Bird Names Research Articles

First peoples’ names for Australian birds? Only with free, prior and informed consent

First peoples’ names for Australian birds? Only with free, prior and informed consent

Bird names as critical communication infrastructure in the contexts of history, language, and culture

Standardized taxonomies and lists of birds were created to improve communication. They are linguistic infrastructure―biodiversity indices and dictionaries―that have been painstakingly built and maintained and that have enhanced regional and global participation in the study and enjoyment of birds. Inclusion of people has been a core objective in creating and maintaining these standardized lists, and dissatisfaction and desires to overwrite objectionable names have been associated with them for nearly two centuries. Suggestions that bird names should be changed are continuous. Today, these suggestions include the view that some bird names must be changed to make them more accurate, inoffensive, and culturally appropriate to further increase diversity and inclusion among ornithologists and bird watchers. The latter, meritorious goal has been largely successful thus far despite many ongoing objections. Historic examples indicate that large-scale name changes, however, are not needed to accomplish major societal goals of inclusion. Some barriers to inclusion likely remain, and some changes are likely needed for English names. Often overlooked or underappreciated in name change discussions are that: 1) standardized names lists have had numerically staggering success in fostering inclusion of diverse participants globally; 2) stability is vital in such systems, and destabilization has exclusionary effects; 3) dissatisfaction with such lists and the names they include has been ongoing since these naming systems began; 4) important flexibilities exist in conjunction with these communication systems that enhance local and regional communication (e.g., alternative names in English and other languages); and 5) cultural values, important as they are, are neither universally shared nor constant, and thus risk bringing divisiveness and instability when used as a central reason for change. Consideration of standardized lists of bird names as communication systems in the fuller context of history, language, and culture will improve our management of these systems and their continued utility in fostering inclusion. With standardized, stable naming systems acting as a skeleton, proactively building outwards, both within and among languages and cultures, offers a positive and productive way to increase inclusion and to improve cultural and biodiversity conservation.

The inordinate unpopularity of changing all eponymous bird and other organismal names

A proposal by Foley & Rutter (2020) to eliminate all eponymous English bird names was published in the Washington Post, a Washington D.C. newspaper. Fears (2021) reported in this same newspaper that a racist and colonialist history is perpetuated in some English bird names, especially eponyms, and that a social movement is working to change those names. These articles generated hundreds of online comments. I used sentiment analysis on these comments to quantify public reaction to this proposal and topic. Among the 340 scored comments to Foley & Rutter (2020), negative opinions outnumbered positive ones by 3.36:1. Scoring comments by relative magnitude of their sentiment (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3) yielded an average score of -1.18. These results indicate this proposed action is very unpopular among these readers and causes pronounced divisiveness. The 570 scored comments to the Fears (2021) article were also negatively skewed (2.3:1), though less so (average score -0.58). Politicization and the left-right nature of the issue were rampant in the comments on both articles, indicating that the subject was immediately brought into the culture wars (i.e., conflict between liberal and conservative groups over cultural issues). The divisive nature of the topic was also evident within self-identified left-leaning respondents. These results likely underestimate public negativity to this proposal, because the Washington Post is a left-leaning newspaper. Similarly, Guedes et al. (2023) called for eliminating all eponymous organismal names, and a sentiment analysis of comments about that article was even more starkly negative, showing 90 % of commenters opposed. More data like these are needed. There is considerable risk that broadly de-commemorating eponymous organismal names will create more negative than positive outcomes (e.g., through asymmetric polarization and the culture wars). We must also ask: does excluding people who do not share our views achieve our objective of inclusiveness? When is it acceptable to take away someone’s hard-won knowledge by changing key terms in our shared biodiversity linguistic infrastructure? There are more constructive ways to address diversity, equity and inclusion.

