Naming and Etymology
Since these canids are called dholes only in English, the etymology remains unclear, but it may have come from Kannada: tōḷa (‘wolf’). Some 19th-century authors connected this word with Turkish: deli ‘mad, crazy’, and erroneously compared the Turkish word with Old Saxon: dol and Dutch: dol (cf. also English: dull, German: toll), which are in fact from Proto-Germanic *dwalaz ‘foolish, stupid’.
Other names for the species include wild dogs, whistling dogs, chennai, red wolves (not to be confused with Canis rufus), red dogs and mountain wolves.
Read more about this topic: Dhole
Famous quotes containing the words naming and/or etymology:
“The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
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—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)