The main Marine Lexicon page describes the project thus:
Marine Lexicon is a cooperation initiative between CHAM – Centre for the Humanities in Portugal and the University Museum of Bergen and NIFU (Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education) in Norway, funded by EEA Grants and CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, aiming at the construction of a thesaurus of European common names of marine mammals (cetaceans, seals and sea lions, sirenians, polar bear and otter), symbolic elements (sea monsters, hybrid beings, folklore creatures) represented in the early modern age (15th-18th centuries) and place names related to the exploitation of marine mammals.
For now, words and expressions in 14 languages, including old versions of the respective languages, are collected in a thesaurus. All are languages from countries and regions with a coastal line. The thesaurus is presented here, allowing scholars and the public to search within the true ocean of possibilities that is the European vocabulary about marine mammals.
Looks good; thanks, Trond!
And if you’re interested in non-biological things of the sea, J. Richard Steffy’s Illustrated Glossary of Ship and Boat Terms has you covered.
Almost every fish market around here has one or more beautiful posters of commercial fish, from a series published somewhere in Europe, each fish bearing its name in a dozen or so languages.
See also M. H. Parry’s euphonious Aak to Zumbra: A Dictionary of the World’s Watercraft.
This gives “leon marino” as the Spanish for sea lion, which is certainly an accurate calque of the English name, but at least in some times and places Hispanophones have instead referred to that marine mammal as the or a sea wolf (lobo marino), leading to e.g. the toponym Point Lobos, California (Punta de los Lobos Marinos in pre-Anglophone days). This of course makes me a bit suspicious of the thesaurus’ reliability on other matters which I lack independent knowledge of.
I’d already forgotten I sent you this link. Since then I tried to dive (hah!) deeper into it and the truth is I soon found it lacking. I hoped it would be a database or multilingual dictionary of ancient marine lexicon, but it’s almost an empty shell (hah!). The terms are few and they seem to be an indiscriminate mix of old and new, of native terms and recent borrowings. In some languages word choices and definitions may be built on thorough lexicography. Others seem to have been added by a random native speaker with a half-decent dictionary.
Weren’t the Spanish sailing the Pacific and South Atlantic before the English? Which would suggest that English “sea lion” is a calque from Spanish, not vice versa. (Spanish Wikipedia calls Zalophus californianus both lobo marino and león marino on the same page.)
“Sea lion” is one of William Dampier’s Firsts: he has the OED’s first citation in the mammal sense (there are earlier senses †1. A kind of lobster or crab; 2. A fabulous animal in heraldry). In A New Voyage Round the World (1697), he observes them in the Juan Fernández Islands, and explains why “lion”:
Me: the truth is I soon found it lacking
That was unnecessary. It''s a laudable project, which is why I joyfully spread the word, but I wish it had been more comprehensive and maybe copy-edited before the launch.
It's also a project tailor made for EEA support. It's pan-European but in a field that is of special importance to Iceland and Norway.
Icel. höfrungur “dolphin” is interesting. It must be a compound of hafr “billy goat” and ungur “kid”*, and the umlauted vowel suggests** that it’s old. It’s not in my ON dictionary, though, but several other compounds with hafr are listed and does mean “some form of whale”. I wonder if that was a play on haf “sea”.
* Disappointingly, an image search for “Billy the Goat Kid” does tiende results but none for a goat with guns.
** To me, but I’m always wrong about Icelandic.
@ktschwarz: Ironically, that description—size, head shape, whiskers, goggle eyes, and long teeth—is clearly of a walrus, not what we today take to be a sea lion.
That was in the Juan Fernández Islands, west of Chile. No walruses there.
J.W. Brewer wrote:
“… at least in some times and places Hispanophones have instead referred to that marine mammal as the or a sea wolf (lobo marino), leading to e.g. the toponym Point Lobos, California (Punta de los Lobos Marinos in pre-Anglophone days)….”
Yes, that’s the name I learned for those animals in Spanish growing up in California. I can personally attest that it is how the sea lion exhibit was labeled at the Santa Barbara zoo when I was a boy ( the zoo already had many of its exhibits labelled in English and Spanish.) I have since heard “león marino” used but I don’t remember if I started hearing that before or after the year 2000.
(To be honest, I’ve felt before that “león marino” was kind of a lazy borrowing from English since the animals seem more dog-like/ wolf-like to me than feline but then again, I’m sure I’m guilty of lazy borrowings from English too.)
Point Lobos
I remember Câmara de Lobos from reading Past Caring by Robert Goddard. I wondered then—some 30 years ago—what wolves could be found in Madeira.
the umlauted vowel suggests** that it’s old
I believe that it’s, on the contrary, new. Compare the Faeroese and Icelandic declension tables for fjara: F. has fjara/fjaru and I. fjara/fjöru, and the umlaut is triggered by the u, which has fronted to y.
