Re: onomatopoetic animal sounds

> Interesting! I haven't thought about that before. We were
> in such a hurry when we wrote this together that we didn't
> have time to look bits like this up. Then it turned out our
> teacher weren't there anyway. So we don't have to turn it
> in to her until Tuesday. I looked up _gala_ in my etymological
> dictionary and it says "croak, screem, chant spells". I
> suppose that English _crow_ could go into this class as
> well, but it's hard to know if _crow_ comes from an
> onomatopoetic sound or if it had some original value "sing,
> chant" as well. Anyone knows? A search on Merriam-Webster
> doesn't give much info.
OED says it's "originally an echoic word", and related to the bird's name
"crow", Dutch "kraaijen" and German "krähen", among others.  Watkins,
however, in the AHD IE roots book, derives it from PIE *gerH2- "to cry
hoarsely; also the name of the crane" (and relates it to "crow", "crane",
"croon", "crack", "cur", and "geranium", among others)

> I suppose _gala_ has been used for "chant" in the first
> place and then has become transferred to the crowing of
> the rooster.
>
> This means that _gala_ could be incorporated into the
> "transferred" or "music" verb class.
OED says the verb 'gale' (which once was an English word, related to but not
the direct ancestor of modern 'yell') meant (1) to sing or "deliver an
oracular response", and (2) meant, of a dog, to bark, and of a bird
(especially the cuckoo) "to utter its peculiar note".

> Speaking of this, does anyone know the origins of Spanish
> _graznar_, Italian _starnazzare_ and French _caqueter_?
> These are supposedly used as verbs for the sound of the duck.
diccionarios.com says 'graznar' is from "l. hispánico _gracinare_, de orig.
onomat."

     *Muke!
--
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/

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