I recently came across one of those lexicographical gaps that drive me crazy. There is a bird called the grandala (Grandala coelicolor); as that Wikipedia article suggests, that is its only name in English, and yet it is not in any dictionary I can find — not even the OED, which has no entry for it, just a lone citation using it (s.v. fire-tailed: “There are two birds of striking colour, the beautiful little Fire-tailed Mixornis..and Hodgson’s Grandala”). It has a Wiktionary stub, but that has only a definition and a photo. All of which means that I have no idea of its etymology, and the only help I have gotten for how to pronounce it is this video, whose narrator says /grənˈdɑːlə/; she’s probably right, but I’d like to have an official source. Does anybody know more?
Is that a name in English, or a name in Latin?
Information about its namer is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Houghton_Hodgson
That claims that he was fluent, among other things, in Nepali, and Google claims that grandala is the Nepali for grandmother.
https://dibird.com/species/grandala/ gives a list of species names in different languages including a Nepali one which Google transliterates as ‘himali grandala’ and translates as ‘Himalayan grandmother’.
But whether any of that is true I could not tell you, and I doubt it helps with English pronunciation!
Remark from B.H. Hodgson’s publication of the species in ‘Additions to the Catalogue of Nepâl Birds’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 12 (1843), p. 448 (available here, boldface mine):
So New Latin Grandāla ‘big wing’, a compound of grandis and āla?
name in English
How about long-winged blue chat?
Sure.
That is the etymology given here, although they mention no sources.
It’s a striking bird: this video shows the remarkable wings, and the trees full of cobalt-blue males and gray females.
Other genera named by Hodgson include Latin and Greek compounds as well as local names.
How about long-winged blue chat?
“The female is sordid slaty, or blue-black, with a brown smear” is vivid, if not very chivalrous.
That is the etymology given here
“L. grandis large; ala wing”: excellent, and I thank you for digging it up! I must say I’m surprised; I was sure it would turn out to have an origin in one of the local languages.
@Xerîb: New Latin Grandāla ‘big wing’, a compound of grandis and āla?
That’s what Jobling says, with a “perhaps”. (Edit: Sniped by Y.)
WP “chat (bird)” says the chats are subfamily Saxicolinae and include genus Grandala. However, the WP Grandala article puts Grandala in family Turdidae, in which case the William Barnes English name should now be “long-winged blue thrush” rather than “long-winged blue chat”.
“The female is sordid slaty” — indeed Hodgson named it a separate species, G. schistacea.
I would say /grænˈdæːlə/ but that’s probably more because of the dialect I speak; there are thousands of words in my vocabulary which I have never heard spoken and this is one of them.
Also: “Transfer Grandala from Muscicapidae to Turdidae as a basal taxon within that family (Jønsson & Fjeldså 2006a; HBW; Fjeldså et al. 2020)” is a comment in a spreadsheet which I have from the IOC World Bird List.
Consulting Cornell’s University’s eBird: https://ebird.org/species/granda1, identified as one of the thrushes. BB in VA
As Jen in Edinburgh points out and several sites seem to confirm, it’s local name is himali grandala, हिमाली ग्राण्डला. But ग्राण्डला suggests a pronunciation /grɑːndəlɑː/ rather than /grəndɑːlə/.
Well, now I’m confused again.
This video appears to show some Sikkimese people pronouncing it in the local way.
Hodgson’s publication of Grandala dates from 1843, and this is after he gave up trying to use local names from South Asian languages as scientific names, apparently in response to pressure from other naturalists. Hodgson’s letter of 1841 (available here, p. 26ff) to the secretary of the Asiatic Society (apparently H. W. Torrens at the time) offers replacement names derived from Greek and Latin for the genera he had previously named by adapting South Asian terms:
This letter has come up before at LanguageHat, and there is a lot of interesting discussion on the pages of the blog Catching Flies linked to at that LH post. Since Torrens was still one of the secretaries in 1843, perhaps the ban on local vernacular names was still in place when Hodgson described Grandala (‘big wing’)?
