On the Naming of Whales

How many different kinds of whales are there? How many can you name? How did they get their names? My name is David and I want your help with a book I'm putting together, in which I will seek to propose new names for whales in English, based on or inspired by other languages and from a better understanding of these animals. This blog is here to provide information about those whales for anyone who is interested in helping me but may not be familiar with the peculiarities of the different species. I would invite you to do your own research, of course, but I hope this will be a good starting point for you, and if you would like to help, you can contact me through this blogger site or else at davidshewry@hotmail.com

The reason I want to do this is because I feel that some of the English names for whales are either too dull and unimaginative to do justice to the amazing creatures that have been given them, or else the names are in some way rather undignified. It seems to me that our understanding of and attitude towards the natural world has changed considerably and so perhaps it's time for our nomenclature to catch up. Countries are frequently renamed - why not whales?

Image of Herman Melville's Moby Dick

'Monstro' from Disney's Pinocchio

Another thing I want to explore in the book is the way in which whales appear in popular culture. For many of us, our cultural frame of reference for whales includes the biblical story of Jonah, the Greek legend of Ketos, Pinocchio and Moby Dick. These are all wonderful stories but, for the most part, whales are portrayed as monsters. I'm interested in hearing stories about whales that might take a different point of view. I’m inviting people from all over to share information about whales: names, stories, mythology, lore, poetry, drawings, illustrations and art of all kinds, in order to help inform my own understanding of and attitude towards these amazing animals. In doing this I hope also to celebrate the linguistic diversity of the world, and especially smaller, less well-known languages. 

Jonah and the Whale
Tobolsk - Russian 18th Century

There are between 6000 and 7000 languages in the world today, and as English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Bahasa, Mandarin and other major languages daily assert themselves more and more as linguae francae, there are many groups who are looking to revitalise or otherwise maintain and perpetuate smaller languages for posterity, which I think is an excellent thing. The world needs a greater understanding and appreciation of its own linguistic and cultural diversity. 

A large amount of the work of marine biology has been conducted and dominated by English-speaking organisations, and English tends to be a dominant language in the global scientific community, so the names for whales in other languages are often literal translations of English (or sometimes French) names, so translating them back into English gets us nowhere. How, then, do we go about this?

Beluga choir

Whale hunting equipment

The common names given to animals are generally of two types – descriptive names such as the beluga whale, which comes from 'белый' (belyy), the Russian word for white, otherwise they are named after individual people, such as is the case for the minke whale, named after a Norwegian whaler who spent his life killing these animals for profit. The former, I find, are often insufficient, unimaginative and short-sighted: The beluga whale is certainly white, and that does distinguish it from other whales, but this animal is also singular in its extraordinary vocal repertoire and has even been known to imitate human speech. As a result it is often known colloquially as the ‘sea canary’ – much better! As for naming animals after people, apart from, it seems to me, being a slightly arrogant thing to do in the first place, they have often been named after men (for it is invariably men) who did the animals considerable harm, such as in the case of the minke whale. So I’d like to invite any interested individuals or groups to come up with new names, whether you’re a linguist, a marine biologist, a language revivalist or, like me, you just have a passion for language and for natural history. For those who are not familiar with the animals I shall try to provide a few details, descriptions, images and links, relating to the species I’m interested in renaming. Whatever names you come up with, it would be interesting to know something about your process.

6th Century Greek vase depicting
Heracles slaying Ketos (κῆτη)

The word ‘whale’, from the Old English 'hvalr' - meaning 'wheel', is not a technical term used to distinguish one group of animals from another. All whales belong to the clade of marine mammals known collectively as cetacea, named after Ketos (Latin Cetus), the sea monster from the Greek legend. Cetaceans are broadly grouped into two categories or parvorders, which are: those with teeth (odontoceti) and those with baleen (mysticeti), both of which derive from a now extinct group of animals known as archaeoceti, and there are currently considered to be 89 living species. These are commonly grouped into whales, dolphins and porpoises. However, as this is a work on nomenclature as much as anything else, we shall limit ourselves to animals which are commonly referred to in English as whales, including ‘killer whales’, which are the largest of the dolphins. Perhaps other dolphins and porpoises will be explored in separate future volumes.

There are broadly considered to be 8 families of whales, which include Kogiidae (the rorquals), Iniidae (right whales), Cetotheriidae (the pygmy right whale), Eschrichtiidae (the gray whale), Monodontidae (belugas and narwhals), Physeteridae (the sperm whale), Kogiidae (the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales), and Ziphiidae (the beaked whales). I shall say a little about each of the species within these families, in turn. Let's start with the baleen whales (also known as Mysticeti - from the Greek meaning 'moustache whale'), and with that group of baleen whales known as the rorquals - humpbacks, fin whales, blue whales, sei whales, bryde's/eden's, omura's and minke whales.