HOW THE GREY PARROT DIDN'T GET ITS NAME

by Martin Walsh

I’ve got an article in press for Kenya Past and Present about the search for words of Austronesian origin in Swahili. It’s a follow-on and much-revised update of a presentation I gave at a meeting in SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, a couple of years ago. Here’s just one section from the new piece. After writing it, I developed a bit of an obsession with parrots. Expect to hear more about this in future posts.

Illustration of a Grey parrot

Endangered parrots and dodgy etymologies

What then do we know about words of Austronesian origin in Swahili? What have we learned so far? First, it is evident that many existing proposals are wrong or doubtful, including some of my own.  The literature is littered with etymologies that are either demonstrably false or questionable in other ways. A notable example of the first category is Otto Dempwolff’s parrot. Here is Krumm on the origin of the Swahili word kasuku, ‘parrot’:

“Kasuku is a Malayan word which spread to India. According to Prof. Dempwolff, Hamburg, kasuku has the meaning: my darling, my sweetheart. It must be mentioned that west from Lake Tanganyika (in the Congo state) a river has the name “kasuku.” In that district parrots are frequent.” (1940, p. 125; also 1932, p. 77)

Leaving aside the evident mismatch between Malay kasihku, ‘my love’, and Swahili kasuku, it so happens that the Swahili name has a perfectly good Bantu etymology. In his dictionary entry for kasuku, Sacleux correctly identified it with the Grey parrot, Psittacus erithacus, and noted that the same name is also found in the Nyamwezi language in the west of Tanzania, and in a related shape in other languages to the north, into modern Uganda.

The Ganda name for the Grey parrot is enkusu: similar names are found in many languages to the west and can be traced back in time to proto-Bantu, as the linguist Edgar Polomé observed in 1987. At some point the syllables in the word root -kusu were switched around – a process linguists call metathesis – perhaps at the same time that it acquired the diminutive prefix ka-, to give kasuku, literally ‘little Grey parrot’. This may originally have been a reference to the fledglings that people took from their nests inside trees. Swahili has never had this ka- diminutive (it uses ki- instead), but has borrowed the name kasuku in its entirety, treating it as though it has no prefix, with an invariant plural.

Grey parrot close-up

When and where did this happen? Grey parrots are denizens of the central African rainforest: the nearest population to the East African coast is found in the west of Kenya, in Kakamega Forest. Because of their intelligence and ability to learn words in human speech, they are also highly desirable as pets, and captive birds are bred and sold throughout the world. Grey parrots are now considered to be endangered in the wild and the trade in them has been banned.

Writing in his book on The Uganda Protectorate (1902), the British explorer and colonial administrator Harry Johnston described how the trade from that area began:

“The young birds are captured by the natives from the nesting places (holes in trees) and are easily tamed. Yet as far as I can ascertain the Baganda never commenced this practice until taught to do so by the Swahili porters from the coast, who of course were incited thereto by the Europeans and Indians [...].” (Volume I, p. 401)

He later makes clear that it was the local people themselves who began taming the young parrots: “The natives nowadays catch and tame the young of the grey parrot for sale to European or Swahili caravans” (Volume II, p. 715). The earliest reference I have found so far to this trade dates to 1874. It may explain why the caravan porters also took away a version of the parrot’s name with a diminutive prefix; they were, after all, being sold juvenile birds. Where exactly they picked up this name is open to question. It may have been from one of the Bantu languages in the Great Lakes region, perhaps in the area to the west of Lake Tanganyika, where there was already a local demand for the scarlet tail feathers of adult parrots to be used in ceremonial headwear.

A Grey parrot in Dar es Salaam

The word kasuku had already reached Mombasa by the end of the 19th century: I have seen references dating to 1891, and so the trade must have begun some time earlier. Once the name became established on the coast, it then travelled back into the East African interior, as a loanword from Swahili, referring to caged parrots and, colloquially, to talkative people. This must have happened quite early, because Johnston found that the Swahili form was widespread south and east of the Great Lakes.

Returning now to Krumm’s original passage, I assume he was alluding to the existence of similar names for parrots in different Indian languages. The direction of borrowing, however, went the other way: Old Javanese adopted śuka, ‘parrot’ from Sanskrit. The resemblance of Indian terms to the Swahili name is almost certainly coincidental – unless they have been influenced by the latter as it has accompanied birds traded from East Africa. As an etymological hypothesis, Dempwolff’s parrot – or at least Krumm’s version of it – has no legs to stand on, and is as dead as a dodo.

Many of the Austronesian etymologies that have been proposed in the literature fare little better, either because there are better alternatives or because they can be shown to be implausible on linguistic and other grounds – though it isn’t always easy to choose between competing etymological hypotheses.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tom Hoogervorst for help with the Malay, and Asha Fakhi Khamis for her linguistic observations and more.

References

Johnston, Harry H. 1902. The Uganda Protectorate. Volume II. London: Hutchinson & Co.

Krumm, Bernhard 1932. Wörter und Wortformen orientalischen Ursprungs im Suaheli. Hamburg: Friederichsen, De Gruyter & Co.

Krumm, Bernhard 1940. Words of Oriental Origin in Swahili (2nd edition). London: The Sheldon Press.

Polomé, Edgar C. 1987. Swahili words of Indian origin. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 8: 325-334.

Sacleux, Charles 1939. Dictionnaire Swahili-Français (Travaux et Mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie 36 & 37). Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, Université de Paris.

Walsh, Martin T. 2017. Evidence for early Malay and Malagasy loanwords in Swahili. Presentation to Baraza III: Swahili Conference at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 14 October.

Walsh, Martin T. In press. Cockatoos and crocodiles: searching for words of Austronesian origin in Swahili. Kenya Past and Present.