Getting to the Root of the Name

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Again, and again, I return to my fascination with birds’ names, the words we use to distinguish one from the other. Crows and parrots might be smart enough to have their own names for their own kinds. Chickadees and kinglets probably not so much. But if birds have names for themselves, they are probably like the names of tribal humans, which often end up being translated as either complimentary or solipsistic. As in, “we are what we are and we are good.”

We usually know a tribe by the name given to them by their neighbors (often their enemies). One nomadic people of the Great Plains call themselves the Lakota, which in their own language means “feeling affection, friendly, allied, united.” But they are called the Sioux by most, which is an abbreviation of Nadouessioux, the Objiwa word for this people. It is their word for “adders” (i.e., snakes) and means “enemies.” I imagine that the blue jays have a benign name that they call themselves, like Lakota, and that all the others have another name, like Sioux. Similarly, the Navajo call themselves the Diné, which means “the people,” while the word navajo is Tewa-pueblo for “place of large planted fields.” Historically, the Diné are new arrivals in the Southwest and the Pueblo seem to have thought their agricultural practices were noteworthy.

We don’t know what birds call themselves, so we have made up some wonderful names to know them by. Some of these names, like thrush, are immensely old, derived from Proto Indo-European words, in this case trozdo. This language is thought to have originated in the steppes above the Black and Caspian seas, where several species of thrushes are indeed found.

What connects this collection of sounds (represented by that collection of letters) to these often brown and spot-breasted birds? We don’t know. But we do know that variations of it were taken up among many peoples, including the Romans, who rendered it as turdus, which because the scientific name for a prominent genus that includes the American robin and is also the root of the family name, Turdidae. It made its way into the Germanic languages, initially as thruskjon, and then becoming þhröstr in Old Norse and þræsce in Old English. The letter þ is called “thorn” and represents a hard “th-” sound.

In Middle English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, þræsce became thresh. In the Oxfordshire and Berkshire dialects it was thresher, which eventually was the name given by English colonists to the American thrashers (which do not occur in Europe but look like thrushes).

There are two diseases called thrush, one in infant children and one in hoofed animals, but the names are derived from different words in Greek and Latin that sound similar to the Proto Indo-European trozdo. Through various languages and spellings, they ended up as the same word in English with quite different and unrelated meanings.

“Swallow’’ is another English word that has separate origins with different meanings and yet ended up with the same spelling in the language in which I am writing. The Old Teutonic swalwon is the source of the bird’s name, but the Old Norse word svelgr, which means “whirlpool” with the sense of “devourer” is the origin of the verb that we use for ingesting food literally (and other things proverbially), as well as the noun that represents the act.

Several other bird names are like thrush and swallow: we have been living with the animals for so long that their names are simply what they are. Other such birds include owl, wren, finch, sparrow, heron. These aren’t used for any other purpose, although some of them have become surnames and then given names. I had a friend called Wrenn Reed. Some may remember the actor Peter Finch. Everyone knows Captain Jack Sparrow. More people ought to remember Gil Scott-Heron.

Some origins don’t go as deep. Rather, the bird name is derived from an existing word in a language that can be attributed to the bird’s appearance or behavior. You might think that those hard-to-see wading birds with querulous calls, the rails, share the same etymology as the verb “to rail,” as in “rail against the regime.” But it isn’t so. The bird’s name comes from the Old French (13th century) raale, which is perhaps derived from the verb râler, “to rattle,” and refers to their call. Railing against, in contrast, comes from the Old French raillier, “to tease or joke,” which is ultimately derived from the onomatopoetic Latin ragere, “to roar.”

Some bird’s names, like crow, lark, swan, goose, and crane have gone the other way, so to speak. They are the bird’s name first and then have found their way into our language as verbs and nouns that derive their meaning from the source birds’ behavior or appearance. The process works in reverse as well with common English verbs and nouns being used to give birds their names: creeper, nuthatch, flycatcher, warbler, wagtail, dipper, swift, mockingbird, hummingbird, woodpecker, crossbill, and kingfisher. Of course, these names are often different in other languages. The great crested flycatcher is copetón viajero in Spanish, which means “pompadoured traveler.”

Some names are of quite uncertain origin. These include the names of birds as pedestrian as the gulls. The Oxford English Dictionary, no less, is baffled by the name for this ubiquitous bird. They venture that it is perhaps from the Welsh gwylan and the Cornish guilan and the Breton goelann. All of these are Brythonic

Celtic dialects. The Breton word, they hazard, is as related to the verb goelaff, “to weep,” which certainly captures the feeling of some of the more mournful cries of the gulls. The older name for this bird in English was mæw, and now the British have the redundantly named mew gull.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot and can be contacted at [email protected].