Note 7 — Chapter I · STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONS.

M. Ad. Pictet has availed himself of the love of the elephant for water, to found on it a solution of the long-contested question as to the etymology of the word “elephant,”—a term which, whilst it has passed into almost every dialect of the West, is scarcely to be traced in any language of Asia. The Greek ἐλέφας, to which we are immediately indebted for it, did not originally mean the animal, but, as early as the time of Homer, was applied only to its tusks, and signified ivory. Bochart has sought for a Semitic origin, and seizing on the Arabic fil, and prefixing the article al, suggests alfil, akin to ἐλεφ; but rejecting this, Bochart himself resorts to the Hebrew eleph, an “ox”—and this conjecture derives a certain degree of countenance from the fact that the Romans, when they obtained their first sight of the elephant in the army of Pyrrhus, in Lucania, called it the Luca bos. But the αντος is still unaccounted for: and Pott has sought to remove the difficulty by introducing the Arabic hindi, Indian, thus making eleph hindi, “bos Indicus.” The conversion of hindi into αντος is an obstacle, but here the example of “tamarind” comes to aid; tamar hindi, the “Indian date,” which in mediæval Greek forms ταμἄρεντι. A theory of Benary, that ἐλέφας might be compounded of the Arabic al, and ibha, a Sanskrit name for the elephant, is exposed to still greater etymological exception. Pictet’s solution is, that in the Sanskrit epics “the King of Elephants,” who has the distinction of carrying the god Indra, is called airavata or airavana, a modification of airavanta “son of the ocean,” which again comes from iravat, “abounding in water.” “Nous aurions donc ainsi, comme corrélatif du grec ἐλέφαντα, une ancienne forme, âirâvanta ou âilâvanta, affaiblie plus tard en âirâvata ou âirâvana.... On connaît la prédilection de l’éléphant pour le voisinage des fleuves, et son amour pour l’eau, dont l’abondance est nécessaire à son bien-être.” This Sanskrit name, Pictet supposes, may have been carried to the West by the Phœnicians, who were the purveyors of ivory from India; and, from the Greek, the Latins derived elephas, which passed into the modern languages of Italy, Germany, and France. But it is curious that the Spaniards acquired from the Moors their Arabic term for ivory, marfil, and the Portuguese marfim; and that the Scandinavians, probably from their early expeditions to the Mediterranean, adopted fill as their name for the elephant itself, and fil-bein for ivory; in Danish, fils-ben. (See Journ. Asiat. 1843, t. xliii. p. 133.) The Spaniards of South America call the palm which produces the vegetable ivory (Phytelephas macrocarpa) Palma de marfil, and the nut itself, marfil vegetal.

Since the above was written Gooneratné Modliar, the Singhalese Interpreter to the Supreme Court at Colombo, has supplied me with another conjecture, that the word elephant may possibly be traced to the Singhalese name of the animal, alia, which means literally, “the huge one.” Alia, he adds, is not a derivation from Sanskrit or Pali, but belongs to a dialect more ancient than either.