Jungle
From Encyclopedia Jr, free information reference for Kids
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For other uses, see
Jungle refers usually to a dense forest in a hot climate.
Using this word to refer to a dense forest in a hot climate is nowadays considered colonialist, and such a forest must be called a rainforest even when the use of the latter term is scientifically inaccurate.
It originated from
With the passage of time many languages of
Sometimes an urban environment can be called a jungle, as "concrete jungle".
The term may still be used in a technical context to describe the forest
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[edit] Jungles in western culture
Some consider the use of the term (which may sometimes be accompanied with adjectives such as "dark" or "steamy", et cetera), to be not so much a neutral description of a natural habitat as an evocation of a
This is indicated by an analysis of the approximate synonyms, "jungle" and "rain forest". If they were exact synonyms, all jungles would be rain forests and all rain forests would be jungles, whereas "to be" means different things applied to a literary and popular cultural construct word such as jungle, and a term with a scientific definition, such as rain forest.
Not all "jungles" (all regions of the earth which English speakers would refer to as a "jungle") because many English speakers would apply the cultural construct, "jungle", to the forests of northern Thailand or southern Guangdong in China: but scientifically, these are "monsoon forests" and not "rain forests".
All equatorial rain forests seem to be jungles, because in all likelihood an English speaker would call an equatorial rain forest a "jungle"; but if all temperate zone rain forests were rain forests then not all "jungles" are rain forests, for the English speaker wouldn't call the forests of the Olympic Peninsula in the USA a "jungle" because of its relatively cool temperatures.
This may show that the word "jungle" should be withdrawn from world English, since it's scientifically misleading. Furthermore, its connotation, as opposed to its above denotation, implies waste or useless land, and given the destruction of rain forest, its use may further the misuse of rain forests.
The failure to see the utility in-itself of "jungle" in the world environment predates the West as seen in the Sanskrit derivation of the word from "waste or useless land", but the West reinforced the colonialist use of "jungle" as an Otherness. Indo-British opposes "junglee" to "pukka" in a binarism in which the "pukka" is better than the "junglee", associated as the pukka is with urbanization, sophistication and cleanliness, and the "junglee" with dirt and disorder.
However, an argument for retaining "junglee" if not jungle would be the reversal in which the word indicates identification with a necessary part of human existence; for example, a successful software firm, founded by Indians, was called Junglee Software.
Inaccuracy persists as a semantic halo around the word "jungle"; for example, the popular song "in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight" displays incorrect habitat of the lion.
[edit] Misc.
The word "jungle" in Aramaic is pronounced "Moogli".
[edit] See also
- Forest
- Rainforest
- Jungle Land Characters