About LinkedFin

Where the etymologies come from

They are taken from published dictionaries rather than inferred from how words look. The ones used most:

• Wiktionary (and the reference works it cites)
• Nişanyan Sözlük (Turkish)
• Kotus, Suomen etymologinen sanakirja (Finnish)
• Eesti Keele Instituut (Estonian)
• Liddell–Scott–Jones (Ancient Greek)
• Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Swedish)
• Uysal, Türkçe Balık Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme (BİBAD 4(1), 2011) (Turkish regional names)

How entries are written

Every foreign word in an etymology is given with its meaning. When a word travelled through several languages, each step is written out instead of skipped, so you can see where the sense shifted.

When the sources disagree, or say the origin is unknown, the entry says that. Plenty of fish names have no settled etymology, and a plausible-sounding guess is worse than admitting it.

Links between names

Names are connected where one was borrowed from another, where two languages name the same fish, or where a name is commonly applied to the wrong species. These links only run between names for the same species. A connection that crosses that line, like a word borrowed twice that ended up on two different animals, is described in the entry text instead.

Who makes this

LinkedFin is a hobby project by Eralp Karaduman. A name says a lot about the people who coined it: one culture names a fish for how it moves or feeds, another for a belief attached to it, another for what it is at the market or on the plate. The same animal carries all of those names at once.

Names travel, too. A borrowed name is a record of contact between cultures, kept by accident in everyday words. That history is what keeps me at this.

Corrections

Mistakes are likely, particularly in the older Mediterranean material. If you find one, especially if you have a dictionary to point at, open an issue on GitHub. A correction with a source is much easier to act on than one without.