«ҚЫЗ ЖІБЕК» ЖЫРЫНДАҒЫ ЭТНОЛЕКСИКАНЫҢ ТАНЫМДЫҚ СИПАТЫ

Ethnolexics is a treasure of life, history and culture of theKazakh nation. On the way of formation of the Kazakh people, the history of ethnolexics, which has developed in different epochs and periods, is deep. The study of ethnolexics in Kazakh linguistics originates in the works of A.Kaidar. The scientist considers the language in ideological, cultural and ethnolinguistic directions. Because the language stores a lot of information and helps others to learn information about the ethnic group. The article deals with the grouping of ethnolectic units in the poem «Kyz Zhibek» into subject and lexico-semantic gro ups based on a paradigmaticapproach. In particular, an ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural analysis of the names of jewelry, weapons, and birds was carried out.

ОРНИТОНИМДІК ФРАЗЕОЛОГИЗМДЕРДІҢ ЭТНОМАРКЕРЛІ БЕЙНЕСІ

In current linguistic researches special attention is paid to the linguistic nature of the views of a native speaker on the views of an ethnocommunity on phenomena in the world through the continuity of «language-ethnicity-culture». Accordingly, the mental image that formed under the subtext of ethnocultural semantics of phraseological units created through using ornitonymic components of the Kazakh language is based on the interrelated continuity of the ethnic group’s ideas about the world of birds and the real world. The goal of the research is to perceptvarious fragments of the world picture (worldview) by considering ornitonymic phraseological units in the linguocultural and linguocognitive aspects. As for the scientific and practical significance of the research work, ornitonymic phrasemes are a lexical unit that includes such complex categories as ethnicity, worldview, culture and mentality. Since the article considers problems of such fields of science as cultural linguistics, cognitive linguistics, phraseosemantics, ethnolinguistics, it helps to replenish the theoretical base of these fields and enrich their practical content. Practical results of the research can be reasonably used in lecture materials on a particular research area within the framework of the anthropocentric paradigm, in coursework and graduate work, and in materials of independently conducted research. During the analysis of the ethnomarker image of ornitonymic phraseological units, indecomposable phrases created through the use of ornitonymic components were collected from «Phraseological Dictionaries of the Kazakh Language» (I. Kenesbaev, A. Kaidar, G. Smagulova) and they were comprehensively studied by using descriptive, comparative, explanatory methods through contextual, linguistic and cultural analysis. In this research, the special object of study is ornitonymic phraseological units that are comprehensively examined from a theoretical and practical point of view within the framework of the anthropocentric paradigm. Phrasemes formed by combining ornitonymic components play a significant role in demonstrating ethnocultural heritage in the language of the nation. In the research, the continuity of the parallel between worlds of «birds and people» is shown through the description and use of the ethnocultural meaning of ornithonym phrasemes. Value and practical significance of the research: studying ornitonymic phrases is mainly focused not only on conveying names of birds and their allegorical meanings, but also on the unity of the ethnic group that cannot be separated from the natural world. The priority of the research work is to consider the origin and formation of ornitonymic phrasemes, their cultural semantics, scope of application and semantic field in various aspects. Ornithonymic phraseology accumulates such characteristics of an ethnos as character, behavior, culture, worldview, and through linguistic units it forms an ornithonymic picture of the world in the human mind. Thus, in ornitonymic phraseological units the original national peculiarity of the ethnos and the cognitive activity of imaginative thinking are shown.

An attempt to identify the birds of Leviticus 11.13–19 using onomatopoeia

We report research into the 19 Hebrew bird names found in Leviticus 11.13–19 using a group cognition methodology (Surowiecki 2004). This is a multi-disciplinary project. The reason for this approach is the degree of uncertainty surrounding the translation of these names, as seen in some Bibles and recent scholarship, where many identifications are at the taxonomic levels of order or family, while some genus- or species-level identifications are implausible. We show that some of the uncertainty is very ancient. Onomatopoeic correlations between the Hebrew names with selected bird calls are examined. We found good-to-strong correlations for 17 of the 19 birds in Leviticus 11.13–19, and suggest 15 as species-level correlations, with one of the others at genus-level, two at family-level, and one at order-level. We conclude with a list of suggested translations resulting from this research. The methodology is explained so that it may be replicated for further research.

