Would a bird by any other name sing as sweet?

Abstract

Ample material for a lexicological and terminological study is provided by over ten thousand species of birds, many with multiple local names. Some of them follow the scientific name, while more creative ones put forward different characteristics of a bird, e.g. Sylvia melanocephala ‘black-headed wood-dweller’ vs fauvette mélanocéphale ‘black-headed warbler’ vs pěnice bělohrdlá ‘white-throated warbler’ vs occhiocotto ‘cooked eye’ vs Sardinian warbler, etc. This onomasiological diversity makes one wonder how bird names are created in different languages, what morphological structures are resorted to, and what semantic features are included in different names of the same bird. Such questions have already been discussed in terminology as far as concepts or artefacts are concerned. This paper compares the names for Sylvia atricapilla and Sylvia melanocephala in some thirty languages, using a combination of intra- and cross-linguistic methods and assembling the two “arch-concepts”. The study points out the specificity of bird names, between linguistic signs, scientific terms and proper nouns or nicknames. The underlying denomination principle consists in selecting a limited number of salient but distinctive semantic features, i.e. characteristics of the bird, and attributing them the corresponding lexical items: nouns, adjectives, suffixes or combining forms.