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During my time in Georgia one word came to puzzle me and I'm still thinking about it:

დელფინი (delp'ini) "dolphin"

Wiktionary says this comes from Greek via Russian.

The thing is Georgia is on the Black Sea which has plenty of dolphins so why wouldn't they have their own word since the times before contact with Greek civilization? Georgian is pretty resistant to borrowing basic vocabulary. There's a native word for "whale" for instance.

Now loanwords are not as common in Georgian as in English, but they're not really rare. They are however mostly for modern/introduced concepts but Georgian is a pretty ancient language, it hasn't really moved, and dolphins have always existed in the world the Georgians inhabit.

I have a couple of theories but they're unconvincing and I haven't been able to find any information:

  • There was once a native word but it fell out of use.
    (It's not in any of the bilingual dictionaries I've been able to find.)
  • Dolphins were considered to be fish, like elsewhere, until relatively recently with the study of biology, taxonomy, etc.
    (But different kinds of fish still have different names and dolphins are pretty different.)
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Or maybe Wikipedia is simply wrong and the word was borrowed directly from Greek a long time ago. Long enough so that no record of the previous word survives. But, of course, this is also another unconvincing hypothesis... – Otavio Macedo Sep 5 '12 at 23:01
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It had to be borrowed into Greek late enough that the PIE labiovelar in *gʷelbh- had turned to the dental in Attic Gk δελφίς delfis, and further it could not have been borrowed from Aeolic since they have βελφιν belfin. – Mark Beadles Sep 6 '12 at 1:01
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I think that having babies is a long-established custom among Germanic-speaking people, and nevertheless, Germans have recently borrowed the noun for “baby“ from English... – JPP Sep 6 '12 at 13:45
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Klimov's Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages shows nothing related to the semantic sphere of dolphin/porpoise/whale/cetacean. Starostin's Kartvelian etymology database likewise shows nothing for dolphin/porpoise/whale/cetacean/дельфин/кит. – Mark Beadles Sep 6 '12 at 22:24
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I think that many of the names for dolphin are periphrastic, like Russian морская свинья morskaya swin'ya "sea pig" (porpoise). Even the Greek δελφίς is a derivation from PIE gʷelbh- "womb". It is evidently a matter of dispute whether this semantically arose from wombed (fish) or whether it arose from (creature of) Δελφοί. – Mark Beadles Sep 6 '12 at 22:25
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