Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1975, Page 18

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Faroese Bird-Name Origins
ously or disparagingly, as befits a crow, a rough translation
being ‘back’. The first element stál- ‘steel’ will refer to the
colour, i. e. stálbláur, so that we have in stálkoka ‘steel back’
a concept substantially equivalent to blábøka ‘dark back’, a
Suðuroy noa name for the same bird.
Súla ‘gannet’
Unresolved problems of interpretation in the case of this name
were discussed in Frót)., XX, 48 ff., and we concluded that as
súla properly denoted an artifact, it possibly arose as a noa
name. At the same time, we dismissed the etymology given in
Nudansk Ordbog (1953) ‘Navnet skyldes den kløft, fuglens
vingespidser i hvilestilling danner’ as unsatisfactory since vari-
ous other seabirds fold their wings in the same fashion.
Taking a lead from J. Maclnnes, ‘Gannet Catching in the
Hebrides’, Frób., XVIII, 156, who referred to the possible use
of Gaelic eun lit. ‘bird’ as a noa name for the gannet, we have
meanwhile been able to confirm that this is indeed the case,
while another term guga, today the ordinary name for the
immature bird, has every appearance of having been evasive
in the first place; its literal meaning is simply ‘cackler’ (Zfcelt.
Phil., loc. cit., 1). We have further established that Eng.
gannet itself originally meant no more than ‘goose’, the present
specialisation of meaning being again due to the working of
taboo (Zeitschrift f. Anglistik u. Amerikanistik, XXI, 416 ff.).
These various terms are thus examples of the purposely vague
noa name, of the same ilk as e. g. Far. dýr lit. ‘animal’, a fisher-
man’s term for kópur ‘seal’.
We may reconsider súla in the light of these observations.
As noticed in the previous contribution, súla as the name of
an artifact has a number of different meanings; however, the
concept of the cleft is common to all. We next visualise the
situation as the fowler reaches the gannetry. All around him
he sees adult birds, and whether standing or sitting their crossed
wing-tips, black in contrast to the white of the rest of the
plumage, are indeed a feature calculated to draw the attention