The title of this post embodies everything I despise about cheap journalism, but the temptation was too strong, because today’s topic is indeed the origin of the word whale. I was planning the story for quite some time, and then suddenly the media informed the world that a spade-toothed whale had been washed up on South Island beach (Australia).
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The title of this post embodies everything I despise about cheap journalism, but the temptation was too strong, because today’s topic is indeed the origin of the word whale. I was planning the story for quite some time, and then suddenly the media informed the world that a spade-toothed whale had been washed up on South Island beach (Australia). The habits and the anatomy of this species are completely unknown, so that a tragedy for the beast will be a great boon to scholarship. The newspaper article tipped the scale, and I decided to contribute an etymologist’s mite to the study of the word, nearly as mysterious as the spade-toothed whale. Those interested in the etymology of the even more mysterious word shark will find my discussion in the posts for May 23, 2012, and December 6, 2023. Sharks will also float to the surface below, if only briefly.
Unlike shark, whale is an old word in English, and it sounds similarly in all the Modern Germanic languages: German Walfisch (that is, “whale-fish”), Dutch walfis, and Icelandic hval(u)r. One should not treat such odd compounds as whale-fish lightly: people probably took whales for very big fish. Also, the idea of a “whale fish” occurred to other inhabitants of Eurasia. For instance, in Russian folklore, the whale is called ryba–kit (ryba fish” and kit “whale”; the world is said to stand on it), that is, German Wal-fisch in reverse order. This reordering of a compound’s elements is also common. For instance, the root of the word whale can be recognized as the first element of English walrus. The element –rus is akin to the word horse, so that walrus (eventually, from Dutch) means “whale-horse,” while the genuine Old English form was horsc–hwæl, like Old Icelandic hross–hvalr, that is, “horse-whale.” Kit in ryba-kit is a borrowing of one of the Greek words for “whale,” namely, kētos, which also meant “sea monster; seal; tuna.”
As far as we can judge, the remote ancestors of those who spoke the oldest Germanic languages had never seen whales. If the word whale had been coined by the Vikings, it would probably have been more transparent. Assuming that whale was taken over from the speakers of some distant land, our main support will be the German fish name Wels “catfish” or perhaps “sheatfish.” The Scandinavians may have known a similar name, but it turned up in texts only in German and only in the fifteenth century. Supposedly, the oldest form of Wels was hwalis. If so, it is related to Old Prussian kalis (Old Prussian is a Baltic language!), and again supposedly, this name was transferred to the otherwise new sea creature. Some catfish are quite big. Those who cite Wels wonder whether the fish was called after the whale or the whale after the fish! As just mentioned, the word Wels is late, it has no cognates in Scandinavian, and there is no certainty that it ever had h- at the beginning. But kalis will soon swim up in an entirely new light.
According to another predictable idea, the Germanic word for “whale” was borrowed from some foreign language. First come Latinsqualus “shark” or “some other big fish” and Latin balæna “whale.” Balæna resembles Greek fálaina. Probably both the Greeks and the Romans took over those words from their Illyrian neighbors, though the Romans believed that they had borrowed the name of the whale directly from Greek. Squalus, which may be related to squatus (another fish name), does look like a more or less probable cognate of whale, except that its origin is also unknown. Greek ‘aspalos, a rare and obscure word, and Sanskrit khāla, both fish names (though khāla seems to be a freshwater fish), have also been pressed into service and are members of the same etymological aquarium. The great German etymologist Friedrich Kluge compared whale and Greek pélor, another name of a sea monster. (I’ll skip phonetic details, because they won’t lead anywhere.) As could be expected, none of the proposals, mentioned above, has been accepted as definitive, though the most authoritative dictionary of Indo-European cites the reconstructed root squalo-.
This form requires an explanation. At one time, before the appearance of the first written documents, the language we call Germanic underwent a consonant shift. For example, Latin has quod (read: kwod), while its Old English cognate has hwæt “what.” (The consonants p and t underwent a similar change, but they need not concern us here.) That is why when etymologists look for forms related to Old English hwæl– “whale,” they try to find promising non-Germanic (Greek, Latin, Slavic, Celtic, and so forth) forms beginning with k-. The root squalo, that is, skwalo-, has the desired k, while initial s is the ubiquitous s-mobile (mobile s), an enigmatic prefix that appears in numerous words for the reasons that have never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction.
Despite all those wanderings over the map of the world, there have been attempts to connect whale with some native Germanic words. Walter W. Skeat referred whale to the root of the word wheel. One of the Old English forms of wheel was hweowol, not too different from hwæl. Whale emerged from this hypothesis as “roller.” Another ingenious reconstruction traced the name of the whale to a verb meaning “to draw back to recoil.” Those are very old ideas. Everybody who has at least opened Moby Dick knows that the book begins with a page, called “Etymology.” It contains quotations from dictionaries by Webster and by Richardson: “The animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted” and “It is more immediately from the Du. and Ger. Wallen; A-S Walw-ian, to roll, to walkout.” Moby Dick was published in 1851, and Melville had no better authorities to consult. Later, Skeat offered a rather improbable Greek etymon of whale. As a postscript, some dictionaries state that Old Norse hvalr made its way to the Finno-Ugric world: Finnish has valas and Estonian has vaal.
The case seems to be closed, but at the last moment, a nearly fateful complication arises. For more than a hundred and fifty years, etymologists have been citing Finnish kala “fish,” along with Prussian kalis, in connections with the Germanic word for “whale.” Prussian, as noted, is a non-Germanic Indo-European language, so that initial k in kalis arouses no suspicions, but Finish is not Indo-European! Yet kala, like kalis, has k-. And the Korean for “whale” is karia, that is,nearly the same form as in Finnish. The word seems to be Eurasian, rather than Indo-European, or as linguists say, Nostratic (this term was coined by the great Danish scholar Holger Pedersen and is now widely used in historical studies). Below, I am rephrasing the conclusion by Martin Sevilla Rodriguez. Indo-European peoples, he suggests, while migrating toward the west, took with them the word that sounded approximately like (s)kwalos or (s)kwalis, which designated in their lexicon a large fish, the biggest freshwater fish being the sheatfish, which in today’s German is called Wels. Later, they continued using the term wherever the sheatfish occurred. In other places, the name stuck to other big fish (sharks, for example) and ended up as “whale-fish.” (In light of such facts, Latin squalēre “to have a rough surface (skin),” also suggested as related to whale, is out of the game.)
This is a reasonable hypothesis, which survives in the margin of a more traditional etymology of the word whale. The riddle has not been solved, but some obscurity may have been dispelled. Among other things, we have no idea why the complex squal– was chosen as the name of a sea monster. Not sound–imitative and, seemingly, not sound-symbolic. Yet we are a step above the verdict: “Origin unknown.”
Correction. A reader has pointed out that I should not have used sword and board as rhyming with broad. At most, the rhyme exists in the r-less varieties of English. I should have used words like pawed, cawed, overawed. Sorry!
Featured image: A whale being speared with harpoons by fishermen in the Arctic sea. Engraving by A. M. Fournier after E. Traviès. Wellcome Collection. Public domain.
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