HOW do animals and birds get their common names? Why is a robin a robin? Why is a cat not a dog? Like their scientific counterparts, common names are part of a classification system – of sorts. You could call it folk taxonomy. Yet these names are much more than mere labels to ensure that we all eat or conserve the same things. With their descriptive terminology, often what they do is tell us what to expect, so that if we meet one we can recognise it by its appearance or behaviour.
A good example is the set of names for the three resident British woodpeckers: great spotted, lesser spotted and green. It’s not too hard to guess what they look like. The thinking applies to tropical species too. Think of the hornbill, the hummingbird and the leaf-thrasher. And it applies to animals as much as birds: squirrel, spider, swamp and howler are all folk names for monkeys, and each gives some idea of what the creature is like.
The uacari, however, breaks all the rules. It is a type of monkey, but you wouldn’t know that from its common name. Uacari means nothing in English, nor in any other European language.
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“It means nothing in English, nor in other European languages”
Even knowing how to pronounce it properly – “wuk-ah-ree” – doesn’t help. Its scientific genus name, Cacajao, is just as unhelpful. Most scientific names make some sense in Latin or Greek, but not this one.
Where do uacari and Cacajao come from? For an explanation, we need to go back to two European explorers born in the 18th century, Alexander von Humboldt and Johann von Spix. In 1800, in a Jesuit mission on the Brazil-Venezuela border, Humboldt encountered a strange little monkey with a very short tail, a woebegone countenance and long shaggy fur. It was unlike anything he had seen, and he called it by its local name, cacajao.
Some 20 years later Spix, collecting specimens in the central Amazon, found a similar animal and called it by another local name, ouacary. Sadly, we’ll never know what these names mean, since the tribes who lived in the places where Humboldt and Spix collected are now extinct, and no one fully recorded their languages. It is just possible that the name might have meant something like “ugly monkey” – the uacari is no pin-up.
The uacari is not the only animal with a name whose meaning is lost. Consider the aye-aye, the binturong, the cacomistle and the yapok, all of whose common names came from a local language. Any idea what they are? Look them up and see if you guessed right. If names like this tell us anything, it’s that we don’t know what to expect, but we know to expect something strange.
