Show Navigation
Conversation
Notices
-
my theory: because they were already present all over, with well-established words, before the world got linguas francas. products developed recently often get the same word (or variations thereof) used all over the world. not so much for things older than e.g. the roman empire. it spread many concepts and the corresponding latin and greek words all over europe, and then on to african and american colonies. so knowledge about creatures and things that only existed in certain places spread along with their original words, but those that had already been assigned different words at different places tended to remain so