U-umlaut was a thing in Old Norse too — but hafr was/is a strong a-stem so it only showed up in the dat.pl. höfrum. I don’t know if it applied to compounds, though.
(Perseus has Zoëga all scanned, though it seems to be stuck in the dark ages of iso-8859 — but it lies about it and claims UTF-8 in the response headers. As a result, you can’t even use the next/prev arrows to get to a word with ö because Firefox correcly puts a Unicode error char in the URL).
http://norroen.info/dct/zoega/
Icel. höfrungur “dolphin” is interesting.
Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon in his Íslensk orðsifjabók (1989) has this:
My translation, doubtless inadequate:
Cleasby-Vigfusson include höfrungur under the derivatives with the suffix -ungr.
https://old-norse.net/html/a_grammar2.php
I am surprised that the Marine Lexicon site has not included Basque among the group of 14 other languages on which it concentrates. The Basques were important in the early European whaling industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Basque_whaling
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basco-algonquin
I imagine that few relevant Basque documents survive from the period that the Marine Lexicon surveys—and documents in other languages probably do not mention many Basque terms either. But it would even be helpful to know that somebody has looked and found nothing.
This passage from the first printing (1780) of Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia Antigua de México contains what may be the earliest written use of león marino in Spanish:
“Cuando Buffon afirmó que el cuadrúpedo más grande del Nuevo Continente era el tapir, y después el cabiai, se había olvidado enteramente de las morsas, las focas, los cíbolos, los rangíferos, los alazanes, los osos y los huanacos. El mismo confiesa (tomo 27) que el becerro marino visto por lord Andson y Roger en América, y llamado por ellos león marino, era incomparablemente más grande que todos los becerros marinos del mundo antiguo. ¿Quién se atreverá a comparar el cabiai, que no es más grande que un puerco mediano, con los cíbolos y los alazanes? Los cíbolos son corrientemente iguales a los toros comunes de Europa, y algunas veces les exceden en tamaño. Véase la descripción que hace Bomare de uno de estos cuadrúpedos llevado de Luisiana a Francia y exactamente medido por él en París el año de 1779 (p. 480; later printings or editions may have a different pagination).
Clavijero says that Buffon wrote in volume 27 that león marino was the name that Lord Andson and Roger had given to the animal they had seen in America which in Spanish [according to Clavijero] is called a becerro marino [literally, ‘sea calf’].
Instead of “llamado por ellos león marino” (‘called by them león marino’), Clavijero should have written “llamado por ellos sea-lion, es decir ‘león marino’.”
Therefore, although Clavijero did not intend to coin a Spanish zoonym león marino (that name appears in his book only as his literal translation of the unstated English zoonym sea-lion), the mere appearance of the collocation león marino there was presumably enough to launch it as an additional Spanish name of the becerro marino.
Spanish also has the simile luchar como león marino ‘fight like a sea lion’ (= English fight like a dragon), as here:
En resolución, a la madrugada zarpó el Adelie con las personas indicadas, cuatro marineros y un piloto. Con diferencia de pocas horas, hizo lo propio el Alegría. El Levante, que ya les zarandeaba en la bahía de Gibraltar, en cuanto rebasaron de Punta Carnero, se les mostró terrible enemigo, con furioso viento y mar gruesa de costado. Entre Tarifa y Trafalgar el Adelie luchó como con los refuelles del Estrecho, moderando su andar y manteniendo el rumbo como podía. En el horroroso cuneo, sus tambores iban alternativamente al cielo y al abismo. Cuando la embarcación se hallaba en la cresta de la ola, las ruedas pataleaban en el aire, y al caer en la sima de agua, creyérase que el barco y sus valientes tripulantes y la revolución española, se colaban (Benito Pérez Galdós, La de los tristes destinos, 1907, p. 292).
The foregoing Spanish quotations are taken from a website of the Royal Spanish Academy (https://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html).
I inadvertently omitted two words (león marino) in the quotation dated 1907. Read:
En resolución, a la madrugada zarpó el Adelie con las personas indicadas, cuatro marineros y un piloto. Con diferencia de pocas horas, hizo lo propio el Alegría. El Levante, que ya les zarandeaba en la bahía de Gibraltar, en cuanto rebasaron de Punta Carnero, se les mostró terrible enemigo, con furioso viento y mar gruesa de costado. Entre Tarifa y Trafalgar el Adelie luchó como león marino con los refuelles del Estrecho, moderando su andar y manteniendo el rumbo como podía. En el horroroso cuneo, sus tambores iban alternativamente al cielo y al abismo. Cuando la embarcación se hallaba en la cresta de la ola, las ruedas pataleaban en el aire, y al caer en la sima de agua, creyérase que el barco y sus valientes tripulantes y la revolución española, se colaban
David Gold ninjaed me, so I’ll only add that becerro marino has never been the name of the sea lion, referring instead to the manatee. I wonder if the confusion is due to Anson or to Clavijero.
