Common names
In earlier times along South Africa's 3 000 km coastline
were numerous isolated communities. Interested in angling
and pursuing fishing on a small scale, the inhabitants gave
names to the fishes they caught. First, in 1652, came the
Dutch settlers who gave names of well-known European
fishes to the similar fishes that they found at the Cape.
Names like "steenbras", "kabeljou", "snoek", etc. are derived from these. Malay slaves and freemen from the East
brought their names with them, and many were manufactured or adapted as the need arose. The Afrikaans names
for the Cape fishes are relatively uniform. Only as the distance increases from the Cape (e.g. at Knysna, Plettenberg
Bay and Port Elizabeth) do alternative names for the same
species occur.
Many English names started in the Eastern Cape Province, and there are different names for the same fish at
towns or holiday resorts sometimes not 50 km apart. It is
therefore not unusual to find one English name in use at the
Cape, another at Knysna, and another at Port Elizabeth differing from that at East London. The Transkeians use yet
another name, and finally Natal has a name quite different
from all the rest. In fact there is one fish in the original Sea
Fishes of Southern Africa that has 14 different names!
The indigenous peoples of South Africa contributed
practically no names to the fishes, as only the early Strandlopers were fish eaters and we know nothing of their language. The Nguni peoples migrating down from the north
were pastoralists and agriculturalists, not fishermen. The
Pondo, Xhosa, Tembu and Fingo peoples that reached the
Transkei originally kept out of sight and sound of the sea.
Only the outcasts existed in this coastal strip. Some tribes
considered fish flesh akin to snake flesh, and by custom and
taboo most tribes were prohibited from eating it. This is a
tradition which fortunately is fast disappearing.
Three-quarters of a century ago all the different common
names produced little confusion. Groups were too isolated.
Then the country's communications improved. In 1949
J. L. B. Smith collected all the common names he could and
published them in his Sea Fishes of Southern Africa, each,
with its locality, carefully attached to the description and figure of the fish so named. He argued that in this way confusion would be avoided and, by referring to the illustration,
everyone would be able to ascertain exactly which fish was
being discussed. While going a long way to unravel the confusion, the original Sea Fishes of Southern Africa did not resolve it, mainly because of man's inherent laziness and
carelessness and the fact that the Sea Fishes, weighing
20
nearly 3 kg, could hardly be tucked into a fishing bag.
Today the necessity of standardised common names of
our fishes is recognised by all sections of the community, including the angling fraternity. As early as 1959, L. P. D.
Gertenbach in his unpublished Ph.D thesis on "Marine
fishery industries and commerce of the Union of South Africa and South West Africa" wrote:
The fish-producers, fish-traders, fish-consumers, legislators, inspectors, managers of factories, depots, transport firms, exporters, housewives, etc., all have an interest in a clear, unambiguous labelling of fishery products. The realities of the modern world-economy demand the standardization of the English and Afrikaans
common names of at least that hundred or so species of
economic significance.
Nowadays, with good roads, air travel and more leisure,
South Africa has not only shrunk, but is no longer isolated
at the tip of a continent. A man can fish off Angola one day
and in Durban waters the next. Big game anglers come from
all over the world. Fleets of many nations fish the fringe of
our territorial waters, and endemic fishes such as South African hake, snoek, kingklip, etc. can be seen daily on
Japanese, Russian, Spanish and other markets.
Commerce, law and sport need common (vernacular)
names for fishes for legal terminology and for general use.
Substitutes for scientific names are essential for the increasing number of inland aquaria, for popular and scientific
writing in encyclopedias, dictionaries, popular and scientific magazines, newspaper reports and record lists. It has
been shown that common names carefully chosen can be
more stable than scientific names, as witness the list given
by Gilchrist (1902) wherein almost all the scientific names
are obsolete but the common names are just the same
today. Even as far back as 1682, Claudius, one of the early
travellers to South Africa, labelled his illustrations of Cape
fishes with names such as "sonvis" and "knorhaan" that are
still in use for those same species today.
To avoid confusion, no fish must have more than one official common name in English and one in Afrikaans. That
particular name must refer only to that fish and no other. A
list of the common and scientific names of the fishes of
southern Africa was produced in the J. L. B. Smith Institute
of Ichthyology's Special Publication No. 14 (Smith, 1975),
and it is followed almost entirely here. In several cases,
especially for widely distributed commercially important
species, we have adopted the internationally accepted
English names used by the U.N. Food and Agricultural
In earlier times along South Africa's 3 000 km coastline
were numerous isolated communities. Interested in angling
and pursuing fishing on a small scale, the inhabitants gave
names to the fishes they caught. First, in 1652, came the
Dutch settlers who gave names of well-known European
fishes to the similar fishes that they found at the Cape.
