I just saw on an Arabic alphabet poster for children that the Arabic for penguin is batriq, بطريق. My Wehr-Cowan dictionary gives three meanings for that word: patrician, Romaic (i.e. modern or not-quite-modern Greek) general, and penguin.
Presumably the word is a borrowing from the Latin source of English patrician, probably through Greek. But how does it come to mean penguin? Is it because penguins look patrician in their little tuxedos? Or is there some completely different etymology?
I am not sure about the link with Arabic but in Latin "pinguis" means "fat" and this probably reflects the shape of this (fat and flightless) bird. You find the same connection in the Dutch word "vetgans" which literally means "fat goose".
in Latin "pinguis" means "fat" and this probably reflects the shape of this (fat and flightless) bird.
In French, pingouin is an auk (the group of birds including puffins and guillemots), and this usage doubtless predates the biological Latin usage of the word Pinguinus for the extinct Great Auk. We English, having also once called the great auk a penguin, then borrowed the name for the similarly appearing penguins, and coined a new one for the great auk - just as we did for guinea fowl which we had originally called turkey fowl. So if it comes back to pinguis, fat, in Latin, then it was auks who were identified as fat.
Many languages have shared the English name for penguins, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Russian. But French (manchot) and Arabic are not the only ones to have their own name. In Czech it is tučňák. I wonder if Arabs recorded South African penguins before Europeans?
Edited by: iviehoff