Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks uncovers the stories behind the incredible diversity of bird names, explains what many scientific names actually mean and takes a look at the history of the system by which we name birds. Ray Reedman explores the natural history and folklore behind bird names, in doing so unlocking the mystery of the name Scoter, the last unexplained common name of a British bird species.
Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks uncovers the stories behind the incredible diversity of bird names, explains what many scientific names actually mean and takes a look at the history of the system by which we name birds. Ray Reedman explores the natural history and folklore behind bird names, in doing so unlocking the mystery of the name Scoter, the last unexplained common name of a British bird species.
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Overview
Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks uncovers the stories behind the incredible diversity of bird names, explains what many scientific names actually mean and takes a look at the history of the system by which we name birds. Ray Reedman explores the natural history and folklore behind bird names, in doing so unlocking the mystery of the name Scoter, the last unexplained common name of a British bird species.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784270926 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pelagic Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Language is a living entity which has its own roots and evolution. Society provides the mechanism of usage which drives those changes. This short section offers a brief and very general background to these matters.
ROOTS AND ROUTES
There will be frequent reference to the roots of words and to some of the routes taken by words towards their modern forms. It helps to realise that most modern European languages belong to an Indo-European group which includes Classical Greek and Latin, as well as those which we now refer to as Germanic and Romance (Italic) languages. Evolution in language happens a lot quicker than it does in birds, so words can change within a hundred years, and a lot more in a thousand, but the changes are often traceable. The diagram below shows the relationships between the main languages which contribute to this story.
In simple terms, Greek influenced Latin, because the later civilisation of Classical Rome looked to the Golden Age of culture and learning which had preceded theirs. The Romans created an empire which left a heavy legacy in the languages in Spain, Portugal, France and others, including modern Italy: these are the Romance languages, meaning that they were derived from the Roman tongue, spoken Latin.
Meanwhile, further north, the Germanic languages prevailed and included those of the Franks, the Goths, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Norse among others. These were the peoples whose languages evolved into such as modern German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. In Britain, and some other parts of Europe, an older Celtic civilisation left a legacy of Welsh, Gaelic, Breton, and others.
The Roman occupation of Britain left almost no direct influence on our language, because any Latin remaining after the Romans left was erased by the subsequent influx into Britain of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. By the time the Vikings arrived, England was Anglo-Saxon, and spoke a Germanic form of language, to which Viking Norse merely added another and different layer, but mainly in the north and east of the country. The influence of trade and the Church had reintroduced small elements of Latin into Anglo-Saxon. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was part of a Viking quarrel (the word Norman had evolved from Norse Men), but the court of William the Conqueror had espoused the culture and language of France and brought to England a Latin-based tongue, Old French. For several hundred years, this was the language of the ruling classes, who were constantly reinforced by new blood from France, through marriage and inheritance. Slowly and of necessity this Romance language blended with the Germanic to give English an enriched form which was unique in Europe. A very simple illustration is that the living cow or ox (both Germanic in root) becomes beef (from French) when slaughtered.
This blend was reinforced later, when the Renaissance (the rebirth of Classical learning) came to Tudor Britain, bringing with it a more intense study of Latin and Greek. By the time Dr Johnson formulated his dictionary in the eighteenth century, Latin, which had always been the language of Christian scholars, was the universal language of lay-scholars in Europe and had been re-injected into the bloodstream of formal English. For the first time there was 'correct' English, a norm for the educated classes – and that was to become available to the entire population within a hundred years or so.
But we also have to remember that there was no single form of universal spoken English in Britain in the eighteenth century. Regional differences were often huge, and locally developed words and turns of phrase made for a series of sub-languages, or dialects. In these different forms there was much colour and variety, often now lost, largely because of universal education and the advent of mass media – radio, television and cinema in particular.
WIDENING HORIZONS
So what happened to the local names which existed in dialect? Some of them didn't go anywhere, of course: 'wheatear' and 'wagtail', for example, remain and have been elevated to name whole families. Other historical and local vocabulary travelled abroad to become established in other parts of the world: for example the Cornish 'murre' and the Scottish 'dovekie' both emigrated and survived in North America.
In Britain today we have lost many of the subtle differences which existed in a population of largely rural communities before the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Industry and technology slowly drew people away from the countryside and created a new mix of relatively mobile workforces. With greater urban integration came an increasing separation from nature and from its vocabulary. The dialect forms, which gave me the Pewit as a child, were fading into history. Words need to be used to survive, and even technology has its ephemeral vocabulary: 'cat's whisker' and 'tranny' are already in the museum of radio vocabulary, yet both had currency in my lifetime.
From the Renaissance onwards, Natural Scientists tried to make sense of the world of nature, and that included agreeing formal names in the English language. Even in this sphere of influence, names are adopted and then changed. My Green Plover existed for a while as the accepted name for what we now formally call a Lapwing, but the latter has now become the name of a whole family.
