The idea of being ethnoknown is extremely tricky to establish. It's a very slippery idea to ask what did the indigenous people know and when did they know it...
Well, thank you, I've learned something today. I always assumed from context that "ethnic" and associated words like ethnicity related only to race. However, a bit of Googling today shows that the root of the word referred to a group of people from an area. It carried no racial connotations. For example, under this earlier meaning, you could have
ethnic cockneys, being people of all races, colours and creeds coming from a specific area of London.
That insight took away some of my initial discomfort at a word that would have drawn the line between scientists and local populations on a basis that would have been problematic. (If
ethno only referred to race.)
That leads me to the second part of the word:
known. This is problematic for me epistemologically rather than ethically. What do we mean by
known?
Without rehashing my earlier examples with the hypothetical ichthyosaur, I think there would be room for words such as ethnoknown, ethnoreputed, ethnobelieved, ethnonarrated, ethnosuspected and so on. (Only half joking here: the important distinctions need to be recognised, but the words would be silly.)
If the existence of a species is known with certainty by one part of humanity, it is not a cryptid.
To define it as cryptid would be to make a value judgement about the knowledge of one part of humanity compared to another. Species A is
only ethnically known, but Species B is
properly known: western scientists recognise it.
I am usually the last one to resort to dictionaries and etymology in a debate. The concepts are usually more important than the labels. However, when trying to agree a definition in a technical context, sometimes the etymology is helpful.
Cryptid comes from Greek
kryptos, often simply translated as
secret or
hidden. That's why we put bodies in crypts, and why crossword clues are sometimes
cryptic.
However, there is very seldom a 1:1 relationship between words in different languages.
kryptos also meant
not evident, not obvious.
Using
cryptid to refer to all species that have not yet been identified would be to make it a synonym for
unknown, or
undiscovered.
I think any working definition of
cryptid has to include the idea that a species is
reputed or
believed to exist by some section of the population, but its existence is
doubted or even
denied by science.
I think we then need to make a fundamental distinction between putative species that, if they existed, would recognisably comply with the known laws and norms of biology (flesh and blood mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, etc.) and creatures that could only exist in the context of an as yet unknown paradigm: animals that can shape shift, teleport, travel between dimensions, fly in defiance of the known laws of physics and aerodynamics, and so on.
Back to the original question at the top of the thread: discovery of an example of the first (flesh and blood) category would cause a minor flurry of news, and a predictable debate about ethics and conservation; discovery of the second sort (operating outside the bounds of physics as we presently understand it) would perhaps cause some degree of panic, hysteria, and religious debate, and a rush by governments to weaponise the new knowledge of physics. If an ABC can travel between dimensions and appear from nowhere, then perhaps our missiles can be made to do the same...
