Nativised, playfully aetiologised literary zoonyms, I: The squirrel cuckoo. Rich onomasiology, semantic calques, and phono-morphological matching, encapsulated into a stylemically constrained narration

Abstract

Literary use of animal names is, of course, different from how zoologists use them. The discourse of zoological scholarly literature tends to be detached (birdwatchers’ texts instead may be warm and emotional). This article is the first in a trilogy illustrating how zoonyms are nativised in a literary context. We begin by providing data about the Squirrel Cuckoo (Piaya cayana), a bird which in Brazil is called alma-de-gato (‘cat’s soul’) and by many other names. In Nissan’s Liber animalium, a literary bestiary in early rabbinic Hebrew, the entry for the Squirrel Cuckoo playfully explains extant names for this bird, or their newly introduced Hebrew semantic calques, within a fable in which they “make sense”. In the process, fine points are raised of Hebrew verbal derivation and inflection, but it is part of the poetic conventions of the genre that, like in the rabbinic midrashic literature, such quaint étymologisant devices as linguistically spurious segmentation are also used.