Fun With Words
Words like “feline” and “canine” are pretty commonplace, and their meaning is probably understood across the board.
It wasn’t until a few months ago when someone posted an article talking about leporine creatures that I really gained an interest in the construct. It took only a moment of reading the article before I was able to put together that “leporine” means hare-like. I’m year of the rabbit, so that struck a chord with me on a couple of levels.
Off the top of my head, I was able to come up with “bovine”, “equine”, “ursine”, “porcine”, and, with a bit more thinking, “lupine”. Resembling cows, horses, bears, pigs, and wolves, respectively. Most of those could probably be puzzled out if not immediately recognized, especially if any attention has been paid to Latin roots. Many of those roots show up more than one might think in our day-to-day vocabulary.
A bit of digging brought me “taurine” (bull-like, of course) and “hircine” (goat-like, not so obviously, at least as far as I’m concerned).
Finally, and for fun only, “porcupine” (thorny pig). :)
Alas, the porcupine doesn’t follow the same construct (at least not in the direct manner of the other examples), though its name does come from the Middle French word for it, which was “porc d’espine”, which translates to “thorny pig”. It was further diluted through Middle English as “porcupyne”, which was a variant of “porcapyne”, which replaced “porke despyne”.
The -ine suffix itself is French in origin, as the feminine version of the Latin (there it is again) suffix -inus, -ina, -inum, which means, approximately, “of the nature of”. This is found elsewhere, as well: “medicine” is, literally, pertaining to a medicus, a doctor.