Universal education made society more literate and gave it access to books: the language of scientists and of amateur birders eventually met on the same ground. There was now a 'correct' form, which left the colourful variants of the past strewn by the paths of history. More recently, the Internet has given us access to information about pretty well any bird in the world, while air travel allows a new breed of 'world birders' to see them. We now need bird names in a worldwide dimension: Lapwing in my own records is now prefaced with Northern, Southern or Masked, so that I can distinguish the familiar home species from those seen in Trinidad and Australia.
But for the popular language all is not lost. We should be eternally grateful to Bill Oddie, who knows a good dialect word when he hears one: thanks to his frequent use of the term on television, the Shetland dialect name Bonxie is now widely used even by Sassenachs and Southerners, because it is so much more fun than Great Skua. Birders do in fact like colourful names – witness the formal retention of Dunnock after the attempt to impose Hedge Accentor a few years ago. In any case, the wheel is turning all the time: new dialect is being formed, as birders communicate in a language born of haste and technology: shorthand words such as 'barwit' and 'mipit' seem to prove that formality has only so much influence. Add to that the power of knowledge, and its vocabulary of 'larids' and 'hirundines', 'primary projection' and 'secondary coverts', and you find that the birding community has its own enclave, separated this time by culture, rather than by geography. A new birder may often feel like a foreigner in a strange land with its own language and dialect. But all is not lost: most birders are friendlier than they were a few years ago, and that may be because technology now tells us where to flock.
CHAPTER 2
FRAMEWORKS
The activities of scholars led a transition from folk-names to formal names. This created a functional structural framework which today allows ornithologists and amateur birders alike to appreciate the complex world of birds. This section summarises the movements which created that framework.
THE MILESTONES
In discussing the content and history of bird names, certain reference points are important. There are several good histories of ornithology available, and fortunately it is not my mission to write another. In this case I need names and dates which are specific to the discussion of bird names. Much as I am a fan of Darwin, he had little influence on the naming of birds, so he is not included. Shakespeare was not an ornithologist, of course, but his use of language of the natural world provides some good evidence. A special word for Francis Willughby (1635–1672): he was the true naturalist in the partnership with Ray, but the latter outlived him to publish their joint work and his name is mercifully easier to type. Below are just some of the milestones along the road towards modern bird names. Some are historical events which bring about significant changes of culture and language. Some individual figures have significant influence on the shape of names, and some provide the evidence.
• Aristotle, 384–322 BCE: the 'father' of natural history, whose work was the model until the eighteenth century
• Pliny (the Elder), 23–79 CE: Naturalis Historia
• Hesychius of Alexandria, 5th (?) century CE: Greek grammarian and lexicographer
• St Cuthbert, 635–687 CE: founder of the Farne Islands sanctuary
• Norman Conquest of England, 1066
• Albertus Magnus, ?– 1280: De Falconibus
• Geoffrey Chaucer: The Parliament of Fowls (many English bird names), 1382–1383
• Christopher Columbus landed on Trinidad, 1498
• William Turner: A Short and Succinct History of the Principal Birds noticed by Pliny and Aristotle ('the first bird book'), 1544
• Conrad Gesner: the bird volume of Historia Animalium, 1555
• Ulisse Aldrovandi (Aldrovandus): Ornithology, 1599–1603
• William Shakespeare, 1564–1616
• Jamestown, Virginia, founded, 1607
• The Pilgrim Fathers founded Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1620
• Christopher Merrett: Pinax Rerum Naturalium Britannicarum, 1666
• Walter Charleton: Onomasticon Zoicon, 1668
• Francis Willughby and John Ray: Ornithology, 1678
• Carl Linnaeus: 10th edition of Systema Naturae (binomial system), 1758
• Thomas Pennant: British Zoology, 1761–
• Botany Bay colony founded, 1788
• John Latham: General Synopsis of Birds, 1781–
• Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne, 1789
• Alexander Wilson: American Ornithology, 1808–1814
• Charles Lucien Bonaparte: major revision of American Ornithology, 1825–1833
• William Yarrell: The History of British Birds, 1843
• John Gould: The Birds of Australia, 1840–1848
• Alfred Newton: the foundation of the British Ornithologists' Union (BOU), 1858
• Elliott Coues/ Henry Seebohm: promotion of trinomials, late nineteenth century
• International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, 1901
• Hartert, Ticehurst, Witherby & Jourdain: A Hand-list of British Birds, 1912
• Thomas Coward: Birds of the British Isles, 1920–1925 (BOU 1923 list)
• International Ornithological Committee (now the International Ornithological Union): the IOC list (definitive list of English bird names), 1990– (ongoing)
DEVELOPMENTS BEFORE LINNAEUS
English names represent our vernacular, which is of course paralleled in other languages and cultures. But the other half of the story is about the scientific names, which are Latinate, though not necessarily all Latin. Aristotle, long considered the father of natural history, was after all Greek. In truth, both languages were used widely by scholars throughout the post-Roman period. Before Linnaeus developed his Systema Naturae in the eighteenth century, the Babel of languages spoken throughout Europe was transcended by the culture of the abbeys and monasteries. The outposts of the Christian Church were oases of learning, which had evolved from the times of the Roman Empire, so for well over a thousand years all scholarship and much communication were in Latin, heavily underpinned by Classical Greek. The universities were founded in that tradition, which transmitted into the late-medieval Renaissance and onwards, through the Age of Reason and into the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. Therefore Latin in particular was still the obvious and natural medium in which Linnaeus and his secular contemporaries wrote and communicated.