Fruits and plants, grains and seeds, birds, precious metals, and substances, or the conceptualization of colors in Tunisian Arabic

Abstract Two opposed views dominate the color scene: Universalism and relativism. Each view has been shown to have fallen short of fully accounting for color perception and naming across languages and cultures. Beyond this controversy, the current article proposes cultural neuroscience as an alternative view to account for color naming and the conceptualization of experiences in color terms in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Cultural neuroscience accumulated massive cross-cultural empirical evidence to the effect that culture greatly impacts brain and cognition. The current article will draw on cultural neuroscience to explain the central role played by culture in shaping cognition and language. Thus, the argument will run as follows: The language in which color is cloaked owes much to experience in social cognition, which is greatly impacted by the cultural environment. This view implies that color naming is under the influence of the cultural needs of color users and cognizers in their respective cultures, with the language they speak as ancillary to culture. In TA, there are 11 color terms, with five focal colors including multiple shades and a form in mes– (–ish), reminiscent of English brownish from brown. Color naming in TA is conceptualized in terms of names of fruits (oranges, apricots, peaches, dates), plants (Jew’s mallow), aromatic plants (lavender), grains (wheat), birds (canary), seeds (pistachio), precious metals (gold), and substances (honey, coffee, chocolate, ash). Color is also manifest as a source domain in various metaphoric and metonymic expressions to conceptualize experiences and events using verbal, nominal, and adjectival derivations.

FUNCTIONAL-STYLE CHARACTERISTICS OF NEUTRAL VOCABULARY IN THE POETICAL WORKS OF F. POTUSHNYAK

The article analyzes the functional and stylistic features of neutral vocabulary in the poetic works of F. Potushnyak. An overview of the views of scientists regarding various approaches to the selection and study of stylistically neutral vocabulary is made. The lexical features of the neutral vocabulary in F. Potushnyak’s language work are studied, and they are represented by examples from the poet’s poetic heritage. Groups of stylistically neutral words reflecting the uniqueness of the author’s worldview are highlighted. Many linguists have addressed the problems of learning neutral vocabulary, but even today there are issues that require detailed consideration. In particular, it is important, in our opinion, to study the neutral vocabulary of fiction. Neutral vocabulary includes words used by all native speakers. This is the basis of oral and written communication. Therefore, the attention of researchers of modern Ukrainian linguistics is drawn to the problems of the lexical-semantic structure of the language of fiction, in particular the language of poetry. The purpose of the work is to highlight the main groups of stylistically neutral words based on the material of F. Potushniak’s poetic works. The object of the research is neutral vocabulary in the poetic works of F. Potushnyak, the subject of the research is the study of the peculiarities of the use of stylistically neutral words in poetic works. The research uses the following methods: the general method of linguistic observation and description of linguistic phenomena, the method of contextual analysis, and the method of component analysis. The author of the article focuses her attention precisely on stylistically neutral words, which she clearly distinguishes from the works of F. Potushnyak. On the basis of the conducted research, the following groups of stylistically neutral words were selected: vocabulary that reflects objects of the surrounding reality; vocabulary reflecting natural phenomena; vocabulary reflecting the names of things related to human life and their parts – household items, work tools; vocabulary for marking the names of organs and parts of the human body; vocabulary for marking the names of animals and birds; vocabulary for marking the names of plants. It was established that, according to semantic features, the studied poetic texts contain the most neutral vocabulary, which reflects the objects of the surrounding reality.

