A Thesaurus of Bird Names: Etymology of European Lexis Through Paradigms: v. 4 by Michel Desfayes (Mixed Media, 1998) for sale online

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The result of a lifetime's work, including 11 years a professional ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution, this great work will be of value to linguists as well as as natural scientists. One innovation is the distinction of the origin of words into chromatic, acoustic, morphological and kinetic categories. The paradigms illustrate how the relationships of many European terms predate Latin and Greek. A bird by any other name...These two massive and magnificent volumes contain around 100 000 bird names in 40 or so Indo-European languages. About 450 European and Middle Eastern species, with a few well-known introduced birds - chicken, turkey, etc. - are covered in Volume 1. Within each species, the names are listed by language from Irish Gaelic east to the Indo-European languages of Afghanistan and neighbouring regions, then Caucasian and Hamito-Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) and finally Romany (Gypsy). The modern language groups involved are thus Celtic, Romance, Slavonic, Lettic (Baltic), Germanic, Albanian, Greek, Iranian, the enigmatic Basque tongue, Hamito-Semitic and Caucasian.There are cross-references within each group of names to appendices in Volume II and species numbers in Volume I. The breadth and depth of coverage is truly astonishing: for example, out of 13 pages of names for the Magpie Pica pica, seven pages are dedicated to German appellations, and among 20 pages for the Wren Troglodytes troglodytes, five focus on French names, prominent among which is roitelet ('kinglet') now appropriated for Regulus. Working on the premise that local speech, the true 'fossils' of vocabulary, is of pre-eminent importance for etymological research, the author also deals in masterly fashion with names in the dialects of English.Preceding the all-important paradigms in Volume II is an appendix of bird names in ancient languages and one giving the sources of scientific names borrowed from Greek, Latin or regional speech, also a subsection on unidentified species (21 languages) The paradigms (or filiations) attempt to show in family trees of words the semantic relationships of groups of European terms (bird names and many others), thus allowing models or structures to be studied rather than isolated words and clearly demonstrating that almost all roots are common to all major groups of European languages, often even to some outside Europe. Appendices 3-6 cover, respectively, paradigms of terms of chromatic (claimed to be the most complete collection of colour words ever compiled), morphological, acoustic and kinetic origin. The following topics are dealt with in appendices 7-15: arm, wing, articulation; to seize or capture; smallness; diving and swimming birds, various ways of diving; flight and lightness; circle and birds (i.e. rotund or circling in the air); names for 'bird'; miscellaneous names (nestling, feather, flock, etc.); lexicons of falconry, etc.More than 2000 bat names are given in Appendix 16, the names of over 1000 bird species from francophone overseas countries in Appendix 17 and some 8000 Latin-American names (Spanish, Portuguese and Amerindian) for 1700 species in Appendix 18. This book is a stupendous achievement, a philological tour de force, a celebration of birds, and of man's relationship with nature, expressed through the wondrous gift of language; it is endlessly entertaining, instructive and illuminating. A few moments of browsing and you are likely to get hooked; when it comes to word search, the CD-rom is recommended. M.G. Wilson. Ibis, The International Journal of Avian Science, 142: 333-334, 2000 This monumental work deals not with scientific names or Linnaean nomenclature, but with names for birds that exist in other than the scientific idiom - the so-called common or folk names for birds. The first volume is a compilation of such names for all of the species of European and Middle Eastern birds, plus a few others that are almost universally known, such as the domestic fowl (