Apr. 5th, 2007 05:14 pm
Pépé le puant
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muckefuckI don't know why I'm so fascinated by animal names in other languages. I suppose it has something to do with their abundance of salient characteristics. It's always interesting to see which ones a particular culture will seize upon when it comes time to find a name to call them by. It often tells you something about how the culture views (or once viewed that creature) and their interactions with it. In a similar way, the etymology of the names can tell you some interesting things about the history of cultural relations.
That's because there are two basic strategies for naming a new species that one comes across: Deriving a name from existing elements and borrowing one from a culture which has already given it one. We see both strategies applied to New World fauna in English: Chipmunks, opossums, raccoons, skunks, woodchucks, and other creatures bear altered American Indian (generally Algonkian) names.
On the other hand, a muskrat is a kind of rat that produces musk, a white-tailed deer is a kind of deer with a white tail, a bobcat is a cat with a bobtail, and a prairie dog lives on the prairie and looks sorta like a dog. And some animals come in for both treatments, like the puma (a Quechua word) or cougar (Guarani), a.k.a. mountain lion, panther, or catamount and the wapiti or elk. (Confusingly, "elk" is used in Europe for moose and I've never quite understood how we came to call them by an Abenaki word and reassign "elk" to a species of deer.)
Of course, the same strategies are found in other languages. As I remarked to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
innerdoggie in a comment to this entry, Basque mofeta wears its foreign origins like sports jersey at a folk dance festival. They obviously got this word from the Spanish, but where did they find it? The -eta ending screams "Catalan" to me, so I checked the GDLC and found that they favour an Italian origin. The etymon is mofetta, which exists in English as a vulcanologist's term for discharges of pestilent vapour associated with volcanic activity.
This word also turns up in France in the fully Frenchified form moufette, but the Cajuns went their own way with bête puante, lit. "stinking beast". They weren't the only colonials to do so. Spanish speakers seem either to have highlighted its vulpine qualities (Argentine zorrino and Uruguayan/Central American zorrillo are both diminutives of zorro "fox") or taken the route of least resistance and called it by the same names as the natives, such as mapurite (from some Carib language), añás (from Quechua), or chingue--a Chilean name which looks pretty racy to my Chicano-conditioned ears. The Brazilians follow suit with their cangambá.
You wonder if the Dutch and Germans, with their stinkdieren bzw. Stinktiere ("stinkbeasts") have somehow been talking to the Cajuns, but they also have room for good-ol' Algonkian skunk. It seems likely they influenced the Finns and their haisunäätä ("stink marten") unless the the poor bugger's stinkiness is simply so inspiring as to make such coinages irresistable.
That's because there are two basic strategies for naming a new species that one comes across: Deriving a name from existing elements and borrowing one from a culture which has already given it one. We see both strategies applied to New World fauna in English: Chipmunks, opossums, raccoons, skunks, woodchucks, and other creatures bear altered American Indian (generally Algonkian) names.
On the other hand, a muskrat is a kind of rat that produces musk, a white-tailed deer is a kind of deer with a white tail, a bobcat is a cat with a bobtail, and a prairie dog lives on the prairie and looks sorta like a dog. And some animals come in for both treatments, like the puma (a Quechua word) or cougar (Guarani), a.k.a. mountain lion, panther, or catamount and the wapiti or elk. (Confusingly, "elk" is used in Europe for moose and I've never quite understood how we came to call them by an Abenaki word and reassign "elk" to a species of deer.)
Of course, the same strategies are found in other languages. As I remarked to
innerdoggie in a comment to this entry, Basque mofeta wears its foreign origins like sports jersey at a folk dance festival. They obviously got this word from the Spanish, but where did they find it? The -eta ending screams "Catalan" to me, so I checked the GDLC and found that they favour an Italian origin. The etymon is mofetta, which exists in English as a vulcanologist's term for discharges of pestilent vapour associated with volcanic activity.This word also turns up in France in the fully Frenchified form moufette, but the Cajuns went their own way with bête puante, lit. "stinking beast". They weren't the only colonials to do so. Spanish speakers seem either to have highlighted its vulpine qualities (Argentine zorrino and Uruguayan/Central American zorrillo are both diminutives of zorro "fox") or taken the route of least resistance and called it by the same names as the natives, such as mapurite (from some Carib language), añás (from Quechua), or chingue--a Chilean name which looks pretty racy to my Chicano-conditioned ears. The Brazilians follow suit with their cangambá.
You wonder if the Dutch and Germans, with their stinkdieren bzw. Stinktiere ("stinkbeasts") have somehow been talking to the Cajuns, but they also have room for good-ol' Algonkian skunk. It seems likely they influenced the Finns and their haisunäätä ("stink marten") unless the the poor bugger's stinkiness is simply so inspiring as to make such coinages irresistable.
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http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouffette
That also adds another term to your list: sconse, said to be from Iroquois.
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I love the way the Wikipedia article repeatedly refers to comic books in the blurb on common usage!
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Mofetta, mo' stinky!