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During my time in Georgia one word came to puzzle me and I'm still thinking about it:

დელფინი (delp'ini) "dolphin"

Wiktionary says this comes from Greek via Russian.

The thing is Georgia is on the Black Sea which has plenty of dolphins so why wouldn't they have their own word since the times before contact with Greek civilization? Georgian is pretty resistant to borrowing basic vocabulary. There's a native word for "whale" for instance.

Now loanwords are not as common in Georgian as in English, but they're not really rare. They are however mostly for modern/introduced concepts but Georgian is a pretty ancient language, it hasn't really moved, and dolphins have always existed in the world the Georgians inhabit.

I have a couple of theories but they're unconvincing and I haven't been able to find any information:

  • There was once a native word but it fell out of use.
    (It's not in any of the bilingual dictionaries I've been able to find.)
  • Dolphins were considered to be fish, like elsewhere, until relatively recently with the study of biology, taxonomy, etc.
    (But different kinds of fish still have different names and dolphins are pretty different.)
hippietrail
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    Or maybe Wikipedia is simply wrong and the word was borrowed directly from Greek a long time ago. Long enough so that no record of the previous word survives. But, of course, this is also another unconvincing hypothesis... – Otavio Macedo Sep 05 '12 at 23:01
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    It had to be borrowed into Greek late enough that the PIE labiovelar in *gʷelbh- had turned to the dental in Attic Gk δελφίς delfis, and further it could not have been borrowed from Aeolic since they have βελφιν belfin. – Mark Beadles Sep 06 '12 at 01:01
  • @OtavioMacedo: True on both counts. To add credibility we'd need some contemporarily old Greek borrowings. Off the top of my head I'm going to assume most Greek stuff came into Georgian related to Christianization and possibly via Armenian too which I think has both Greek cognates and borrowings also due to Christianization, and also it's known that plenty of Armenian words were borrowed into Georgian. Also before I started researching for this question I just assumed it was borrowed from Latin or Romance. – hippietrail Sep 06 '12 at 07:44
  • It turns out that Old Armenian had the same as Georgian but replaced it with a Russified version in modern Armenian. (Replaced the aspirated p' with an "f" sound. Georgian doesn't have an "f".) So Armenia, which I assume used to have Black Sea coast also uses Greek derived terms. I've also filed requests on Wiktionary for the Laz and Abkhaz words if anybody can find them. I could expand this question to ask why Armenian and Russian also seem to lack a native term! – hippietrail Sep 06 '12 at 08:11
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    I think that having babies is a long-established custom among Germanic-speaking people, and nevertheless, Germans have recently borrowed the noun for “baby“ from English... – JPP Sep 06 '12 at 13:45
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    @JPP: But we still have records available where we can find out what the Germans used to call very young very small people (-: – hippietrail Sep 06 '12 at 15:37
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    Klimov's Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages shows nothing related to the semantic sphere of dolphin/porpoise/whale/cetacean. Starostin's Kartvelian etymology database likewise shows nothing for dolphin/porpoise/whale/cetacean/дельфин/кит. – Mark Beadles Sep 06 '12 at 22:24
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    I think that many of the names for dolphin are periphrastic, like Russian морская свинья morskaya swin'ya "sea pig" (porpoise). Even the Greek δελφίς is a derivation from PIE gʷelbh- "womb". It is evidently a matter of dispute whether this semantically arose from wombed (fish) or whether it arose from (creature of) Δελφοί. – Mark Beadles Sep 06 '12 at 22:25
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    Only Turkish of the Black Sea languages has an unrelated term, yunus, which seems to stem from the Jona and the whale story in the Old Testament (is it also in the Q'uran?). The other Turkic languages I noticed had presumably borrowed from Russian. – hippietrail Sep 06 '12 at 22:29
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    It turns out some old Georgian-Russian dictionary have ზღვის ღორი (zḡvis ḡori), which literally means "sea pig". Well English has "sea pig" and "sea hog" too. I wonder if this is common or just a calque from Russian and still not a native word? – hippietrail Sep 08 '12 at 22:26
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    @hippietrail Yes, it is also in the Qur'an: link – cyco130 Nov 12 '13 at 12:37
  • Can it be that the place where Georgian originated was far away from the sea, somewhere in the mountains? – Yellow Sky Dec 10 '13 at 18:49
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    I have found the Abkhaz words for "dolphin", there are 2 of them, адельфин (obviously, a borrowing from Russian), and амшынҳәa (а-мшын-ҳәa - the-sea-pig). – Yellow Sky Dec 10 '13 at 19:12
  • Interestingly enough, Irish Gaelic, another language for a culture that has had an ancient association with dolphins, lacks a native word (that I'm aware of) for the animal (they say "deilf"). –  Dec 10 '13 at 16:27
  • @YellowSky: The Kartvelians, who include the Georgians, Mingrelians, Laz, and Svan seem to be from this area from the south side of the Caucasian mountains to the shores of the Black Sea. The Laz only live in coastal areas but their numbers and especially their language is dwindling. – hippietrail Dec 11 '13 at 01:41

2 Answers2

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How about აფალინა /apʰalina/? the Black Sea bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus ponticus)?

It is/used to be common in the Black Sea and has a similar name in (all?) languages bordering on the Black sea: afalina (Turkish), афала (Bulgarian), afalin (Romanian), афаліна (Ukranian), афалина (Russian).

Mario Elocio
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The word აფალინა /aphalina/ is a word of Greek origin, derived from φάλλαινα, "whale". This word came from Greek φαλλός which in late Greek meant "penis" due to similar shape of the whale. This word in turn came from PIE root bhel- "to swell, blow".

Anixx
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  • I wonder if the initial ა- might be due to it arriving in Georgian via Abkhaz where а- is the marker of the nominative case, which is used as the lemma/citation form. – hippietrail Feb 01 '14 at 00:14
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    Interesting. It seems that the Latin "balaena" is also related, but I'm not sure why it has "b" instead of "ph." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balaena – brass tacks Sep 05 '15 at 16:17