Galaxy Magazine (October 1957) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1957-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

HP HE Dutch word Walghvogels •*• (also spelled Walchvogels ) translates literally as "nauseating birds," but it led to one of the many mistakes that crowd the dodo's short life history.

About two hundred years later, it was asserted in German books that there had been Forest Birds, so named, on Mauritius. There probably were, and still are, forest birds on Mauritius, but the Forest Bird was only a sloppy translation, appearing in its German form of WaldvogeL Spelling in those days was helter-skelter in any language, so somebody probably thought that "walgh" was just a poor rendering of "Waldt," a then frequent spelling of the German word Wald, which means forest.

might be just as well to clear up this additional difficulty as much as possible.

In the most recent specialized professional work on the dodo, by the Marquis Masauji Hachi-suka, not less than seventy-nine different names are listed. But the confusion is not quite as large as this figure seems to indicate, for the names clearly fall into a small number of classes.

One set of them tries to be descriptive. They are mostly French, as, for example, austruche encapuchonne (hooded ostrich), cygne capuchonne (hooded swan) and d'mde sauvage (wild turkey). Another set are either translations or mistranslations of Dutch names. The Dutch names themselves are either variations on the theme of walghvogels or else descriptive terms similar to the French names just mentioned.

Just two words emerge as, so to speak, "exclusive" terms. One is the name dodo, with the variations dodaars and dodaerts, and the other one is dronte.

It is reasonably certain that "dodo" is a name coined by the Portuguese, as witness a letter written in 1628 by Emanuel Al-tham about "very strange fowles called by ye portingals Do Do."

The fact that Altham pulled the two syllables apart, thereby

Since this has raised the prob- changing their pronunciation, is lem of the name of the bird, it "very suspicious-making," as a

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

French lady I know phrased it. It is so suspicious — or, rather, indicative — because old Dutch and German writings spell the name as doedoe and dudu, all of which must be pronounced "doo-doo." Since it has no real meaning in any language, it can well be, as has been asserted, an imitation of the bird's call.

The Dutch variation dod-aars or dod-aers is rather clear to an English speaker, especially in view of the Dutch descriptive remarks ende heeft een rond gat ("and has a round rump," as van Neck put it) or rond van stuiten ("round of stern," as Capt. Wil-lem van West-Zanen wrote in 1602).

TTOWEVER, the name dronte, •"-*■ which in Dutch and in German was used about equally frequently as dodo, still is not explained. The Englishman H. E. Strickland, who wrote the first book about the dodo in 1848, and it is still good, accepted the explanation that this term was coined by Danish sailors, using their verb drunte, which means "to be slow." This is not only somewhat far-fetched on the face of

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