FWIW, lobo marino is attested as far back as the 16th century, in Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias.
“Dogfish” means any one of as many as 119 species of small shark, but the name is also popularly used for several unrelated species of freshwater fish, notably the bowfin. So this is going to be a tough job to finish.
It’s not like the various species within the subfamily Otariinae are inherently more leon-like than lobo-like, so there was nothing wrong with the approach of de Oviedo and subsequent Hispanophones. But what would be interesting to know is whether a fuller survey than this beta-version thesaurus affords would show the “wolf” name extant anywhere outside Spanish or find any European languages that use neither a “wolf” name nor a “lion” name — perhaps because they just treat them as another kind of seal that doesn’t need a different name. Since sea lions are not found anywhere particularly close to Europe, I guess it makes sense that most European languages would end up borrowing or calquing a name from another European language whose speakers had had already had occasion to talk about the animal, but how dominant is the market share of the “lion” version? Some European language of one of the first-mover (in global exploration) societies could plausibly have borrowed the indigenous name from the indigenes of the place where that language’s sailors had first encountered the critters, but that doesn’t mean that actually happened with this particular sort of critter.
😮 The cognate of capra, vanished from West Germanic without a trace that I’m aware of.
I should have understood from the written form that it was a derivation with -ung(u)r rather than a compound with ungi “kid”, I think I was seduced by the Billy the Goat Kid joke. But I can’t really make sense of the suffix does there. I don’t think it works as a diminutive. To me it smacks a little of affinity, something like “billygoatian”.
But the semantics makes much more sense if it’s an allusion to a playing goat kid than a grumpy old buck. Maybe it could be a compound with the bare adjective -ung(u)r.
David M.: The cognate of capra
Yes, I was surprised too. I thought it had survived only in a few placenames.
But if the meaning “(small toothed?) whale” was common early, it might perhaps explain Hafrsfjord
The cognate of capra, vanished from West Germanic without a trace that I’m aware of.
There’s still Kapriole. There are various kinds of frisky, all-too-fancy programming that are hard to maintain. When I find that in code reviews, I describe it in my reports as Kapriolencode.
Also sich kaprizieren auf etc.
The cognate of capra, vanished from West Germanic without a trace that I’m aware of.
There are traces in German, and the latter entry also quotes the word as directly attested in Old English.
And Hafer itself, rather more than a “trace”, according to the etymology given there in Duden, and in DWDS too. First “billygoat”, then “fodder for a billygoat”.So it is speculated.
Among pinnipeds, there is also the sea leopard, probably more frequently called the leopard seal today. (It is a true seal.) It presumably gets its name from a combination of analogy with sea lion, its spotted hide, and its vicious disposition. They live fairly far south and will eat all sorts of different animals, not just fish. I first learned about them from Mr. Popper’s Penguins (my favorite book when I was seven), since sea leopards and killer whales are the only significant predators of large penguins. (The orcas are, in turn, also the only nonhuman species that hunts sea leopards.)
@Brett: Note to self to encourage my almost-seven-year-old to read my old copy of Mr. Popper’s Penguins before he reads his mother’s old anthologies of Bloom County strips with their slander on walruses as alleged threats to penguinkind.
• NO WIMPS
• NO WINOS
•
NO WALRUSESWALRUSES
WELCOME
The orcas also have a fondness for the livers of great white sharks, who hastily leave the area, if they’re lucky, as soon as an orca shows up. The orca seems to be the apex predator of the sea, and it strikes me as excessively polite to call them “orcas” now, rather than “killer whales”.
I wonder why they didn’t include Croatian, which has a centuries old maritime tradition.
Not only would it have ensured that the Slavic language group was represented, but also the extinct romance language, Dalmatian, from which numerous maritime themed loan words entered into Croatian.
Examples:
The monk seal, Monachus monachus is traditionally called morski čovik in Croatian. ie. sea man.
The dolphin can be called dupin, which dervies from Dalmatian, or morsko prase (sea pig) in Croatian.
and it strikes me as excessively polite to call them “orcas” now, rather than “killer whales”
Supposedly the original Spanish term actually meant “whale killer”, and “killer whale” is a mistranslation.
(Orcas are, of course, not technically whales, as such, but very large dolphins.)
@January First-of-May: All the Odontoceti have always been included under the general English heading of whales. In fact, in English there is a longstanding term specifically available to distinguish the largest cetaceans: great whales.* That is not to say there has not been a push from some sectors to restrict whales to only the largest varieties, not the dolphin types (just like there has been a push to use ape only a restricted sense).
