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How would you name a male pet, Monkey? Since 'scimmia' is female it doesn't seem right. Scimmio, or is that slang for something else?

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  • What I originally tried to enter, without the last sentence, got rejected as low quality, so I had to lengthen the post some
    – Dexygen
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 11:56
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    Scimmia is fine. For example in Italian we call Shere-Khan tigre although the character is manifestly male and the word is female. Grammatical gender does not have a one-to-one correspondence with biological sex. In my opinion this question is still low quality, though, since it is unmotivated.
    – Denis Nardin ♦
    Commented Apr 4, 2017 at 13:47
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    This question should definitely be clarified, as the diversity of the answers shows. Is the OP asking about grammatical genders in Italian (if so, please clarify what you are asking)? a suggestion for a name for a pet (off-topic here)? whether “scimmio” is used in Italian (no)?
    – DaG
    Commented Apr 7, 2017 at 9:48
  • If @DaG got the question right, then it should be changed to "Is calling a male monkey pet Scimmio correct, in Italian?" At least it would avoid users come out with fantasy names, which is out of the scope for this site, IMO.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Sep 9, 2017 at 11:47

3 Answers 3

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Maybe call it scimmiotto. The suffix -otto sounds cute in Italian, so it fits to a pet, regardless of age or size.

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"Scimmia" is for both genders.

In Italian there are many animals with female name for both genders, for instance: zebra, vipera, marmotta, balena, ...

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Monketto

  • It's neither English or Italian.

  • Has connotations of monkey, small and cute.

  • The masculine suffix suits a male pet.

  • Can be abbreviated to ketto.

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  • Let me see. Answered the question? Yes. Low quality question? Yes. Down vote explained? No. First post encouragement? No. Typical Stack Overflow behaviour? Unfortunately, yes.
    – andy256
    Commented Apr 7, 2017 at 10:40
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    The question is low quality and very unclear (see my comment to the question), so it is unclear if the answer is relevant. And, in my not-so-humble opinion, “Monketto” is an awful name (among other reasons, because monco means “mutilated” in Italian), so I deem it “not useful”, which is exactly what “-1” means.
    – DaG
    Commented Apr 7, 2017 at 12:18
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    @andy256: As I have written, I downvoted your answer for its specific merits (or lack thereof), not those of the question. In Italian “Monketto” sounds more or less like “Armlessy” could in English.
    – DaG
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 7:49
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    @andy256 Beyond "Monketto" being a horrible name, when a question is ambiguous and there are different possible interpretations, choosing to answer a blatantly off topic one is going to bring in some downvotes. I don't know why the question was not closed sooner, but this is a relatively low traffic site.
    – Denis Nardin ♦
    Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 13:15
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    I agree that Monketto pronunced as it's Italian (that is, as written) sounds like "without arms", but if we pronunced it as it's English (that is "monkitto") is not so bad. I agree with you, sometime people are too much fussy, here. (Hence, +1).
    – CarLaTeX
    Commented Apr 19, 2017 at 2:45

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