My dad was listening to an item on the radio newscast about the famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the article they referred to the periodic famines that grip the horn of Africa. He realized that he didn’t know where the name came from and he asked me. I figured that this would be a fine test of the SDMB and so here we are.
Why the horn of Africa?
Keith
“I’m tired of being an object of ridicule. I wanna be a figure of fear, respect, and SEX!”
-Radar O’Reilly
are you asking what makes up the horn of africa? or why there is famine in the horn of africa?
Check out a map. The area juts out from the rest of Africa, kind of like a rhino horn.
What is the origin of the term “Horn of Africa”
Keith
Yeah, Random is right. The Horn of Africa is Somalia, with Ethiopia at its core and Eritrea at the north end. It doesn’t look much like a bull’s horn, and it doesn’t look anything like an antelope horn, but it’s the spittin image of a rhino horn. I always wanted to know what the big old hump in the northwest of Africa was called. I wanted it to be the “Hump of Africa”. Somebody told me it was called “western North Africa”. How creative is that?
Other geographical features are sometimes named, or nicknamed, for their appearance from the air. Angles are from the hook-shaped part of northern Germany (angle is an old word for hook, c.f. angler). It’s common to refer to Italy as “the boot”. Can anyone think of some others?
I wonder if the “cape” in Cape Horn, Cape Disappointment, Cape of Good Hope, etc., is related, etymologically, to the cape you wear when doing a vampire impression.
thanks to WWWebster Dictionary, the etymology on cape is from Middle French, Old Provençal and originally Latin, caput meaning ‘head’.
Eritrea is not itself part of the actual ‘horn’ of Africa, but rather the coast area extending northward from the country of Djibouti, which lies at the junction of the ‘horn’ and the Red Sea coast. For a map, see Eritrea from the Compton’s Online Encyclopedia. According to the same encyclopedia, other names include Punt (old Egyptian) and Regio Aromatica (presumably Latin).
My dictionary says that “cape” the clothing and “cape” the geographical feature, both come from the Latin word for head “caput.”
The etymologies are slightly different.