Breve estudio en torno al zoónimo rosmaro

This article focuses on the vocabulary related to the animal world. This work in particularly studies the trajectory in Spanish of rosmaroʽwalrusʼ, a zoonym of Nordic origin. The route of the word is traced from the European north to the south showing that it was probably transmitted to the Spanish language via Latin. The transmission took place through the translation of texts written by the historian Olaus Magnus and the cartographer Abraham Ortelio. The results of the research reveal that the term rosmarocomes from rosmarus,the latinization of rosmar. The word rosmaris a distortion of Old Danish/Old Swedish rosmal,which derives from rosmhvalurʽwalrusʼ, and not from the term hrosshvalurʽwhale-horseʼ, as suggested by theDiccionario de la lengua española (DLE) in its 2014 edition