In Other Words Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names by Stephen Moss
by Stephen Moss, Faber & Faber, 316 pages
Many a birder has found the name “prothonotary warbler” to be a bewildering mouthful. We struggle to see the connection between a North Carolina songbird and a high court or papal official. It turns out this linguistic failure is not ours alone. In Mrs.
Moreau’s Warbler, Stephen Moss tells us that when President Harry Truman was introduced to papal officials in the Vatican, who wore uniforms the color of the aforementioned warbler’s gleaming-yellow head, he asked, “What the hell is a prothonotary?”
Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler is ostensibly the story of how birds got their names, but what gives this book its momentum is the story of how history impacted the English language, chiseling it into its present cosmopolitan state. In the face of conquests and colonizations, the once-staid English language flung off its inertia, digested words from diverse tongues, and accrued such a degree of relevance that today one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, some 1.5 billion people, are more or less fluent in it.
English — along with French, Hindi, and many others — is a “daughter language” of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). One of the oldest bird names with PIE roots may be that of a goose. Many of our ancestors would have seen this familiar water bird, and linguists think the bird was originally called ghans.
A British naturalist and television producer, Moss delves into a miscellany of bird names and ornithologists who later tweaked or scrapped these names, or renamed birds after each other. While it improves our appreciation of, say, the delightful puffin to know that its name means “little friar of the sea,” the book sometimes devolves into reading like trivia. At his best, Moss situates the naming of birds in significant historical moments, such as when the Normans invaded England in the 11th century. After the conquest, Old English remained the humble language of peasants, Norman French ascended to become the language of court and literature, and Latin retained its primacy in religion and education.
Against this backdrop of cohabiting languages, Moss parses out the bird names that have survived from Old English (dove) from the ones with French origin (partridge, eagle, peregrine). The kingfisher, for instance, was “isen ” or “isern” in Old English, meaning iron-colored or blue, but by the early 15th century, it had morphed into the compound name “King’s fisher,” which is probably “a direct translation of the French roi pêcheur.”
After Old English had dwelled for some time with Norman French, the former’s status as an obscure and inflexible Germanic tongue improved, and an offspring, now called Middle English, was born. While old German words, such as lark (songbird) persisted, fresh words from French and other tongues were absorbed, and this is one reason why the English language is rich in synonyms today. Even bird names can do double duty. As Moss points out, sniper also refers to a hidden sharpshooter, and teal also signifies a blue-green color. King Lear insulted his deceitful daughter Goneril, by calling her a “detested kite.” An oriole by any other name may sing as sweetly, but names (and language) are wired deeply into us, and we don’t care to lose our Baltimore oriole. Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler leans on vivid details and capsule biographies of ornithologists for its structure, and while the absence of a clear narrative could put some readers off, the book can provide meaningful clarifications to a birder. For instance, how the nightjar got its name: The prefix ‘night,’ of course, refers to the bird being nocturnal. Moss writes, “‘Jar’ is, in fact, a corruption of the word ‘churr’ representing the bird’s weird rattling call, which echoes across moors and heaths, at dusk on spring and summer evenings, and which to the untrained ear sounds more mechanical than avian in origin.”
Name origins aside, today’s birders are more likely to be up in arms when organizations like the American Ornithologists’ Union announce that it is splitting or lumping a species. In 1973, for instance, the AOU decided to lump the orange-and-black songbird, the Baltimore oriole (who lends its name to the professional baseball team) with the Bullock’s oriole, and called the new species the “northern oriole.”
Misery ensued, until Canadian ornithologists later discovered that despite some interbreeding, the Baltimore and the Bullock’s orioles are two separate species, and, in 1995, to the relief of “devoted followers of the Baltimore Orioles,” the original names were reinstated. An oriole by any other name may sing as sweetly, but names (and language) are wired deeply into us, and we don’t care to lose our Baltimore oriole. To that end, a birder might be forgiven for asking: “What the hell is a northern oriole?”