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Words for birds
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,
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?'
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?'
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