History of the Word Aardvark
Quote from Word Histories and Mysteries (print book) -
– Aardvark: The aardvark is a burrowing mammal, with a stocky hairy body, large ears, and a long tubular snout somewhat resembling a pig’s. It is found over much of Africa and it eats the ants and termites that it excavates with its powerful digging claws. The animal is in actuality a pale yellowish-gray color, but in the wild it is usually seen covered with a thick layer of reddish dust from its digging activities.
The English name for this animal is borrowed from Afrikaans, the languages descended from the Dutch dialects spoken by settlers from the Netherlands who moved to the south of Africa in the 17th century. Today Afrikaans is one of the official languages by a large percentage of the population of Namibia. The Afrikaans spelling system differs somewhat from the one used in Modern Standard Dutch, and there are some differences in grammar and vocabulary between the two languages. Nevertheless, modern Afrikaans and standard Dutch still resemble each other quite closely, and a speaker of Dutch and a speaker of Afrikaans can converse without difficulty.
In Afrikaans, aardvark is a compound that literally means “earth-pig.” The name is motivated by the animal’s piglike snout and its habit of digging in the earth for its food. Afrikaans belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family just like English, and both the words that go in to make up the word aardvark have close relatives in English. Afrikaans aard, “earth,” comes from Middle Dutch aerde, eerde, which in turn comes from Proto-Germanic *ertho, also the source of the English earth and German Erde. In this case, the th heard in the English word preserves the original Proto-Germanic sound, which both Dutch and German have changed to a d.
The Afrikaans word vark, “pig,” comes from Middle Dutch varken, which in turn comes from Proto-Germanic *farhaz. In German, this word is preserved as part of the word Ferkel, “piglet.” English too has kept this ancient word as farrow, which can be both a noun meaning “a litter of pigs” and a verb meaning “to give birth to a litter of pigs.” Proto-Germanic *farhaz itself descends from Proto-Indo-European *porko- Developed into porcus, “pig,” and porcus then developed into French porc. Porc was then borrowed into Middle English as porke, which at first could mean both “pig” and “pig-meat.” Only the latter meaning has survived in the Modern English word pork.
Other aspects of the etymology of pork are discussed at the separate entry for the word in this book.