Lexico-semantic characteristics of composite ornithonyms in the Yakut and Altai languages

The issues of comparative language learning are among the most relevant topics in modernlinguistics. The comparative typological method is especially important when studying the word-formationsystems of two languages in order to identify similarities and differences. Complex words actively replenishthe lexical stock of the language in all its functional varieties. There is a fairly voluminous layer of vocabularyof composite words representing the names of birds – ornithonyms. The abundance of composite words inthe Yakut and Altai languages used for naming birds, and the lack of work on their comprehensive researchand systematization indicates the need for scientific research of bird names. The purpose of this work isto study the lexical and semantic features and word-formation structures of composite words denoting thenames of birds in the Yakut and Altai languages. In order to achieve this goal, the following tasks are solved:identification of the functional meaning of composite words; consideration of the history of the study of birdnames in Turkic linguistics; systematization of bird names in the Yakut and Altai languages; establishmentof the main lexico-semantic groups, methods of formation and structural models of composite ornithonyms.This study uses a set of methods: comparative, descriptive and quantitative methods. The scientific noveltyof the work consists in the fact that the issues of comparative analysis of composite words denoting thenames of birds in the Yakut and Altai languages were not the subject of special study. The theoretical andpractical significance of the work is that its materials can be used in the study of composite ornithonyms inother Turkic languages, as well as in the development of lecture courses, seminars on vocabulary.

Arrangement of Modifier Lexemes in Common Bird Names Based on Lexical Domains in Malay Language

Arrangement of Modifier Lexemes in Common Bird Names Based on Lexical Domains in Malay Language

Wild bird names in old and contemporary dialectological material from Greater Poland

The dialectological record of wild bird names is scant. This article presents the Greater Polish material covering wild bird names obtained as part of the field research carried out in the Pobiedzisko commune (Poznań poviat) and completed in 2022. Contemporary names are juxtaposed with the dialectal material collected by Adam Tomaszewski (the 1930s) and the material found in Atlas języka i kultury ludowej Wielkopolski (Atlas of Greater Poland’s regional language and folk culture) (the 1970s and the 1980s) for the same area. The overview of the old and contemporary material allows conclusions on the functioning of dialectal and general Polish names of wild birds gathered by three generations of Poznań dialectologists and indication of the research needs as regards recording names from the thematic field NATURE (not only bird names).

Descriptiveness of Common Bird Names in the Malay Language

Descriptiveness of Common Bird Names in the Malay Language

LINGUISTIC UNITIES FORMED IN CONNECTION WITH THE REFLECTION OF THE PREDATORY BIRD DOMESTICATION PROCESS

The study of linguistic units has a great interest and importance for linguists, formed as a result of the reflection process of wild birds‘ domestication. The significant impact on humankind‘s consciousness has left knowledge about the benefits and harms of birds, their properties, and their essence. Birds have a special place in human cognition, superstitions, and beliefs. People cherish them, as they are able to predict the changes in seasonal phenomena. Studying birds‘ behavior, manners, and gestures, people concluded that birds can anticipate disasters occurring in nature, thus people can be warned. Human beings understand and share the close liaison between man and bird, being a part of nature, formed in unity, who have a common habitat and air, they breathe. Linguistic data (legends, phraseological units, and proverbs, riddles, parables) evidences the fact that birds occupy a significant place in a person's life, his worldview. The wild birds‘ domestication and the areas of their application concepts are researched and discussed in this article. The birds‘ names and their origin are linguistically analyzed through the prism of the Kazakh people‘s features, characterizing their nature and cognition. The names related to prey birds were created, first of all, to fill the lack of titles in a particular nomination phenomenon, and secondly, to enrich figurative linguistic units. As for the names, some were formed linguistically, others cognitively. As a result, in the Kazakh language, there were collected the names of literary, folk, and local wild pray birds, their lexical layer, and word formation. And as a result, there were revealed their applicative features the phraseological, paremiological fund, figurative, and, of course, their evaluative properties, as well as previously used definitions, now out-ofuse terms, related to birds.

