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

[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.