måndag, juli 27, 2009

Savann

Om savanner kan man läsa på både Wikipedia och NE, men inget om varför det heter just savann. Vad kommer ordet utav, och vad betyder det? Nån som vet?
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Update:
OED: "treeless plain," 1555, from Sp. sabana, earlier zavana "treeless plain," from Taino (Arawakan) zabana. In U.S. use, "a tract of low-lying marshy ground" (1671).".

Wikipedia: "Although the term savanna is believed to have originally come from an Arawak word describing "land which is without trees but with much grass either tall or short" (Oviedo y Valdes, 1535), by the late 1800s it was used to mean "land with both grass and trees". It now refers to land with grass and either scattered trees or an open canopy of trees.

Spanish explorers familiar with the term "sabana" called the grasslands they found around the Orinoco River "llanos", as well as calling Venezuelan and Colombian grasslands by that term. "Cerrado" was used on the higher savannas of the Brazilian Central Plateau.[3]".

/Tack till kommentatorerna Tomas och Pat.

5 kommentarer:

Tomas sa...

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=savannah

p sa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna#Definitions_and_distributions

stationsvakt@gmail.com sa...

Tomas/Pat: Tack.

Anonym sa...

Står ju också i NE:
savann (spanska sabana, av äldre spanska çavana, çabana, ett ord upptaget ur taino)

stationsvakt@gmail.com sa...

anonym: Tack - vad dålig jag är på att titta.