One zoonym, two parents: Mendele’s phono-semantic matching of animal terms, and later developments of lexical confluence in modern Hebrew zoonymy

Abstract

In this study, we sift through the Hebrew animal names neologised by Abramowitsch (1866) in his natural history of birds. We identify and discuss a few such coinages of his which exhibit folk-etymological nativisation, by phono-semantic matching. Moreover, we trace occurrences of application of devices of lexical conflation by covert borrowing also in Hebrew zoonyms coined more recently than in Abramowitsch’s Natural History. Studying the latter’s neologised animal names is important because it illustrates a phenomenon (lexical conflation as a way to nativise loanwords) which has occurred in several modernised languages, and because Abramowitsch’s work was at a time when there arose modernisers also for other languages.