Hottentot

The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary concluded in 2008 that hottentot came into English from Dutch in the seventeenth century (its first known use being in 1677, in Dutch). But it finds that no definitive etymology of Dutch hottentot can so far be given:

A very large number of different etymologies for the name have been suggested ... The most frequently repeated suggestion ... is that the word was a spec. use of a formally identical Dutch word meaning ‘stammerer, stutterer’, which came to be applied to the Khoekhoe and San people on account of the clicks characteristic of their languages. However, evidence for the earlier general use appears to be lacking. Another frequent suggestion is that the people were so named after one or more words which early European visitors to southern Africa heard in chants accompanying dances of the Khoekhoe or San ... but the alleged chant is rendered in different ways in different 17th-cent. sources, and some of the accounts may be based on hearsay rather than first-hand knowledge.[1]

It does seem clear, however, that hottentot was an exonym, that is, not the Khoikhoi's own name for themselves but rather a foreign term applied to them.

Hottentot (plural Hottentots)

1. (archaic, now offensive) A member of the Khoekhoe group of peoples.
   • 1798-1801, Lady Ann Barnard, Letters and Journals

     I was told that the Hottentots were uncommonly ugly and disgusting, but I do not think them so bad. Their features are small and their cheekbones immense, but they have a kind expression and countenance.

2. Any of several fish of the genus Pachymetopon, in the family Sparidae.

• (person): Khoekhoe, Khoikhoi, Khoi

• Hottentot fig
• Hottentot teal

• Hottentot apron
• Hottentot's bread
• Hottentot cabbage, Hottentot's cabbage (Trachandra)
• Hottentot cherry
• Hottentot fig, Hottentot's fig (Carpobrotus edulis, formerly Mesembryanthemum edulus)
• Hottentot god, Hottentot's god
• Hottentot's Holland Range

Hottentot

1. The language of the Khoekhoe, remarkable for its clicks.
   • 1913, George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

     "I have tried her with every sort of sound that a human being can make...Hottentot clicks, things it took me years to get hold of."

• Hottentot language, Khoekhoe

• Hottentotism

• Khoikhoi on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Sparidae on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Pachymetopon on Wikispecies.Wikispecies

• Webster's International Dictionary 1902.
• Jean Bradford: A dictionary of South African English: Oxford 1978.