The sloth (Folivora) is a mammal from Central and South America that struck the early modern (c.1500–1800) European naturalists as especially odd. Hence, descriptions and depictions of this animal featured in many texts from this period. Apart from its physiognomy and its behaviour, the naming of the sloth was discussed in detail, and scholars came up with various names and etymologies for the animal. Several European and Amerindian languages were involved in this complex naming process, while Latin played a decisive role as the lingua franca in establishing a scholarly discourse. The paper focuses on written sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it tries to reconstruct how the given names and their etymologies were connected to the perceived behaviour and the physiognomy, and what this might tell us about the conceptions behind these. The results are compared to similar findings from anthropology and ethnobiology.
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