| Title: | How Mendele Mokher Sfarim got it wrong: Abramowitsch’s 1866 phono-semantic matching of zoonyms, & why he named the Auks (Alcidae) the way he did |
| Authors: | Ephraim Nissan, Ghil‘ad Zuckermann |
| Publication: | Numele și numirea. Actele Conferinței Internaționale de Onomastică. Ediția a II-a: Onomastica din spațiul public actual, p. 867 |
| ISBN: | 978-606-543-343-4 |
| Editors: | Oliviu Felecan |
| Publisher: | Editura Mega, Editura Argonaut |
| Place: | Cluj-Napoca |
| Year: | 2013 |
| Abstract: | [How Mendele Mokher Sfarim got it wrong: Abramowitsch’s 1866 phono-semantic matching of zoonyms, & why he named the Auks (Alcidae) the way he did] A future famous novelist, in his Natural History Abramowitsch was the main moderniser of Hebrew zoonymy in the 19th century. We are concerned with his bird names from his volume on birds (1866), and in particular, with how he named the Auks (Alciformes) from the northern Atlantic. In a sense, we solve a mystery: it was the extinct Great Auk that was named (rather than e.g. the Razorbill) by phono-semantic matching to a hapax from the Hebrew Bible, alqum by interpreting that term as ‘no rising up’. This is because the Great Auk could not fly, and even more to the point, on the evidence of Abramowitsch relating about the named bird’s then apparent extinction, because that bird would never rise again. We also discuss how Abramowitsch named the Antarctic penguin, considering that originally, in European languages, the lexical type penguin used to be applied to a flightless alciform species that became extinct. |
| Key words: | motivation of bird names (for ‘Great Auk’ and ‘razorbill’), language modernisation, Modern Hebrew, biblical hapax, Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch (Mendele Mokher Sfarim) |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 1
| 0 | Adrian Koopman | Call me Brigadier Sir Nils Olav: Properhood in bird names and the naming of military mascots | Onoma, 52, 67-86 | 2017 | pdf html |
References in this publication: 0
The citations/references list is based on indexed publications only, and may therefore be incomplete.
For any and all inquiries related to the database, please contact us at [Please enable javascript to view.].
Preview:
