Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1975, Page 22

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Faroese Bird-Name Origins
(Telemark) tildra seg fram ‘go on tiptoe’, otherwise tiltra,
tilta, etc., etc., thus receives no confirmation from compara-
tive nomenclature and we, for our part, feel that such an
interpretation is, in any case, philologically impermissible, and
on the level of folk etymology.
The question now is: can Prim. Germ. *telða- be accomo-
datcd in one of the above categories? The first is excluded, as
Germanic designations here are always compounds. In the case
of the second we have examined the evidence of the Germanic
vocabulary known to us, but have failed to find any compar-
able root suggesting the required sense; nor does a step back
to Indo-European *delto- afford any help either, see Pokorny,
IEW, 193—96. There remains the third, the onomatopoeic
choice. It is permissible to analyse Prim. Germ. "'telða- as root
*tel- plus well-known suffix -ða- (F. Kluge, Stammbildungslehre
der altgerm. Dialekte, 62) and here *tel- is perfectly plausible
as an echoic root and a suitable imitation of the high-pitched
call of the oyster-catcher. Formations of this type ceased be-
fore the appearance of the earliest written records, so that the
name tjaldur is clearly ancient. Properly denoting the call of
the bird, it thus belongs to that old stratum of names well
exemplified by Far., Icel. lómur cred-throated diver’, Icel. also
‘moan’, Fróðskaparrit, XIX, 129 f.
Next, Icel. tildra f., tildri m. ‘turnstone’. The only reference
in etymological dictionaries to this word occurs in Jóhannesson,
Isl. etym. Wb., where the name (in the form tildra only, 492)
is placed with over a dozen other Icelandic words, among them
tjaldr, and simply said to be derived from an IE root "'de/-
‘wackeln, schwanken’. The author does not seem to regard
the two bird names as particularly closely linked: tjaldr is
listed between tqltur pl. ‘schlechte hufeisen mit stacheln’ and
the verbs tolla ‘lose hangen’ and tylla ‘lose anheften’, while
lildra appears also without commentary between the verb
tildra ‘etwas lose aufhángen’ and the adjective tildrulegr ‘hin-
fállig’.
It seems, however, that tildra is very closely affiliated to