Names like "steenbras", "kabeljou", "snoek", etc. are derived from these. Malay slaves and freemen from the East
brought their names with them, and many were manufactured or adapted as the need arose. The Afrikaans names
for the Cape fishes are relatively uniform. Only as the distance increases from the Cape (e.g. at Knysna, Plettenberg
Bay and Port Elizabeth) do alternative names for the same
species occur.
Many English names started in the Eastern Cape Province, and there are different names for the same fish at
towns or holiday resorts sometimes not 50 km apart. It is
therefore not unusual to find one English name in use at the
Cape, another at Knysna, and another at Port Elizabeth differing from that at East London. The Transkeians use yet
another name, and finally Natal has a name quite different
from all the rest. In fact there is one fish in the original Sea
Fishes of Southern Africa that has 14 different names!
The indigenous peoples of South Africa contributed
practically no names to the fishes, as only the early Strandlopers were fish eaters and we know nothing of their language. The Nguni peoples migrating down from the north
were pastoralists and agriculturalists, not fishermen. The
Pondo, Xhosa, Tembu and Fingo peoples that reached the
Transkei originally kept out of sight and sound of the sea.
Only the outcasts existed in this coastal strip. Some tribes
considered fish flesh akin to snake flesh, and by custom and
taboo most tribes were prohibited from eating it. This is a
tradition which fortunately is fast disappearing.
Three-quarters of a century ago all the different common
names produced little confusion. Groups were too isolated.
Then the country's communications improved. In 1949
J. L. B. Smith collected all the common names he could and
published them in his Sea Fishes of Southern Africa, each,
with its locality, carefully attached to the description and figure of the fish so named. He argued that in this way confusion would be avoided and, by referring to the illustration,
everyone would be able to ascertain exactly which fish was
being discussed. While going a long way to unravel the confusion, the original Sea Fishes of Southern Africa did not resolve it, mainly because of man's inherent laziness and
carelessness and the fact that the Sea Fishes, weighing
20
nearly 3 kg, could hardly be tucked into a fishing bag.
Today the necessity of standardised common names of
our fishes is recognised by all sections of the community, including the angling fraternity. As early as 1959, L. P. D.
Gertenbach in his unpublished Ph.D thesis on "Marine
fishery industries and commerce of the Union of South Africa and South West Africa" wrote:
The fish-producers, fish-traders, fish-consumers, legislators, inspectors, managers of factories, depots, transport firms, exporters, housewives, etc., all have an interest in a clear, unambiguous labelling of fishery products. The realities of the modern world-economy demand the standardization of the English and Afrikaans
common names of at least that hundred or so species of
economic significance.
Nowadays, with good roads, air travel and more leisure,
South Africa has not only shrunk, but is no longer isolated
at the tip of a continent. A man can fish off Angola one day
and in Durban waters the next. Big game anglers come from
all over the world. Fleets of many nations fish the fringe of
our territorial waters, and endemic fishes such as South African hake, snoek, kingklip, etc. can be seen daily on
Japanese, Russian, Spanish and other markets.
Commerce, law and sport need common (vernacular)
names for fishes for legal terminology and for general use.
Substitutes for scientific names are essential for the increasing number of inland aquaria, for popular and scientific
writing in encyclopedias, dictionaries, popular and scientific magazines, newspaper reports and record lists. It has
been shown that common names carefully chosen can be
more stable than scientific names, as witness the list given
by Gilchrist (1902) wherein almost all the scientific names
are obsolete but the common names are just the same
today. Even as far back as 1682, Claudius, one of the early
travellers to South Africa, labelled his illustrations of Cape
fishes with names such as "sonvis" and "knorhaan" that are
still in use for those same species today.
To avoid confusion, no fish must have more than one official common name in English and one in Afrikaans. That
particular name must refer only to that fish and no other. A
list of the common and scientific names of the fishes of
southern Africa was produced in the J. L. B. Smith Institute
of Ichthyology's Special Publication No. 14 (Smith, 1975),
and it is followed almost entirely here. In several cases,
especially for widely distributed commercially important
species, we have adopted the internationally accepted
English names used by the U.N. Food and Agricultural