Etymology
The origin of the word walrus is thought to derive from a Germanic language, and it has been attributed largely to either the Dutch language or Old Norse. Its first part is thought to derive from a word such as Dutch walvis 'whale'. Its second part has also been hypothesized to come from the Old Norse word for 'horse'. For example, the Old Norse word hrossvalr means 'horse-whale' and is thought to have been passed in an inverted form to both Dutch and the dialects of northern Germany as walros and Walross. An alternate theory is that is comes from the Dutch words wal 'shore' and reus 'giant'.
The Norwegian manuscript Konungsskuggsja, thought to date from around 1240 AD refers to the walrus as "rosmhvalr" in Iceland and "rostungr" in Greenland (walruses were by now extinct in Iceland and Norway, while the word evolved on in Greenland). Several place names in Iceland, Greenland and Norway may originate from walrus sites; Hvalfjord, Hvallatrar and Hvalsnes to name some, all being typical walrus breeding grounds.
The archaic English word for walrus—morse—is widely thought to have come from the Slavic languages. Compare морж (morž) in Russian, mursu in Finnish, moršâ in Saami, and morse in French. Olaus Magnus, who depicted the walrus in the Carta Marina in 1539, first referred to the walrus as the ros marus, probably a Latinization of morž, and this was adopted by Linnaeus in his binomial nomenclature.
The coincidental similarity between morse and the Latin word morsus 'a bite' supposedly contributed to the walrus's reputation as a "terrible monster".
The compound Odobenus comes from odous (Greek for 'tooth') and baino (Greek for 'walk'), based on observations of walruses using their tusks to pull themselves out of the water. The term divergens in Latin means 'turning apart', referring to their tusks.
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“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
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