Summary: whales and dolphins vs. pigs and lambs

[Alexander Vovin]

Dear all,

       Many thanks for everyone who responded to my query about
pigs/lambs vs. whales/dolphins (in chronological order): Peter Hook,
Chris Cleirigh, Roger Lass, John Charles Smith, Shigeru Tsuchida,
Paolo Ramat, Ivan Iguartua, Christian Kay, Frank Seifert, Mair Parry,
and Vit Bubenik.
      If I may offer a summary,  It looks like that whales, dolphins,
dugongs, porpoises etc. can be named 'pig of the sea', 'water pig,
'pig fish'. 'sea-ox' and sea animal' also do occur, although much more
rare. However, it seems that there are no direct semantic shifts like
'pig'  > 'dolphin', or what is even more important to me 'lamb'  >
'dolphin.'
       For those, who might be interested, the original query was
triggered by the following problem: after my recent talk at the Kyoto
University, where I suggested that Proto-Ryukyuan *peto 'dolphin'
(with seemingly no apparent attestations on the Japanese side of the
Japonic family and as far as I am aware without any possible external
parallels in surrounding language families) should be probably treated
as Proto-Japonic word for 'dolphin' since Old Japanese (OJ) (etc.)
iruka 'dolphin' is rather transparent loan from Ainu, my friend Bjarke
Frellesvig suggested the possibility that *peto might be connected to
OJ pi1tuzi 'lamb' (Modern Japanese hitsuji). Phonetically and
morphologically it is plausible, because Proto-Japonic *e and *o
raised to OJ i and u respectively in most cases, and because there are
dialect data (Yaeyama phitsI, pitsi 'lamb') indicating that -zi is a
suffix. However, semantics seemed somewhat suspicious (although 'pig
of the sea' lurked in my mind), and this basically was confirmed by
responses that included no references to lambs. There is an additional
problem: Yaeyama forms indicate Proto-Ryukyuan *petu 'lamb', not
*peto. So, the etymology is probably still possible, but,
unfortunately for the possibility to strengthen the status of
Proto-Ryukyuan *peto 'dolphin' at the Proto-Japonic level, it is not
strong at all.
     Thank you all again,

Best wishes,

Sasha


============
Alexander Vovin
Visiting Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto &
Professor of East Asian Languages
University of Hawaii at Manoa


On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Alexander Vovin <sashavovin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
>         Does anyone know about any possible semantic shifts between
>  'doplhin' (or 'whale') to 'lamb' (or 'pig') or vice versa? A friend
>  told me that he vaguely remembers that some language calls whales
>  'pigs of the sea', but he could not recollect which one.
>         I will be grateful for any information. Thank you,
>
>  Best wishes,
>
>  Sasha
>
>  --
>  ============
>  Alexander Vovin
>  Visiting Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto &
>  Professor of East Asian Languages
>  University of Hawaii at Manoa
>



--
_______________________________________________
Histling-l mailing list
Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l