The Bees’ Excuse and What the Penguins Say: A poem in B minor for transverse flute and basso continuo

[1] Anatole France, L’Île des Pingouins (1908), a satire on the French nation, translated as Penguin Island. See on auks https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/great-auk. Larousse étymologique cites a sixteenth-century Dutch work on travels to the East Indies as the source of the Dutch penkuyn, from which the French pingoin, later pingouin, derived and adds “d’orig. obscure.” The OED dates use of the word penguin to apply to the great auk only to 1792, although giving its first appearance as 1578. So it would seem that penguins came before great auks, at least etymologically speaking. Dutch (and early English) navigators would have encountered numerous jackass (French jacasse = magpie, chatterbox; verb jacasser = to jabber, chatter) penguins at the Cape of Good Hope on their way to India and Indonesia. The (European) servants of Dutch East India Company’s first permanent settlement at the Cape (1652) complained of being given penguin to eat instead of pork. It is conceivable that the word penkuyn derived from the Khoi (Hottentot) name for these birds. The name in modern Afrikaans (spoken now mostly by partial descendants of the Khoi) is pikkewyn.