Are there any differences (nuances or usage) when using prefix 子, 小 or 仔 for denoting young animals?
Examples:
- Kitten: 子猫 vs 小猫 vs 仔猫
- Puppy: 子犬 vs 小犬 vs 仔犬
- Pony: 子馬 vs 小馬 vs 仔馬
- Calf: 子牛 vs 小牛 vs 仔牛
- Lamb: 子羊 vs 小羊 vs 仔羊
- Piglet: 子豚 vs 小豚 vs 仔豚
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2 Answers
The OP's comment just now is on the right track:
小猫 certainly could be just a small cat.
仔猫 would be more common in science, but for a different reason than you guessed: 仔 is actually the correct character for a child animal, but it's not one of the 1945 -- er, 2136 as of last year, is it? -- 常用漢字. Since 子 looks and means almost the same, it took on the added responsibility of being the simplified form of 仔.
I think for the anthropomorphism case those characters would need to be switched. =p
Google hits [Japanese pages only]:
"仔猫" - 3,160,000
"子猫" - 10,700,000
"小猫" - 1,310,000
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子 means child. 仔 means an animal child, but does not seem to be used much regularly except for mentioning a child of a horse. 小 means small, which often means child but not necessarily.
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2In writing, is the choice of prefix kanji determined by whether we want to focus on the kitten as a child of a cat (子猫) or a smaller version of a cat (小猫)? And is 仔猫 the best choice when writing objective text where the focus is on the kitten being an offspring of animal (e.g. theses paper for biological research) whereas 子猫 is used when we want to treat kitten as if a human kid (i.e. anthropomorphism)?– LukmanSep 7, 2011 at 23:25
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@Lukman I think you are on the right track.– user458Sep 8, 2011 at 0:15
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7Funny that the animal child character is the one with the human radical… Sep 8, 2011 at 3:36