Passed on by Jonathan Lighter, this story of the 4th from Herald Scotland:, “Meet Farmer Murphy’s geep (or shoat): now what will he call it?”
An Irish farmer who claims to have bred a cross between a sheep and a goat is seeking a name for the rare offspring.
… Similar crossings have been reported before in Chile, Jamaica, Malta and in Botswana, where scientists found a hybrid – known as the Toast of Botswana – had 57 chromosomes, a number in between that of sheep and goats.
In most cases the offspring is stillborn.
A photo:
The genetic status of the creature is still to be determined. (You’ll note the Herald Scotland‘s caution in reporting this part of the story: “claims to have bred a cross…”)
On the linguistic front, one strategy for naming such a hybrid is compounding: a copulative compound like sheep-goat or goat-sheep. Another choice is a portmanteau, essentially a compact version of a copulative compound (reflecting the hybridity of such a creature by a fused linguistic form): geep or shoat.
Shoat would be a bad choice, since the word has an already established use, for ‘a young pig, esp. one that is newly weaned’ (NOAD2). Geep sounds silly to me, but that’s just my personal aesthetic judgment.
