Nativised, playfully aetiologised literary zoonyms, III: Abdim’s Stork. Substituted eponym, dense cultural rewiring, ethics

Abstract

Arguably, a literary conduit can do for the cultural acceptabily of terminological items what the ordinary criteria of institutional language planning could not, when introducing new terminology for referential use. This article is the third in a trilogy illustrating how zoonyms are nativised in a literary context. The original semantic motivation of the international lexical type Abdim’s stork (Ciconia abdimii) was to honour ‘Abdīn Bey, an Albanian-born Egyptian administrator in northern Sudan in the 1820s. He is the one after whom Cairo’s Abdeen Palace was also named. In Nissan’s Liber animalium, a literary bestiary in early rabbinic Hebrew, the entry for Abdim’s stork shapes connotated names for this bird within a morality tale in which they are semantically remotivated after Abdimi of Sepphoris (‘Bird-[city]’), a prominent Roman-age Talmudic sage.