* The great whales are probably paraphyletic though, because of the cachalot. While the sperm whale is clearly a great whale, it is also toothed, and since its closest relatives are much smaller, it seems that the Odontoceti is a true clade, and the sperm whale just happens to have grown to a size otherwise only seen in the other whale clade, the Mysticeti (who have baleen).
the leopard seal
That reminds me:
On a low budget, Rymill had counted on eating local. Fortunately, seals at Northern Base were plentiful, both crabeater (“vastly superior in flavour and eating qualities,” according to Rymill) and Weddell, which were killed in larger numbers for dog food. Both dogs and men refused to eat leopard seal.
Jason C. Anthony, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine
havre — the ODS restricts itself to oprindelse omstridt, but gives the ON as hafri, not hafr. The word is the same in Swedish, but Hellquist is more loquacious and (after giving the communis opinio of bliiy goat fodder) adduces all sorts of names for the cereal in other families that seem to be related to words for ‘hair,’ culminating with a reference to L capronæ = ‘mane’ and old-style PIE *kəpr-.
kaura
Finnish
Etymology
From Proto-Finnic *kakra, borrowed from Proto-Germanic *hagrō, whence Old Swedish haghre (dialectal Swedish hagre) and Old Gutnish hagri. Cognates include Karelian kakra, Livonian kagr, Estonian kaer.
Noun
1. oat, oats
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaura
kauris
Finnish
Etymology
From Proto-Finnic *kapris, borrowing from Proto-Germanic *habraz, *hafraz (“he-goat”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kápros. Cognates include Estonian kaber, Karelian kabris.
Noun
1. A mountain goat, more specifically called alppikauris or alppivuohi, Capra ibex.
2. Any small deer of unspecified species, especially a roe deer.
3. One born under the sign of Capricorn.
4. (archaic) billy goat, he-goat
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kauris#Finnish
Hellquist also mentions a Norwegian word for horsehair that could be cognate to the Gutnish word for oats that was loaned into Finnish. The dispute is whether the current havre in Danish and Swedish is from that word or from the goat.
@J. W. Brewer:
Quite a few of the Romance languages have “wolf” forms, though they seem to be less common than the “lion” equivalents: Catalan llop marí, Portuguese lobo-marinho, Italian lupo marino, French loup de mer are all attested, and even German Seewolf makes an occasional appearance.
@al
Loup de mer, lupo di mare and Seewolf most often refer to an edible white fish and not to the sea lion. I would suppose the name was calqued separately for the fish and for the predator.
@Alon L.: hopefully future editions of the thesaurus will capture those Romance “wolf” variants side-by-side with the “lion” versions.
@PlasticPaddy: I specifically searched for documents that also included the genus name Otaria to prevent that kind of ambiguity. Anarhichas species are also known as “peces lobo” in Spanish, so I was aware of the potential for collision.
There’s also the figurative use for lupo di mare/loup de mer meaning ‘seadog, seasoned sailor’, which again also exists in Spanish as lobo de mar (but never marino). I see that Germanic languages tend to go for ‘sea bear’ instead.
@David L Gold: There are earlier attestations of león marino. The Viage del comandante Byron al rededor del Mundo, translated and annotated by Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1769) translates Byron’s sea-lion as león marino. Ulloa’s 1734 account of his journey mentions leones marinos (v. 3, p. 290). Becerros marinos (sea calves) also appear in various places. Perhaps they are elephant seals?
The earliest Spanish sea lions I found are in the 1624 annotated translation of Pliny by Luis Sánchez, here. This appeared only five years after the use of leones marinos in Latin, in Schouten’s account of his voyages.
the sea leopard, probably more frequently called the leopard seal today
I wondered what the Japanese would be for it, the true seal being, characterwise, ‘sea leopard’:
海豹
Japanese
Etymology 1
Originally a compound of Old Japanese elements 痣 (aza, “bruise”) + 等 (ra, “lots of”, a pluralizer) + 獣 (shi, “beast”, especially one used for meat). The bruise meaning was in reference to the spotted coat.
The kanji are jukujikun (熟字訓), from Chinese 海豹 (literally “sea leopard”).
Pronunciation
(Irregular reading)
(Tokyo) あざらし [àzáꜜràshì] (Nakadaka – [2])[1][2][3]
IPA(key): [a̠za̠ɾa̠ɕi]
Noun
海豹あざらし • (azarashi)
a seal, specifically the earless seal or true seal
Usage notes
As with many terms that name organisms, this term is often spelled in katakana, especially in biological contexts, as アザラシ.
Note the distinction between 海豹 (azarashi) for seal, which has no external ear flaps, and 海驢 (ashika) for sea lion, which does have external ear flaps.
azarashi
(The Chinese term is the same, except for the pronunciation, of course.)