While the Renaissance was strictly the rebirth of Classical learning, the subsequent Age of Enlightenment was a period when the standards of the classical past were applied to modern reasoning, in science, political philosophy, language and the arts. It was the age of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Dr Johnson, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and other such major figures, of which Carl Linnaeus was one.
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), was not the first to attempt classification: as David Attenborough put it, 'the first task of ornithology was to name birds'. This tradition in fact had its roots in the work of Aristotle, and many scholars had made attempts to build on this idea, though sometimes with rather odd logic, to say the least: the medieval Church had rules about eating only fish on Fridays, so it was convenient to classify some edible water birds as fish.
In the sixteenth century, scholars such as the Englishman Turner, the Swiss-born Gesner and the Italian Aldrovandus did much to promote the investigation and understanding of birds. In 1544 Turner produced what has been described as the first bird book. In 1555, Gesner's work included accounts of 217 birds. Between 1599 and 1603 Aldrovandus produced a monumental three-volume lifetime's work which named birds in four languages and classified them in a general way.
In 1666, Christopher Merrett published a highly incomplete and unreliable list, which nonetheless contained over 120 identifiable birds, including some binomial and even trinomial forms (see below). The list included names like Aquila and Milvus, which are still retained, but many which are not. Pica is there for the Magpie, but so is Pica Marina for the 'Sea Pye' (the Oystercatcher). In 1668 Charleton produced the Onomasticon Zoicon, which attempted to classify birds with reference to the work of his predecessors, and named the species in English, Latin and Greek.
This work was followed by a major contribution by Willughby and Ray, their Ornithology, published in 1678. In that work, based largely on Willughby's notes, Ray followed earlier examples by splitting water birds and land birds, but made further subdivisions, according to key features of appearance and habit. Much of the importance of this work lies in its influence on the development of the English names of birds.
LINNAEUS AND THE LINNAEAN SYSTEM
As stated above, there was much activity not only in Britain but elsewhere in Europe before Linnaeus produced a comprehensive framework which really worked. First published in 1734, and in eleven later editions, the Systema Naturae became the gold standard of classification and nomenclature. This is a monumental work which spans a huge part of the natural world: birds were just one part of it. Given that his name will forever be linked with the international system of naming all living things, it seems odd that in later life, upon his ennoblement in his native Sweden, Linnaeus changed his own name to Karl von Linné. In 1788, ten years after his death, the Linnean Society of London was founded, and to this day the society keeps Linnaeus's botanical, zoological and library collections.
The system
One has to admire the logic which underpins the system, since it breaks down all living creatures into comprehensible chunks. Linnaeus developed a formula which really worked. Under that, the tree of relationships between each species can be traced. The parentage of the Arctic Loon/Diver works thus:
• Kingdom: Animalia (all animals, including mammals, birds, insects, etc.)
• Phylum: Chordata (vertebrate animals)
• Class: Aves (birds)
• Order: Gaviiformes: those resembling loons (divers)
• Family: Gaviidae (loons/divers)
• Genus: Gavia (loon /diver)
• Species: Gavia arctica (Black-throated Loon/Diver)
The final line for Linnaeus was the two-part (binomial) form, Gavia arctica (though, as will be discussed later, the uses of 'loon' and 'diver' are cultural issues between North America and Britain).
Trinomials
Linnaeus's was not the last word, however, since others continued to develop variants and alternatives. These were often controversial, with some views hotly disputed. In the late nineteenth century the concept of creating trinomials slowly emerged in America to eventually win wide favour: these provide names for subspecies (races). As a result, the Atlantic form of the Black-throated Diver is Gavia arctica arctica (the nominate race), while that of the north Pacific (Siberia and Alaska) is the subspecies Gavia artica viridigularis. Another example: the British race of the Yellow Wagtail is Motacilla flava flavissima, one of a number of subspecies of M. flava.
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)
The Linnaean system had survived more than a century and a half of debate and challenge when, in 1901, the scientists of the world met to establish the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2016 Ray Reedman.
Excerpted by permission of Pelagic Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
1 Historical Perspectives 1
Roots and routes 2
Widening horizons 3
2 Frameworks 5
The milestones 5
Developments before Linnaeus 7
Linnaeus and the Linnaean system 8
The evolution of formal English names 10
3 Inside the System 14
The matrix 14
Classic deviations 15
The names behind the names 15
Things in their place 17
Cardinal points 20
And the scientists didn't always do so well 21
Waits and all 22
4 The Names and the Stories 24
5 New Horizons 209
Crossing the great divide: North American names 210
Let's go fossicking: Australian names 220
The Trinidad trail 239
Journey's end 251
6 Appendix the Legends Behind the Names 253
Avian transmutations in the Classical world 254
Other legends 258
Bibliography 262
Index 265