I have a really weird question about linguistics. It is about that ask about a porn involving a dog. I just started to think about it, when I saw the tags. Why is the word bestiality used rather than the word zoophilia? I am not a native English speaker, and while my native language has a word analogous to bestiality, pretty much 99% people would use the word zoophilia. It seems in English it is kinda reversed: I see the word bestiality much more often. Do you have any idea why is it so?

Ooh, that’s a good question, but it’s unfortunately not one I’m familiar with the answer to.

I do have a guess though: Would your language happen to be from southern Europe or related to the languages from there, the Romance family? English is a mixture of the Romance and Germanic language families (both subsets of the Indo-European family), and has a lot of synonyms with different origins. “Bestiality” is Germanic, as far as I can tell, and “zoophilia” is Romance. So if your language is Romance, it would make a lot of sense for “zoophilia” to be much more common than the analogue to “bestiality”, and the reverse to be true in Germanic languages (though as far as I’m aware, my own native language – Norwegian, which is Germanic – doesn’t even have a direct analogue/cognate to “bestiality”).

As for why “bestiality” is more common in English, maybe that has something to do with the vulgarity of the subject? When the families started mixing into English, Germanic words were more commonly used by commoners, and Romance words by the high society folks, and to this day the Romance words tend to sound more “proper” and science-y. I’m pretty sure most English swears are Germanic, too.

Sheesh, I’m coming dangerously close to sounding like I know what I’m talking about. Rest assured I may be pulling this explanation out of my ass. 😛