Colour Name ‘Shkhue’ in Adyghe Linguistic Culture: Etymology, Internal Form, Semantics

The etymological and historical-semasiological analysis of the word ‘shkhue’, the designation of one of the most significant sacred flowers in the Adyghe linguoculture, has been carried out. The analysis of this linguistic unit is accompanied by a study of the semantic development and word-formation relations of single-root words grouped around the main generating base, represented by the root word ‘shkhue’, in the modern language. The purpose of the study is to research the historical and semantic development of the color lexeme ‘shkhue’in the Adyghe linguistic culture. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the genesis and further development of the word is reconstructed, which is at the head of the systemic semantic and word-formation relations between linguistic units united by genetic kinship. In the course of the study of cognate words, not only the type of semantic relations, but the possibilities of maintaining or breaking (full or partial) semantic links are studied. Results: Based on the analysis of texts and dictionaries, language units that form a nest with a ‘shkhue’ top were collected. The chain of semantic transitions in this group of nominations is restored. The internal form of derived units is clarified. The originality of metaphors is commented. It has been established that the continuants of this nest implement semantic models that are characterized by seriality and regularity. On the basis of color naming, other color naming conventions of a wide range (all shades of the changing color of the sky), the names of birds as inhabitants of the sky (or by the color of their plumage), animals by coat color, as well as designations from the sphere of magic and traditional medicine (drugs, poison), and finally, words denoting fear, blurred perception, etc.

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

MEARNS, Barbara and MEARNS, Richard. Biographies for birdwatchers: the lives of those commemorated in Western Palearctic bird names

MEARNS, Barbara and MEARNS, Richard. <i>Biographies for birdwatchers: the lives of those commemorated in Western Palearctic bird names</i>

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UKRAINIAN BIRD NOMENCLATURE IN SCIENTIFIC USE: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

The period from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century should be considered as the beginning of the creation of the Ukrainian natural nomenclature. At that time, I. Verkhratsky published several lists of specifically Ukrainian names of animals and plants. More than two thousand names of birds are in these lists. The second period of development of the national bird nomenclature fell at the end of the first third of the 20th century and lasted very little. It was distinguished by the fact that M. Scharlemann published a dictionary with approximately 1.900 Ukrainian bird names for almost 400 species. The names mostly related to species of common fauna, and the main names were chosen among them. Since then, they have been widely used. In this dictionary, only a small number of names were to exotic birds. Unfortunately, this period was replaced by the third stage, which lasted from the end of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1980s, when the national nomenclature of birds was subjected to russianization, that is, a significant number of Russian names were used. At the same time, for educational needs, a number of foreign names were introduced into the Ukrainian language to denote species that occur outside of Ukraine. In general, the use of bird names of common fauna was characteristic of these periods. The fourth period of formation of the Ukrainian bird nomenclature began in the mid-1980s and lasted for ten years. During this period, O.Markevich and K. Tatarko published a trilingual zoological dictionary and listed Ukrainian names for almost 860 bird species in it, that is, at that time, more than twice the number of species compared to those found in the domestic fauna. The names referred mainly to Palearctic birds. Expansion of the functioning of the national nomenclature within the framework of the world fauna was initiated at this stage. The fifth stage, for which specifically Ukrainian names were returned to use, took place from the end of the 1990s during the first decade of the 21st century. Based on this, a complete system of the Ukrainian bird nomenclature of the world was formed in the second decade of the current century, i.e. in sixth period. The Ukrainian synonymous names of birds were used to a large extent for this purpose, as well as names from eight foreign languages were borrowed. Currently, changes in the Ukrainian nomenclature system of birds are taking place under the influence of new taxonomic studies.

Making a Bird AI Expert Work for You and Me.