Some of Hodgson’s original names that he lists still survive today—preserved by rules of taxonomic nomenclature, I suppose: Cochoa, Cutia, Suthora, Yuhina, etc. I wish Baza (now Aviceda?) had survived (ultimately Persian bāz ‘hawk, falcon’, perhaps originally Astur gentilis in particular, but later applied indiscriminately to various birds of prey used in falconry).
Yeah. By current rules, Hodgson’s “classical substitutes” are junior objective synonyms and can never be the valid names of anything (…unless one of the originals turns out to be a junior homonym).
The fire-tail mixornis is just a stripe-breasted, scarlet-tailed little bird. I was really hoping it would be part avian, part horse and part lion with an incendiary caudal appendage.
Grandala seems like Hodgson’s joke on the absurd pedants. You want Latin? I’ll give you a local name that looks Latin.
Or a Latin name that looks local?
I’ll give you a local name that looks Latin.
Or a Latin name that looks local?
In this regard, the genus name Grandala does not have the look of a colloquial word that Hodgson might have taken directly from a common name either Nepali or Newar.
The ancestor of Nepali participated in the general simplification of Old Indo-Aryan #CrV > Middle Indic #CV typical of its section of Indo-Aryan. Note that all the words beginning gr- in R.L. Turner (1961), A Comparative and Etymological dictionary of the Nepali Language (pages 151–152 here), are loanwords from Sanskrit (except for grāmofon), and not part of the inherited vocabulary.
Similarly, for Classical Newar, a Tibeto-Burman language, there is something interesting in this regard. See pages 94–95 in Kamal Prakash Malla (2000) A Dictionary of Classical Newari, available here. There too, the words beginning gr- are loanwords from Sanskrit, and several of them are even hypercorrections of Sanskrit words beginning with simple gV-: Newar grarbha ‘interior of the caitya or temple’ for Sanskrit garbhaḥ; Newar grīta (yāṅāo) ‘sing, recite’ from Sanskrit gītā ‘song’; etc. These hypercorrections would indicate that the cluster gr- was unusual in Newar and typical only of learned words. On the topic of such hypercorrections, note also Hans Jørgensen (1941) A Grammar of the Classical Newari, on page 15 here.
In this way, it does not look likely that Hodgson’s Grandala is simply an unaltered adaption of a colloquial word—in either Nepali or Newar, at least. Hodgson made a study of Newar, beginning on page 2 here in his Illustrations of the Literature and Religion of the Buddhists (1841).
Xerîb, did you look at any of the local names Hodgson adopted? Are they generally Nepali? Newari? A bit of both? Other?
I tried, and many of the names were very difficult to figure out—for some genera, like Yuhina, there seems to be no certainty about the actual form that Hodgson borrowed. Hodgson said that Suthora was a contraction of Sugathora ‘parrot-beak’, which looks like Nepali सुगा sugā ‘parrot’ and ठुँड़ो or ठुंडो ṭhũṛo ‘beak’ (and indeed, they do have stubby beaks). Lerwa was a Bhutia name. Since Grandala breeds above the tree line, apparently, Nepali and Newar were not my first thoughts for something that Hodgson could plausibly have adapted into Latin. Alas, I have no more time to pursue this.
I did not know about Hodgson before. He achieved an enormous amount of research, much still unpublished. From D.M. Waterhouse (ed.), The origins of Himalayan studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling 1820–1858 (2004):
And he introduced tea cultivation to Darjeeling.
And [Hodgson] introduced tea cultivation to Darjeeling.
I checked about 10 Google hits for “history darjeeling tea”. Nowhere does the name Hodgson come up. A Dr. A Campbell is everywhere credited with introducing tea cultivation to Darjeeling, along with a few other people. The background is the efforts of the British to break dependency on China for tea.
Full disclosure: About history, tea and history of tea I know zilch. Do I know more now after consulting the tenants of Dr Google ? It is the question.
You are right. I was not accurate. Waterhouse, p. 7:
Hodgson’s account quoted above is here.
So the consensus is that the local word himali grandala was learned from the British?