Words for birds

[regshoe]

An interesting etymological ramble I've been meaning to post about for a while...

Some time ago I was thinking about the Middle English song 'Mirie it is while sumer ilast' (as you do), and I thought, hmm, 'with fugheles song'—surely 'fugheles' is the same word as 'fågel', the Swedish for 'bird'? So I looked it up and yes, it is; more obviously, they're also both the same as the modern English word 'fowl', which must have lost the G somewhere along the way.

'Fowl' used to mean what 'bird' and 'fågel' mean now, referring to the entire class of Aves, but it's rare these days, and most of its surviving uses are in specific contexts to do with domesticated birds and hunting (wildfowl, Guinea fowl, etc.). I'd never heard of any other distinction between 'bird' and 'fowl'; but The Country Housewife and Lady's Director by Richard Bradley, a housekeeping manual published in the mid-eighteenth century which I recently read for fic research, makes a very specific one: according to Bradley,

a Fowl always leads it's young Ones to the Meat, and a Bird carries the Meat to the Young: For this Reaſon, we find that Fowls always make their Neſts upon the Ground, while Birds, for the moſt part, build their Neſts aloft; ſo then our common Poultry are Fowls, the Pheaſant, Partridge, Peacock, Turkey, Buſtard, Quail, Lapwing, Duck, and ſuch like are all Fowls: But a Pigeon is a Bird, and a Stork, or Crane, and a Heron, are Birds, they built their Neſts aloft, and carry Meat to their young ones.

This is the distinction between what modern ornithology calls 'precocial' and 'altricial' birds. I don't know how widespread using 'bird' and 'fowl' like this ever was, but I've never come across it before and it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word 'bird', meanwhile, is rather mysterious. It appears in Old English as a word for young birds, and took a bit of a semantic detour through young animals in general and young humans before becoming a synonym of 'fowl' in Middle English and eventually supplanting it as the generally-used English word for Aves. But where it actually came from, we don't know; it's not part of the fughel/fowl/fågel group of words in Germanic languages, nor is it related to Latin (avis) or French (oiseau) or Welsh (aderyn) or anything else, apparently. I imagine some Anglo-Saxon peasant looking thoughtfully at a robin and going, 'you know what, Egbert? I'm not going to call that a fowl any more. I mean, it just looks more like a bird to me, you know?'

Comments

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

This is all so interesting! I love it when words just pop up in a language and there's no way of tracing where they came from (I think "dog" is another example of that). And the pathways of semantic change are always so idiosyncratic and weird! I wonder if "fugheles" was a direct borrowing from Norse or if they both descend from some proto Germanic/Indo-European root...

[regshoe]

'Dog' is very similar to 'bird' in the relationship between English and Swedish—the common Swedish word (hund) has an English equivalent (hound) which is rare, old-fashioned and/or context-specific, while the common English word (dog) is unrelated—how interesting that it also appeared mysteriously! I think the fowl/fågel words are of common Germanic descent—as liriaen points out below, modern German has the same word—although I have no idea what happened as far back as Indo-European.

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

According to Wiktionary, the proto Germanic originally goes back to the Proto Indo-European root *plew(k) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/plewk Interestingly it's also the source of a lot of words for "rain" in various languages-- etymology is wild!

[regshoe]

Oh wow, that's very interesting—and I see 'fly' and 'flee' are also from the same origin, which makes sense.

[liriaen]

In German, bird (singular) is Vogel, plural Vögel. (Fowl would be Geflügel, which comes from Flügel=wing…)
I adore the idea of ye jolly olde Egbert going, “heya you wing thing, I’mma call you BIRD!”

[regshoe]

Vogel must be the same word again! But how interesting that German also has an alternative word, from a different source.

Jolly olde Egbert is my historical linguistics headcanon now. :D

[isis]

Huh, I actually always assumed that 'fowl' was the term for 'birds you eat' and 'bird' was the term for 'birds you don't eat'. Today I learned!

[regshoe]

That does seem to be one of the ways it's sometimes used—it's interesting how contrasting words with similar meanings have these varying distinctions drawn between them!

[friendofthejabberwock]

Oh interesting! I don't think I knew that "bird" and "fowl" were ever different except in connotation (I've always thought of fowl as more "birds people sometimes hunt"). Etymology is always really neat. And kudos to Egbert's naming skills. :D

[regshoe]

It is very interesting how sometimes the two words are the same, and sometimes they're different in varying ways! Words are complicated...

[osprey_archer]

I love the image of this random peasant just deciding that bird fits those fluffy feathery flying things better than fowl, and proceeding to call them birds accordingly. And then it caught on! Why not! Bird is fun to say.

[regshoe]

It is! Surely that's what really happened :D

[philomytha]

Oh, that's fascinating! You have to wonder where Richard Bradley got his definitions of Fowl and Bird from.

[regshoe]

Perhaps he invented them himself! It's interesting how two words for roughly the same thing can be re-purposed to express a useful distinction like that.

[garonne]

That was fascinating. I never made the connection between Vögel and fowl before. And like Isis I thought the distinction between fowl and birds was whether humans eat them or not!

[regshoe]

All this etymology is fascinating stuff! Losing the G and the vowel changes cunningly disguised the word 'fowl', I think.

[luzula]

Huh, interesting! Yes, it does seem obvious that fowl is related to fågel, but I had never considered where bird came from before.

[regshoe]

Neither had I—it's great fun finding out these bits of etymology and history!

[scintilla10]

Hee! Love the idea of a trendy Anglo-Saxon peasant coming up with new slang for fowl that really took off. ;) This was an entertaining post!

[regshoe]

What are mysteriously-arising new words but trendy slang that takes off? It's my linguistic history headcanon now :D

[lilliburlero]

The Bradley distinction has the feel of something that was stringently enforced in his household ("Darling, please don't wind Daddy up by calling ducks birds, you know how cross he gets, it ruins the whole day") that he was determined to see more widely adopted.

[regshoe]

Heh, it does sound a bit like it!

[luzula]

Heee! I can absolutely see that.

[hyarrowen]

Wow, it's one of things that I never even thought of. They're just birds, y'know? I guess the name stuck because everyone who heard the word thought the same. "Yup, that's a bird all right."

[regshoe]

I suppose so—it's a nice catchy name :D