As powerful as fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is, responding your query with a bird name of "Whip-poor-will" or "Mallard" probably does not make much sense. This however commonly accepted in the literature, underlines a fundamental question interfacing AI and human - what constitutes transferable knowledge for human to learn from AI? This paper sets out to answer this very question using FGVC as a test bed. Specifically, we envisage a scenario where a trained FGVC model (the AI expert) functions as a knowledge provider in enabling average people (you and me) to become better domain experts ourselves. Assuming an AI expert trained using expert human labels, we anchor our focus on asking and providing solutions for two questions: (i) what is the best transferable knowledge we can extract from AI, and (ii) what is the most practical means to measure the gains in expertise given that knowledge? We propose to represent knowledge as highly discriminative visual regions that are expert-exclusive and instantiate it via a novel multi-stage learning framework. A human study of 15,000 trials shows our method is able to consistently improve people of divergent bird expertise to recognise once unrecognisable birds. We further propose a crude but benchmarkable metric TEMI and therefore allow future efforts in this direction to be comparable to ours without the need of large-scale human studies.

Bird Names in «Tarjuman» and Their Pragmatic Features

The study of the history of a language based on a comparison of linguistic data in ancient written monuments with language units actively used in modern society is of high importance today. Comparing the vocabulary of peoples of the same origin, it is possible to identify common points and some differences in the system of thinking, mentality, as well as on the basis of similarities in the language with a long history, concepts fixed in their cognitive consciousness. For this purpose, the article considers ornithonyms from the Turkic written monument "Tarjuman" in comparison with the materials of the modern Kazakh language. Also, to identify the features of some names of birds in a variable meaning, the study used data from other Kipchak literary written sources published in the Middle Ages. The authors revealed the semantic potential and a number of pragmatic features of bird names in modern Kazakh proverbs and sayings. In connection with the names of birds in the Kazakh language, the native speaker of the language of proverbs and sayings, set expressions, figurative usages drew conclusions by analyzing the features of usage associated with the ethnic differentiation of the people. In the course of the study, such phenomena as the semantic circle of bird names assigned to the monument of medieval writing «Tarjuman», their narrowing or expansion, resulting in an increase in semantic potential, spending on a variable value, positive and negative assessment given to them by the population, the system spiritual values through which they are expressed, the place and significance in the religious knowledge of modern Kazakh people were compared on the basis of proverbs and sayings.

Bird conservation status and cultural values in Indigenous Mexican communities: towards a bioculturally informed conservation policy

BackgroundWe summarize comparative ethnoornithological data for ten Mexican Indigenous communities, an initial step towards a comprehensive archive of the avian diversity conserved within Mexico’s Indigenous territories. We do so by counting highlighted species listed for bird conservation status on widely recognized “red lists” and their cultural value to build biocultural policies in Mexico for their conservation.MethodsIndigenous bird names for each study site were determined to allow calculation of the “Scientific Species Recognition Ratio” (SSRR) for high cultural value birds obtained across communities. This demonstrated patterns of cultural prominence. A matrix of 1275 bird versus seven biocultural values was analysed using a correspondence analysis (InfoStat/L-v2020) to illustrate patterns of concordance between bird conservation status and cultural values.ResultsThis paper contributes to quantitative and qualitative data on the role of ethnoornithology and ethnobiology in biocultural conservation. The areas studied provide refugia for almost 70% of the Mexican avifauna within a fraction of 1% of the national territory, that is 769 bird species recorded for all communities. The global correspondence of regions of biological and linguistic megadiversity is well established, while linguistic diversity is widely accepted as a good proxy for general cultural diversity. Our correspondence analysis explained 81.55% of the variation, indicating a strong relation between cultural importance and bird conservation status. We propose three main categories to establish a bioculturally informed public policy in Mexico for the conservation of what we described as high, medium, and bioculturally prominent bird species all include cultural value in any material or symbolic aspect. High are those species appearing on any threatened list, but also considered in any endemic status, while medium include threatened listed species. The last category included species not necessarily listed on any threat list, but with a wide range of social and cultural uses. We suggest that the concept might be extended to other species of biocultural importance.ConclusionsWe argue that bird conservation policies should be biocultural, that is they should recognize birds of cultural value on a par with bird species “of special interest” because they are most critical for biodiversity conservation. The desire of local people to protect their traditional community lands and livelihoods can be an effective biodiversity conservation strategy, which should be recognized in national biocultural policies.