![]() But what is more interesting is the word songe, indeed dream in French (cf “Le songe d’une nuit d’été”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Ian Parker could have known that une mare, even if it somehow looks and sounds like une mer, isn’t really a sea, but a pond. Which allowed me to spot another “linguistically significant bit” in the 17th paragraph, about the name of the swamp where the dodo bones were found: “The area was known as the Mare aux Songes, which is sometimes translated, wistfully, as the Sea of Dreams but is more likely named for the starchy tropical root known in Mauritian French as songe.” I just finished “Digging for Dodos,” by Ian Parker (not online) * Noticea will notice that the verb “to be” does exist in Reunionese creole So if the M-W desperately wants to have something to replace its ibis at 1.b…. The only dodo that ever existed in Reunion is still alive and kicking - la Dodo lé* la ! -, since it is the nickname given to the most popular beer on the island. (David Marjanović would probably have more to say about all this.) But, as it turned out, it was a type of ibis instead, the error coming more from linguistic confusion than from zoological misconceptions: as it was a lonely animal like its counterpart living on Rodrigues/z, they both ended up sharing the same name, thus making people believe they were from the same group - it would somehow be like putting Siberian and Tasmanian tigers in the same family just because the are both called ‘tigers’. It’s true that in the past this large solitary bird was thought to be part of the didines group, and therefore related to the Mauritian dodo and the Rodriguan (-guese?) solitaire. b : an extinct flightless bird (Raphus solitarius) of the island of Réunion similar to and closely related to the dodo”. ![]() ![]() ![]() Here’s what they say at the dodo entry you linked to: How can “serious people” write that, though? Don’t they think twice before printing such nonsense in such a book?Įven if it is not as bad, dodo-wise (if you will allow me to use this construction here) the Merriam-Webster seems to have gone a bit cuckoo too. So, dodaars means, in effect, “fluffy rear end”, not fat-ass.Ĭ’est marrant - Cimarrón as well? Gone astray… It adds, “in the working of flax, ‘dotten’ are the rougher parts that are left over after the threshing of the ‘lokken'” (the locks, or softest portions). The WNT says lisdodde (formerly lischdodde), derives from lis, formerly lisch, name for the wild iris (as in ‘fleurs de lis’, and dodde, deriving from the stem “dot”, referring to a small fibrous mass, like a clump of hair. Their cigar-shaped seed heads eventually open up and release large fluffy seeds. More importantly, every other etymology I’ve seen for dodo (for example, Merriam-Webster’s) derives it from Portuguese doudo ‘silly, stupid.’ My default assumption here is that the author listened to somebody who didn’t know what he was talking about (presumably one of the Dutch scientists he traveled around with) and that the magazine, as sadly often these days, fell down on fact-checking, but if anyone knows differently, please speak up.Ī Dutch birding site ( ) says (of the Little Grebe]: “De naam Dodaars heeft te maken met de gelijkenis van het stuitje met een uitgebloeide Lisdodde – de rietsigaren langs de waterkant.” Which means: the name dodaars has to do with the similarity of the tailfeathers with the Lisdodde when it has finished blooming - the ‘reed cigars’ along the water’s edge.” Lisdodde/reed cigars are cattails in English (typha latifolia and other species of typha). In the first place, dood does not mean ‘fat’ in Dutch, it means ‘dead’ or ‘death’ (‘fat’ is dik or vet). In English, “dodo” was in use by the sixteen-twenties, perhaps through a simple process of linguistic evolution but Hume likes the idea that the coinage was inspired, or at least reinforced, by the bird’s call. ![]() On later visits, the Dutch came to refer to the birds as dodaersen-fat-asses. It’s fairly interesting (though presumably more so if you care more than I do about dodos), but the linguistically significant bit was this, from p. 22 New Yorker, and I just finished “Digging for Dodos,” by Ian Parker (not online). I’m still working my way through the Jan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |