A tailless cow is fanned by God: designations for the tailless cow in Galicia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5433/2237-4876.2009v12n2p11Keywords:
Cows, Linguistic geography, Dictionaries.Abstract
This article presents a sample of a broader project whose objective is the study of names referring to cows, animals of extraordinary importance in the Galician culture. Several forms to designate a tailess cow are studied from several points of view, paying special attention to geolinguistic analysis. The importance of dialectal data is shown in order to make etymological hypotheses and to ponder data taken from dictionaries. Likewise, lexicographical material is very useful as an aid to improve our understanding of certain dialectal forms and their distribution.