Hacker News Reader

Comment by otabdeveloper4 | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not as simple as that. Finnish and the Slavic languages are the only ones in Europe that have a native word for "elephant". (Everyone else uses variants of the Greek "elephas" or Arabic "fil".)

The question is, why those two languages and only those two?

What's worse, the Slavic word dates to proto-Slavic times, it's one of the basic animal words like "deer", "rabbit", "cow", etc.!

View on HN

Just wanted to mention that! In Serbian (and most other south Slavic languages) we use a word слон (slon) for elephant. I was always wondering why is that, how can we have native word for the animal we could hardly had chance to see. However, there’s some evidence that (south) Slavic people lived somewhere near India. And India is mentioned a lot in some of the tradional folk poems. There’s even a town in Serbia called Inđija. Really interesting stuff, but not sure how credible that theory is.

> Finnish and the Slavic languages are the only ones in Europe that have a native word for "elephant". (Everyone else uses variants of the Greek "elephas" or Arabic "fil".)

So the only languages in Europe except the other language in Europe? :)

He means "indigenous" words that evolved along with the rest of the language rather than being adopted from another language.

Right, but Greek fits that description. Three languages in Europe have a native word for elephant.

Depends; etymonline says this:

> from Greek elephas (genitive elephantos) "elephant; ivory," probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely via Phoenician (compare Hamitic elu "elephant," source of the word for it in many Semitic languages, or possibly from Sanskrit ibhah "elephant").

So the Greek word is not necessarily native to Greek.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com