danish.

But in a direct answer to jwer: Yes, I really do believe that this word is non-pc in Sweden as a whole, whatever one´s political conviction is.

I think I have written this before: LANGUAGE IS A TRICKY BUSINESS, :)...
 
KEEPER said:
I totally agree with this way of calling to the animals that live in a zoo as a whole.:)
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That could be fine, but it sounds funny when you say:

The zoo has a great our animals. or
The zoo has a great animals in the zoo.


I have looked up a thesaurus and found some alternate words:

inventory, stock, assortment
 
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