Tuirns out it’s just ‘leopard sea leopard’:
Japanese
Etymology
From 豹 (hyō, “leopard”) + 海豹 (azarashi, “earless seal”). 海豹 (literally “sea leopard”) is jukujikun (熟字訓).
Noun
豹海豹ひょうあざらし • (hyōazarashi)
1. a leopard seal
豹海豹
Well, at least it’s a leopard. Meanwhile, the shika in ashika means ‘deer’, and ashika is a contraction of ashishika ‘reed deer’.
@Y:
That one can be translated quite literally: also in English are manatees known as sea cows.
Ah, thanks. I didn’t look too closely at their description. Likewise there are also mentions of bueyes marinos.
sea cows
In Russian that would probably be understood as referring to Steller’s sea cows in particular.
(Larger, far less aggressive, and apparently significantly tastier than land cows, they were swiftly hunted to extinction whenever encountered by humans, the last remnants of their once extensive range disappearing in the mid-18th century.)
@January First-of-May: Really? Steller’s description of the species and the concomitant naming (which presumed the prior existence of the name sea cow for manatee and dugongs; the first OED cite for sea-cow in English is from 1613) was in 1741, and the species went extinct in the 1760s. So there were only a few decades in which sea cow could refer to the living Steller’s sea cow.
The population of Stellar’s sea cow was already in a precipitous decline when it was “discovered” by Europeans. By 1741, they were only found around the Commander Islands, but the species had previously ranged all along the coastal areas of the Bering Sea and Strait and occasionally as far south as California and Japan. The causes of the decline are not really known. Direct overhunting by indigenous peoples may have been involved, as well as knock-on effects of overexploitation of other species (perhaps sea otters, which are the main predator for sea urchins, which, in turn, competed with the Steller’s sea cows for kelp), or just natural climatic changes. The population was probably never especially large to begin with, making it particularly vulnerable to small changes is circumstance.
sea cows
Also
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vaquita
bueyes marinos.
Borrowed, probably from late Latin, into Algerian Arabic as bu-mnir بومنير. Not that there’s much occasion to use it any more – seals are practically extinct along the Algerian coast, and hardly doing much better in the rest of the Mediterranean.
Wiktionary has the failing that it takes the written form, more specifically the kanji orthography, as the headword, which results in tortuous explanations.
For azarashi taking あざらし as the basic form would be more sensible. The Japanese and Chinese should not really even be at the same entry.
Thus:
Japanese (redirected from 海豹)
あざらし
Etymology 1
A compound of Old Japanese elements 痣 (aza, “bruise”) + 等 (ra, “lots of”, a pluralizer) + 獣 (shi, “beast”, especially one used for meat). The bruise meaning was in reference to the spotted coat.
Written in kanji as 海豹 “sea leopard”, from Chinese, a practice known as jukujikun (熟字訓). アザラシ in scientific contexts.
Pronunciation
(Tokyo) あざらし [àzáꜜràshì] (Nakadaka – [2])[1][2][3]
IPA(key): [a̠za̠ɾa̠ɕi]
Noun
あざらし • (azarashi)
‘a seal, specifically the earless seal or true seal’
Note the distinction between 海豹 (azarashi) for seal, which has no external ear flaps, and 海驢 (ashika) for sea lion, which does have external ear flaps.
……………………………..
Chinese
Mandarin
(Pinyin): hǎibào
(Zhuyin): ㄏㄞˇ ㄅㄠˋ
Cantonese (Jyutping): hoi2 paau3
Min Nan (POJ): hái-pà
Wu (Wiktionary): he pau (T2)
Noun
海豹
literally ‘sea leopard’
‘earless seal’ (Classifier: 隻／只 m)
_________________________
The only thing that unites the two is that Japanese has decided to write the word azarashi as 海豹, taking the Chinese word as the graphic form, even though it has no etymological connection with azarashi.
For ‘sea lion’, the two entries would be:
Japanese
あしか (redirected from 海驢 or 葦鹿)
Etymology 1
Ashika is a contraction of ashishika ‘reed deer’. Originally referred specifically to the Japanese sea lion, now used for all members of the Otariinae.
Written in kanji as 海驢 ‘sea donkey’ [from Chinese, a practice known as jukujikun (熟字訓)??] or 葦鹿 ‘reed deer’. アシカ in scientific contexts.
‘sea lion’
……………………………………..
Chinese
海獅 / 海狮
Mandarin
(Pinyin): hǎishī
(Zhuyin): ㄏㄞˇ ㄕ
Cantonese (Jyutping): hoi2 si1
Noun
海獅 (literally ‘sea lion’)
‘sea lion’ (member of the Otariidae family)
______________________________
For ‘leopard seal’
Japanese
ひょうあざらし (redirect from 豹海豹)
‘leopard+seal’
In kanji written 豹海豹 (豹 hyō ‘leopard’ + 海豹 azarashi ‘seal’); ヒョウアザラシ in scientific contexts.
‘a leopard seal’
…………………………….
Chinese
豹海豹
literally ‘leopard sea-leopard’
Mandarin
(Pinyin): bào hǎibào
(Zhuyin): ㄅㄠˋ ㄏㄞˇ ㄅㄠˋ
Cantonese (Jyutping): paau3 hoi2 paau3
Min Nan (POJ): pà hái-pà
Wu (Wiktionary): pau he pau (T2)
‘leopard seal’
The above still has a few loose ends but illustrates how a system based on pronunciation could be implemented. This is not as outlandish as it looks. It’s the method basically used in 国語辞典 (Japanese-Japanese dictionaries). Wikipedia articles for the seal and the sea lion are at アザラシ and アシカ respectively, not using a kanji headword.
A line “The Bue Marino cave take its name from the Sardinian name of the rare Foca Monaca (the monk seal), it is 3 km north from the beach of Cala Luna.” from Google made me curious and I looked up Foca Monaca in it.wiki.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monachus_monachus mentions a colony near the Grotta del Bue marino and also has Nomi dialettali italiani: Bove marino (Toscana ed Elba), tigre marina e vecchio marino (Elba), boe marinu (Capraia), voje marino (Ponza), boe marinu e vriccu marinu (Sardegna), mammarinu e mammarina (Sicilia).
Someone who claimed to know what he was talking about said that when kanji are used, the Japanese writing system is so ambiguous that even a well-educated Japanese can never be completely confident that he’s pronouncing things right when reading something aloud.
Ah, but that also means that nobody else can be confident that you’ve got it wrong. You just need to brazen it out: nobody is in a position to call you on it.
You just need to brazen it out: nobody is in a position to call you on it.
Er, no. Japanese has inherited the nitpicky literate tradition of the Chinese. If you get it wrong you are revealed as an illiterate.
That is unless, of course, you can out-nitpick the nitpicker by being even more erudite than they are.
John E.: The orca seems to be the apex predator of the sea, and it strikes me as excessively polite to call them “orcas” now, rather than “killer whales”.
Norw. spekkhogger lit. “blubber hewer”; also (and likely older) staurhval lit. “pole (as in big stick) whale”, presumably named for the long and upright dorsal fin. The Icelandic name háhyrningur means “high-horner” — or perhaps “shark-horner”, if it’s the other há.
I’ve been wondering about the pair staurhval and grindhval “pilot whale”, lit. “wicket whale”, The long pectoral fins of the latter may have been likened to the horizontal beams of a fence and the dorsal fin of the former to the fence post, but the image of a fence doesn’t make much sense. I’d rather think that staur and grind had the extended senses of “vertical member” and “horizontal member” before they were applied to the whales – but if so, there’s no trace of it elsewhere.
grindhval
Whence, ultimately, the Russian гринда:
Слово «гринда» происходит из фарерского языка.
Faroese is a very exact origin. Do we know when the word entered Russian?
It strikes me now that in the old practice of grindadráp, pilot whales are surrounded by boats and hunted onto the beach. The formation of boats could well be described as a grind, the species of whale hunted by grind as grindhval (Faroese grindahvalur), and simple grind for the whale would be a back-formation.
Trond Engen, thank you for that comment on the grindadráp and гринда! Very interesting!
I just had to share this passage containing an early attestation (the earliest given in the OED) of sea wolf in a meaning like “seal, elephant seal, sea lion”, from The Complaynt of Scotland (1549):
<volue>? That’s peculiar. Did they mix their v’s and u’s and w’s willy-nilly? I can’t find a scan of the original edition.
It occurs in the texts I can find online as volfe, volue, and plural voluis.
I’m intrigued by the distribution of seemingly 3p singular presents.
How widespread were qu- forms in Scottish at the time?
@Xerîb: I was looking for a first Spanish citation to match, and it seems to be earlier:
That would probably be the Caribbean monk seal (Neomonachus tropicalis), hunted to extinction since.
the selcht quhilk sum men callis the see volue
I’m not too sure what the -t is doing in selch, the regular descendant of OE seolh and cognate of seal. Its diminutive selkie is usual in Northern and Insular Scots and gives us selkie folk ‘people who can transform themselves into seals’, clipped in English to selkie.
The prefix quh- in the older Scots tongue was a way of writing /xw/, cognate with English /hw/. In both languages it is generally pronounced /ʍ/ or /w/ today, so modern Scots writes whilk.
Sum men callis is an instance of the Northern Subject rule, whereby the 3PL.PRES is expressed using 3SG.PRES forms except when the verb is directly adjacent to its subject pronoun they/thay in the traditional varieties of the North of England and in Scots, thus:
Is the cows white?
The cows is white.
Are/*Is they white?
They are/*is white.
This is one of those odd almost-parallels with Welsh[*] that can’t be substratal, because it doesn’t show up until the 15C (note: VSO because Insular Celtic):
Maen nhw yn bwyta ‘r caws, lit. ‘Are they PRES eat [inf.] the cheese.’
Mae Sioned a Ryan yn bwyta ‘r caws, lit. ‘Is Sioned and Ryan PRES eat [inf.] the cheese.’
[*] Another one is the be … -ing verbal construction in English, quasi-paralleled by be … [inf.] in Welsh, and also appearing in this example.
John C.: I’m not too sure what the -t is doing in selch, the regular descendant of OE seolh and cognate of seal.
Now I would like to know too.
The prefix quh- in the older Scots tongue was a way of writing /xw/, cognate with English /hw/. In both languages it is generally pronounced /ʍ/ or /w/ today, so modern Scots writes whilk.
I know, in a general way, but was it universal in Scots or may something be learned from the distribution in time and place? It’s interesting because apart from dialects of Scots the “hard” k(v)- is a feature of Western Norwegian
the Northern Subject rule
Ah, thanks. I forgot about that.
The prefix quh- in the older Scots tongue was a way of writing /xw/
Not just as a prefix:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colquhoun
This is one of those odd almost-parallels with Welsh[*] that can’t be substratal
The sg verb preceding a non-pronoun plural subject is seen in Classical Arabic, and quite often in Biblical Hebrew. I suspect it’s something to do with VSO word order.
Verbs following a plural subject in older Welsh vary a bit but are usually plural (this is the “Abnormal Order”, so called, to confuse the English, because it was the normal order in Middle Welsh, and still is even in the 1588 Bible.) This is the rule for Classical Arabic (more or less) too.
I know, in a general way, but was it universal in Scots or may something be learned from the distribution in time and place?
OE seems to have had it universally, because hw as in hweolc was [xw], and the same for hnutu ‘nut’, hlāf ‘bread’ (cognate to loaf), and hring ‘ring’. (Plain h was probably [ç] after front vowels and [x] otherwise, but note that sporadic /x/ > /f/ only applies to [x], never [ç].) So the betting is that /xw/ was a survival in Scots.
Looking at selcht again, I now suspect it is hypercorrection. The cluster /-kt/ is pronounced /k/, like a number of other final clusters: ModSc act is [ak] (ModE [ækt]), so perhaps [sɛlx] was written selcht.
Specifically, the one Scotsman I’ve heard distinguish wh from w and that I paid enough attention to, Steven Moffat on YouTube somewhere, uses [ʍ]. I haven’t encountered that sound anywhere else; the scattered Americans I’ve heard distinguish wh from w, most prominently Elisabeth Warren but also people from Maryland and Alabama, all use [hʷ].
Then there are Scots dialects that use [f] today, in a merger with /f/ instead of with /w/. (I just happen not to have heard such a dialect myself.)
It did alliterate with h, whether followed by a vowel or another consonant. I suspect it was actually [hw] or [hʷ].
But of course it must have been [xw] or [xʷ] at some point, at least before the general shift from initial [x] to [h] across early Germanic.
I’m not the only one to wonder if that was a special feature of the written register, perhaps calqued on Latin, or perhaps a generalized use of emphasis (because if you take the trouble of writing something down, it must be important, right?)…
Speaking of medieval written registers, a few days ago I got to see a document from 1287 concerning the Upper Austrian city of Steyr and written thereabouts. Remarkably, it’s not in Latin, but in… it’s Middle High German, but Not As We Know It. The New High German diphthongization seems complete; even what is -lich today, with a shortened vowel, is consistently spelled -leich. Modern Gnaden is spelled with a t, indicating that the Central Bavarian lenition had already happened medially. When that /d/ ends up word-finally, it’s spelled d, indicating that final fortition had either been undone (by Central Bavarian lenition) or had never reached that far southeast. There’s an -ig word spelled with -ich; that’s either a graphic form imported wholesale from much farther northwest, or maybe the area was settled by Franks instead of Bavarians (as has happened with parts of Vienna). Pfennig, on the other hand, is consistently spelled not only with -ig, but also with ph; maybe the whole spelling was conserved from Quite Old High German somehow…
The OHG period is supposed to last till 1150, MHG from 1150 to 1350; both of these dates lie in periods when most writing was done in Latin, causing partial breaks in the writing tradition of German.
