Wait...how is there a Coeurl miqo'te tribe if coeurls aren't Eorzean?

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Originally Posted by amifiq

We can see a real life example in European coat of arms. Many of them are using lions but we all know lions' habitat is in Africa

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Today, yes. In ancient times lions lived in southern Europe and throughout the Middle-East as well. There is still a small population living in western India.
The last of the European lions were killed around 100BC.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Today, yes. In ancient times lions lived in southern Europe and throughout the Middle-East as well. There is still a small population living in western India.
The last of the European lions were killed around 100BC.

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So they would have been extinct in europe by the middle ages when most of these coat of arms where created and used. So nobody alive would have seen one in europe first hand prop :P
And tourism wasnt where it is now so european people would have known lions only from stories.

Wait, the C tribe is specifically named after the Coeurl? I thought it was just associated with the letter. I can't find any reference to that in the Encyclopedia; is it mentioned elsewhere (in-game, etc.), or is it just a theory? Assuming that is the case, though - while we don't have a clear map to work from, "southern Ilsabard" could probably be considered the same general region as the "Near East" (which doesn't need to refer to Thavnair exclusively), and as such the theory that the C tribe knew of Coeurls from before their migration is probably the most likely.

If that seems less plausible, though, another possibility is that the the Coeurl was a legendary creature to the Miqo'te, and when the animal was encountered in more modern times, it was then named after the legend - sort of like how giraffes became associated with and subsequently named after the legendary qilin/girin/kirin of East Asian mythology when encountered for the first time by those cultures. Or how...

the Primal that Ilberd summoned was named after the otherwise-unassociated Doman legend of Shinryu).

There's no real evidence of that being the case, of course, but it'd have real-world precedent.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

So they would have been extinct in europe by the middle ages when most of these coat of arms where created and used. So nobody alive would have seen one in europe first hand prop :P
And tourism wasnt where it is now so european people would have known lions only from stories.

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From stories and from the many paintings that the ancient Greeks and Romans left behind - many of which were made by people who did see lions with their own eyes.
But true, lots of heraldic depictions of lions and (even more so) tigers aren't very realistic.

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

Wait, the C tribe is specifically named after the Coeurl? I thought it was just associated with the letter. I can't find any reference to that in the Encyclopedia.

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Well... it's in the stickied Race Naming Conventions thread.

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

Or how...

the Primal that Ilberd summoned was named after the otherwise-unassociated Doman legend of Shinryu).

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I have my own theory about that. It's linked to ninja summoning, and from a passing visual clue from the NIN post-60 storyline, but that's another topic for another thread and another time.

Shinryu was named Shinryu... by the Domans. Because it reminded them of the dragon from their legends.

The dragon, when summoned, had no name at all. There's nothing deep about it no ninja tricks, no osmosis of foreign legends; the summoner was just after a big honkin' dragon, like Bahamut only badder. He got one. He wasn't after Shinryu at all, but The Domans thought it looked like their legend, and named it. Everyone else was fine with the name, so it stuck.

I'm not pulling this out of thin air; the Main Scenario quest text explicitly states that the Domans named it after their dragon of legend. At no point does it state that it IS their dragon of legend.

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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Well... it's in the stickied Race Naming Conventions thread.

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Oh, well, there you go then! Knew I was missing something.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Shinryu was named Shinryu... by the Domans. Because it reminded them of the dragon from their legends.

The dragon, when summoned, had no name at all. There's nothing deep about it no ninja tricks, no osmosis of foreign legends; the summoner was just after a big honkin' dragon, like Bahamut only badder. He got one. He wasn't after Shinryu at all, but The Domans thought it looked like their legend, and named it. Everyone else was fine with the name, so it stuck.

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That's...what I said? Shinryu was named after a legendary creature that otherwise had no association with it because of its appearance. Like how East Asian cultures named the giraffe after a legendary creature that otherwise had no association with it because of its appearance, and how it's possible the Miqo'te did the same with the Coeurl (though the "C Tribe immigrated from the Near East and encountered Coeurls there" is the more likely explanation).

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

If that seems less plausible, though, another possibility is that the the Coeurl was a legendary creature to the Miqo'te, and when the animal was encountered in more modern times, it was then named after the legend - sort of like how giraffes became associated with and subsequently named after the legendary qilin/girin/kirin of East Asian mythology when encountered for the first time by those cultures. Or how...

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Or it was a word for an animal but now it is used for a different animal. As a real life example we have the tanuki According to wikipedia the kanji was originally used to describe wild cats but since there were no wild cats in Japan it started being used to describe the tanuki. There is a lack of citations on the wikipedia article about the naming origin but this chinese dictionary gives some credibility to it. https://www.tofulearn.com/dictionary/chinese/%E7%8B%B8

Maybe there was a cat lady equivalent of a dragon living in the continent, collecting coeurls all the time

That's an interesting question! A simple OOC explanation could be that the naming guide was written before the Lorebook, and parts of it might be out of date as a result. There were extensive rewrites of the lore especially between 1.0 and 2.0, so it's a definite possibility. A more fun explanation could have to do with the fact that we don't know exactly where the 26 Original Miquote tribes emigrated from. They could have been wandering through whole continents as far as we know, and might have encountered Coeurls at some point in their journey. If the ecology of the world was so different back then that the oceans were frozen it's also possible that the creatures existed in areas far removed from their current locations.