"ou" in "kinkajou"

[Larry Trask]

--On Friday, June 15, 2001 11:25 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on the spelling of /u/ as <ou>]

>         And in kinkajou, judging by the pronunciation.  First named in
> French Guyana?   Passed into English in British Guyana?   (There were once
> such entitities, no?   My knowledge of colonial history is failing me.)

The OED has an interesting tale to tell about this word.  It derives from
an Algonquian name for the wolverine, and it passed into French both as
<carcajou> and as <quincajou> 'wolverine'.  But the French naturalist
Buffon, in writing up his natural history of the Americas, screwed up
big-time and mistakenly transferred the second version to a wholly
different animal.  In English, we then took over both French words,
applying the first to the wolverine but the second to the other animal
mistakenly singled out by Buffon.

It occurs to me that we do not have an accepted label for semantic shift
resulting from an outright blunder.  Are there any classicists out there
who can provide a suitably dignified Greek term meaning 'change by cock-up'
or something of the sort?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
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