I’m not the only one to wonder if that was a special feature of the written register
It can’t be that, because it’s found in Breton and Cornish too (neither of which, unlike Welsh, subsequently reverted to VSO as the default.) It’s also abundantly clear that in the so-called Abnormal Order the subject is not emphasised or focused. Again, though Welsh can and very often does front pretty much any constituent for emphasis etc (including verbs, in periphrastic constructions!), in negative sentences the constructions for subject emphasis (the so-called “Mixed Order”) are formally distinct from the Abnormal Order.
Moreover, the style of Middle Welsh prose is not always particularly hifalutin; the Four Branches, for example, are in a style whose simplicity and use of natural dialogue to advance the plot can easily make you miss the author’s considerable narrative skill. It’s not Proust or Henry James …
If Middle Welsh authors calqued their style on Latin, I have to say that they did an extraordinarily poor job of it. It’s about as plausible as saying that Shakespeare calqued his style on Latin, really.
The use of the “Abnormal Order” as the default in the 1588 Bible probably was already an archaism, though.
[ʍ] … [hʷ]
Maddieson and Ladefoged deny that any doubly-articulated frikhathives or awwoxiwants actually exist (and so much for you, [ɧ]!) and that the so-called labial-velar consonants are actually labialized velar, which would make the above a distinction without a difference.
Per contra, Wikipedia on /[w]/ claims that Japanese /w/ is in fact not merely labialized but actually labial, as it is spoken with compressed lips just like Japanese /u/ (in phonetic fact [ɯ]), but that sounds to me like it is exolabialized[*] rather than the usual endolabialized[*], which can be written as [ɯ̯ᵝ] using the non-IPA diacritic small beta, U+1D5D.
[*] These names sound wrong to me. Exo- is ‘outward’ and endo- is inward, but it is the endolabials that are spoken with the lips turned outward.
On the topic of the variation seen in selch~selcht, from The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (1997), Charles Jones, ed., p. 42f:
And further on p.101
Note also the following from Molineaux et al. (2020) Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots, p. 3f.:
Great find!
I resign to general confusion about Middle Welsh.
They’re wrong, then. 😐 I can’t guarantee that “[hʷ]” is the best possible transcription, but it simply doesn’t sound the same as Moffat’s glottal-free approximant [ʍ].
For labiovelar plosives ([k͡p g͡b]) and approximants ([ʍ w]), any decision whether they’re labialized velars or velarized labials has to be a matter of theory. In articulation and acoustics, the two articulations are simply equal.
“Official IPA charts do attempt to define [ɧ] as a specific sound, the coarticulated fricative [ʃ͡x]. And yes, that is one possible realization of /ɧ/. Which would be wild enough on its own already, but nope: that is just the beginning.”
I’m not sure what you mean. Exolabials are articulated with externally visible lip-rounding. No rounding is visible in the endolabials; the rounding is moved inside, outsourced to the tongue or something.
The extreme of exolabial rounding is the good old English [w]: very strong rounding that makes the lips protrude.
To some extent that could actually have been real. “Excrescent consonants” that “reinforce” the ends of phonological words were introduced in appreciable numbers at some point between Middle and Early New High German: Saft “sap, juice”, Axt “ax”, and the extremely wide but extremely irregular spread of -s- in compound nouns. The difference to Scots is that they’re still there; there was no competing trend of cluster simplification. (…other than the Kölsch metathesis of -[st] to -[t͡s] and no doubt a dozen others.)
[k͡p g͡b] are certainly not labialised velars; the sounds are quite distinct (although close enough that Kusaal, for example, substitutes its labiovelar stops for Hausa labialised velars in loanwords, e.g. bakpae “week”, from Hausa bakwai “seven.”)
I wondered why M & L excommunicated labiovelar fricatives too, and thought it might be to do with them not involving double closures, unlike [k͡p g͡b].
“Excrescent consonants” that “reinforce” the ends of phonological words were introduced in appreciable numbers at some point between Middle and Early New High German:
That does still happen. I know quite a few people (mostly Northern German) who add a /t/ to eben “exactly”; it’s sometimes jokingly written “ebendt”. (Checking on this it turns out that this by-form is attested since the 17th century; it’s non-standard today.)
ebendt
I’ve heard that often over the years, but I don’t know where or from whom. Although most of my gallivanting has been work-related in the south, I definitely didn’t hear it there. Which leaves the north, where I’ve rarely been. Hmmm.
Maybe it’s become one of those Mildly Amusing Things Anyone Can Say, like ich habe fertig or (an old favorite of mine) hier werden Sie geholfen.
Excrescent t perhaps showing up in Dumfries in 1949 in kauch:
Although the t would be original if kauch is from Scottish Gaelic cathachd, as suggested in the etymology…
Scottish Gaelic cathachd
Ah! the universal root *kat surfaces yet again …