Mind your language
VERONICA had picked up something at school — a prejudice against zoos. `It's so cruel to the animals,' she said.
This looked like putting something of a damper on the half-term excursion to Regent's Park. So I told her what sacri- fices Berthold Lubetkin had made in adapting his penguin pool to make the birds more comfortable. 'Penguins are the test,' I said encouragingly. So we decided to go and see them.
In the even more cruel world of philology, the penguin is the test too. Its name caused James Murray anxious hours when he was writing the Oxford English Dictionary. The word appears in the 1,600-page '0 to P' volume that was published in 1909. Murray was working with handwritten slips of quotations col- lected by one of his volunteer workers 20 years before, but his conclusions on the etymology of penguin were sound enough not to need revision for the sec- ond edition of the dictionary with all its computerised resources.
Penguin is not, he found, from the Latin pinguis, meaning 'fat', nor does it come from 'pin-wing'. It is first found in 16th-century accounts of a voyage to Cape Breton in ,Newfo'cindland. The earliest references" seem to be to the great auk; within a few years it was used as a name for the Spheniscidae of the southern hemisphere for whom Lubetkin was to build 350 years later.
But why penguin? The early citations make reference to Welsh teamen calling them by this name. Aha! Welsh pen, `head', and gwyn, 'white'? But great auks do not have white heads. Or perhaps penguins were named by Breton sea- men, who speak a similar language. Murray eventually opted for 'origin obscure'.
W.W. Skeat, who managed to get his thousand-page Oxford Etymological Dic- tionary out by 1882, agrees about the obscurity. His final word is that penguin might after all perhaps come from a South American language.
Next month the Oxford University Press publishes its revised paperback Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. 'Origin unknown', it says bluntly of penguin. So much for progress.
The penguins in the zoo seemed happy enough. 'But how can you tell what they're feeling?' asked Veronica.
Dot Wordsworth
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