If I ever knew the word tenrec, I’d forgotten it (and it’s never come up at LH); I found it via this MetaFilter post, which links to this 15-second video of a couple of the creatures clambering around and stridulating. They are extraordinarily cute, but of course what leads me to post is the name (which MeFi commenter lalochezia says is “a classic scrabble word designed to fool your opponent into thinking you played a disallowed word”). Merriam-Webster says it’s “French, from Malagasy tàndraka,” which seems straightforward enough, but the OED (entry from 1911) says “French tanrec, < Malagasy tàndraka, dialect form of tràndraka,” which adds a bit of complication. So I looked it up in my Malagasy-Russian dictionary and found:
tàndraka тенре́к (щетинистый ёж [bristly hedgehog] Tenrecidae).
So far, so good, except if it was a dialect form of tràndraka you’d expect it to say so in the entry. So I looked up tràndraka and found:
tràndraka тра́ндрака (растение Centetes setosus).
Which suggests that the two are not variant forms but two different words with different meanings, the first the tenrec proper and the second the greater hedgehog tenrec (note that they give the scientific name of the latter as Centetes setosus, an outdated term — it’s now called Setifer setosus). But what’s hilarious is that they classify the second as a растение ‘plant’!
If WP is to be believed, a Greater Hedgehog Tenrec is a tenrec, but not all tenrecs (by any means) are Greater Hedgehog Tenrecs (many are called, but few are chosen.)
The Malagasys have a hundred words for tenrec.
(Meant poetically.)
Yay! Roger Blench strikes again!
(The man is indefatigable.)
Blench actually gives both tandraka and trandraka as words for “common tendrec”, so they do seem to be synonymous variants.
“Greater Hedgehog Tenrec” is apparently (t)sora, soky or sokina(na).
There is something here, an extract from Jean Poirier and S. Rajaona (1964) Civilisation Malgache, on the etymology of the Malagasy word, on p. 3 of the pdf (p. 302 of Poirier and Rajaona’s book).
(Blust has no discussion of the Malagasy word either at Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian *landak, or at Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *taRutuŋ.)
Blench and Walsh in ‘Faunal names in Malagasy: their etymologies and implications for the prehistory of the East African coast’ have what I think is a reference to discussion of the etymology from *landak Adelaar 1989 (available here) but I couldn’t locate Adelaar’s discussion of this word in his article in a brief search. (I only have my phone with me.) Maybe someone else can find it.
Hébert, Les noms d’animaux en Malgache (here):
For me “the foo proper” would refer to a species named “foo” rather than a genus, family, or higher taxonomic rank comprising all the various foos.
The Malagasys have a hundred words for tenrec.
I enjoyed this bit from the linked article:
For me “the foo proper” would refer to a species named “foo” rather than a genus, family, or higher taxonomic rank comprising all the various foos.
Fair enough.
The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary doesn’t list a Malagasy cognate for *landak ‘porcupine’.
Amusingly, just this morning my younger son told me that he has acquired a family of tenrecs in the zoo simulation game he has been playing, and he wanted my opinion about what kind of enclosure he should build for them.
A tenrec center!
A ’net tenrec rec center?
It appears that tenrecs are related to aardvarks, dugongs and elephants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrotheria
(It’s obvious once it’s been pointed out, really.)
This is almost as discombobulating as the fact that camels come from America.
… or that the horse went westwards from America to Asia (whereupon it went extinct in America) to Europe, westwards to America by human agency, whereupon the indigenous humans (who’d got there eastwards from Asia) learnt how to master them to great effect.
Ah, that’s where I met the word, looking up Afrotheria because sengis. (“Snout dog.” Really?) Seems to me that I had an idea at the time what a tenrec was, but I now see it was totally wrong.
And that’s another wonderful fact, that somebody decided that ‘elephant shrew’ was a good name without knowing they were so closely related to actual elephants. (And to shrews only at the level of Placentalia, or Mammalia if you are that sort. [WP’s taxoboxes are wonderfully inconsistent at the higher levels but I don’t know if that reflects actual disagreements or just laxity in updating]. They are not even in Afrosoricida).
Rhinos come from America, too…
Neither nor. In this case it’s just inconsistency over which artificial ranks to recognize in a taxobox. Placentalia is the smallest clade that contains shrews and elephant shrews; Mammalia further contains the marsupials and, at a great distance, the monotremes. (Plus a whole tree of extinct branches between them.)
sengis. (“Snout dog.” Really?)
Clearly the gi shows the Welsh substrate in Swahili.
Well, at a minimum it’s a disagreement about what clades are important enough to put in the box. I didn’t mean to imply that people agree about the existence of the clades. (When defined like you just did, existence is obviously guaranteed).
(The taxobox at genus Macroscelides even has order Macroscelidea directly under class Mammalia. No truck with clades or infraorders or superclasses, no Sir! Afrotheria, what’s that? Whereas the taxobox at order Macroscelidea admits of four clades between itself and Mammalia. It can be quite confusing to follow a link to a larger clade and find that you can’t get back because the classification in that article does not recognize the clade you came from).
I think my point is that the same clade occurs in many taxoboxes, and it would trigger my sense of order less if they agreed on the higher levels. But imagine the edit wars that could ensue if something like Wikidata was used to ensure that.
When I read “…and implications for the prehistory of the East African coast.” my first thought was: “Blench.”.
I can’t readily name another modern scholar who I can recognize by title…
And that’s another wonderful fact, that somebody decided that ‘elephant shrew’ was a good name without knowing they were so closely related to actual elephants.
Hot take: if elephant shrews are (closely-ish) related to elephants proper but not to shrews proper, they should be renamed to “shrew elephants”.
(I gather that the Russian term is apparently прыгунчики, which can be roughly translated as “the ones who jump a lot”. I wonder how that came about. Shrews proper are землеройки “ground-diggers”.)
The taxobox at genus Macroscelides even has order Macroscelidea directly under class Mammalia. No truck with clades or infraorders or superclasses, no Sir! Afrotheria, what’s that? Whereas the taxobox at order Macroscelidea admits of four clades between itself and Mammalia.
The taxobox at family Tenrecidae (as well as its genera and species, by the looks of it) has Afrosoricida directly under Mammalia, but there’s no inconsistency that blatant going further up – each of the (dozen or so) entries between it and Mammalia, starting with Tenrecomorpha, features its immediate upward clade directly followed by Mammalia. (Though some of the intermediate steps turn out to redirect to the next step.)
This picture does recemble an elephant….
The silhouette does (Exupéry, hat-serpent-elephant). But maybe it was just what the photographer wanted..
or that the horse went westwards from America to Asia
Indeed, this happened four times, but the first three times horses (using this term in a broad sense) became extinct in Eurasia until the next eruption.
Thank you for the video link. I remember them from Stuttgart Zoo.
They jump a lot; that’s what those long hindlimbs are for.
German: Rüsselspringer, “trunk leapers”, accidentally emphasizing the superficial similarity with elephants. Shrews, though, are Spitzmäuse… “pointy mice”.
At least three of the waves, off the top of my head, survived in Eurasia (and the later ones in Africa, too) until long after the next wave had arrived.