Confusion still persisted over the exact taxonomic nature of the hyena family in general, with most European travelers in Ethiopia referring to hyenas as "wolves". This partly stems from the Amharic word for hyena, ("jɨbb"), which is linked to the Arabic word ("dhiʾb") "wolf". The first detailed first-hand descriptions of the spotted hyena by Europeans come from Willem Bosman and Peter Kolbe. Bosman, a Dutch tradesman who worked for the Dutch West India Company at the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) from 1688–1701, wrote of ""Jakhals, of Boshond"" (jackals or woodland dogs) whose physical descriptions match the spotted hyena. Kolben, a German mathematician and astronomer who worked for the Dutch East India Company in the Cape of Good Hope from 1705–1713, described the spotted hyena in great detail, but referred to it as a "tigerwolf", because the settlers in southern Africa did not know of hyenas, and thus labelled them as "wolves". Bosman and Kolben's descriptions went largely unnoticed until 1771, when the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, in his "Synopsis of Quadrupeds", used the descriptions, as well as his personal experience with a captive specimen, as a basis for consistently differentiating the spotted hyena from the striped. The description given by Pennant was precise enough to be included by Johann Erxleben in his "Systema regni animalis" by simply translating Pennant's text into Latin. "Crocuta" was finally recognised as a separate genus from "Hyaena" in 1828. Several languages of Africa lack species specific names for hyenas: for example, the spotted and striped species have identical names in Dyula, Swahili, Mandinka, Mossi, Ngambaye, Wolof and Fulani. In other languages, other species may simply be termed "small spotted hyena", such as in Swahili, where the spotted hyena is termed "fisi" and the aardwolf "fisi ndogo". Unlike the striped hyena, for which a number of subspecies were proposed in light of its extensive modern range, the spotted hyena is a genuinely variable species, both temporally and spatially. Its range once encompassed almost all of Africa and Eurasia, and displayed a large degree of morphological geographic variation, which led to an equally extensive set of specific and subspecific epithets.