BAK 'BUCK' AND KECSKE 'GOAT' IN HUNGARIAN PLANT NAMES

• Authors: Racz Janos
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

Analytic metaphors based on animal names are frequent in the terminology of botany. The reverse case also occurs in a number of instances: animal names are derived from plant names as in kaposztalepke 'cabbage-butterfly', fapoloska 'plant bug', szolotetu 'vine louse', almalegy 'apple maggot', szilvamoly 'plum piercer', gabonamoly 'grain moth', etc. From among zoomorphic terms, the author has collected those in 'bak-' and 'kecske-,' and discusses their word history and word geography. These terms are partly internal developments, compounds, and partly entered Hungarian as loan translations. They are shape-based names, referring to the form or smell of plants or parts of plants. They include several polysemous expressions in which the relationship between individual, immediately related meanings is metaphorical. The motivations are mainly reconstructible. There is a similarity in shape between (parts of) the animals involved and the stalk, root, leaf or flower whose name is borrowed for them.

Keywords

EN

ANALYTIC METAPHOR; ANIMAL NAMES; PLANT NAMES; WORD GEOGRAPHY; WORD HISTORY

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Committee on Hungarian Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Magyar Nyelvor (Hungarian Language Guardian)
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 130
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 302-316
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Racz Janos

• No address given; contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

11HUAAAA090319