Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1971, Side 122

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Faroese Bird Name Origins
call’, and this must be the literal meaning of the bird name,
‘swan’ being then properly ‘(swan-)song’. There is a striking
parallei in ON lómr ‘red-throated diver’ lit. ‘moan’, both
senses being attested in Mod. Icel. lómur. Seeing that a-stems
denoting animate objects are rather scarce in Germanic, and
mainly restricted to words of known Indo-European ancestry,
as ON fiskr ‘fish’, ulfr ‘wolf’ (Lat. piscis, vulpes), we suggest
that other onomatopoeic bird names in this class are likely
better interpreted as words properly denoting the call rather
than the bird. We notice (CGmc.) ON hrókr ‘crow’ and the
raven names ON korpr, Far. gorpur, krunkur, which then
mean literally ‘croak’ rather than ‘croaker’. By the same token,
(CGmc.) ON gaukr ‘cuckoo’ may originally have denoted the
call. The same prinoiple could apply to ON skarfr, an
imitative term which must originally have been used both of
the shag and the cormorant, since in addition to their general
similarity, their calls may be described as virtually identical.
On ON skúfr, ‘great skua’, see previous section.
At all events, the above mentioned bird names are seen to
belong to an archaic type and, as such, to contrast with the
agent names, as (CGmc.) ON hani ‘cock’ lit. ‘crower’ (Lat.
cano ‘ising, crow’), which have attracted a number of echoic
formations, for example ON kjói ‘arctic skua’, spói ‘curlew,
whimbreP, peisti ‘blaok guillemot’.
Blikur ‘eider drake’
The eider drake is known in Faroese as æóublikur, cf. Norw.
dial. eblik, Swed. dial. drbleg, further Icel. æðarbliki, or
simply blikur, cf. Icel. bliki ‘Navn paa visse Arter af Han-
fugle, Andrik, Han-EderfugP (cf. FBN, 11).
An etymology has been given by Jóhannesson, Isl. etym.
Wb., where bliki — without mention of its cognates — is
connected with blika ‘to shine’, the name thus literally rnean-
ing ‘shiner’. An analogous formation would be, for instance,
local Icel. brúsi ‘great northern diver’ from brúsa ‘to roar’.
It is noticeable that, as a formation, Icel. bliki contrasts