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From: mk100485@oak.cats.ohiou.edu (Marwan Michel Kraidy)
Subject: Re: Animal names?
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>    Reply to: Jorma Kyppo
>
>                                 ANIMAL NAMES?
>
>  >   Reply to newsgroup(s)
>Where do come the national names for such animals that don't
>exist in the area where the language is spoken?
>
>For example "lion" is international word, almost same in every
>language, that I know (in Finnish "leijona").
>

maybe not international, but in the Indo-European linguistic family, yes...In
Semitic languages, for example, it is a completley different terminology.


>It is also easy to understand why hippopotamus is "virtahepo" in
>Finnish (for example), because it means "stream-horse" (which is
>naturally a biological fault as it should be stream-pig).

That's interesting. In Arabic, the literal translation of the designation for a
hippopotamus would be "stream-Lion" or "water-Lion"

>
>But where do come such name like "norsu", which means elephant?
>There are no elephants in Finland and the word don't seem to
>have connection with anything (if not "norja suu", meaning lithe mouth
>and sounding crazy, indeed).
>About the other languages I know, that in Slovak they use the word
>"slon", that also means nothing.

Marwan Michel Kraidy
mk100485@oak.cats.ohiou.edu

>
>Jorma Kyppo
>Laukaa, Finland
>jorma@jytko.jyu.fi
--
__________________________________________________________________________
Marwan Michel Kraidy                                Phone [H] 614/592-1383
International Communications and Cultural Studies   Phone [O] 614/593-4874
School of Telecommunications                        Fax   [O] 614/593-9184
