Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1971, Page 120

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Faroese Bird Name Origins
for the razorbill will have originally denoted the clamorous
guillemot, and indeed the specimen names from Welsh and
English, qucted above, can equally refer to this bird also —
murre is, in fact, the usual American English term for ‘gui'He-
mot’.
Now, the evidence of the derivative languages mentioned
above indicates that ON alka is a name proper to the razor-
biil, so that its descendant, Orkney Norn ak, aak ‘guillemot’,
is plainly a case of secondary transference. We are therefore
not disposed to regard this term as of onomatopoeic origin
at adl, and further observe that, in any oase, none of the other
names for this bird, or the guillemot, so far noticed, bears
any resemblance to alka or to the theoretical base '/cala-,
(above). If we are to discover the true origin of this name,
we must forget about onomatopoeia.
Since the indications are that ON alka properly denotes
the razorbill, it is to be assumed that the name will refer to
some distinguishing feature, as Eng. razorbill or Icel. drumb-,
klumbunefja ‘club biil’, or Far. nakkalanga ‘long nape’, the
motivation of which was explained in the foregoing section.
At this point we notice the Icelandic expression teygja álkuna
or, more commonly, teygja álkuna fram ‘crane one’s neck’,
known since the seventeenth century. Aceording to Blondal,
álka in this context means ‘chin’ or (of animals) ‘snout’. Other
languages commonly use ‘neck’ in comparable idioms, cf. in
addition to English, Ger. einen langen Hals machen or Dan.
strcekke hals. That this was once the case in Icelandic, too,
making ‘chin; snout’ derived senses, is strikingly exemplified
in a verse by Stefán Ólafsson (d. 1685) to which Jakob Bene-
diktsson has obligingly referred us; two girls are described:
Hálsstutt við axlir hófuð ber, / hin teygir álku langa (Kvæði,
ii, 30, Copenhagen, 1836).
Icelanders feel that álka in the idiom in question must
somehow be a figurative use of the bird name — so Jóhannes-
son, Isl. etym. Wb. — but the truth is evidently the opposite,
for the dual meaning ‘neck; razorbill’ cogently recalls the