Thank you for introducing me to the fact that a collection of ferrets is called a "business".
Which are, by the way, the closest extant taxon to the elephants. Which themselves are named just for their thick skin.
Meanwhile, "hare" (or "Hase" in German) remains also in English.
Or "bunny"? :-)
Of course, that word is of a completely different etymology (Scottish).
Somehow this reminds me of the Borges' tale "Funes the memorious". Being blessed or cursed with a prodigious and absolutely infallible memory, Funes invents his own numeration system which simply assigns to each number a different, arbitrary word from the dictionary. He claims that saying "Napoleon", for example, is way faster than "one thousand two hundred seventy six".
Most of the sources about collective nouns refer to the "Book of Saint Albans" as the origin of a large number of them [2]. But the book was meant to humorous, and includes collective nouns even for groups of people: "a superfluity of nuns", "a melody of harpers", "a doctrine of doctors", etc.
I imagine it was a fashionable court game to recite all the hilarious collective names for a vast number of animals and professions. Still, completely pointless from the point of view of communication.
https://www.bookdepository.com/Exaltation-Larks-James-Lipton...