Why is it that basically no two languages use the same word for butterfly? Seems like the Romance languages use totally different words to depict the butterfly. What is the reason for this and are there other examples of this conumdrum?
IANALinguist, but I heard an explanation from a linguist. The theory is that, as people from their point of origin, they take their languages with them. However until very recently both people and languages then rapidly became isolated in their new homes and the language started to evolve. Over time words change their sounds, and new words replace old words, creating new languages.
However the priests, nobility, tax collectors and other upper echelons of society tend to remain much more geographically mobile and in contact with the homeland for much longer. Basically, the rulers of the newly conquered or settled territories intermarried with the old nobility and maintained family contacts. Additionally treaties, trade agreements and rituals had to be passed around between the new territories and the old and that all stopped the languages used for those purposes from drifting too far from each other.
As a result language used regularly by those groups tend to maintain a great degree of similarity over time. So words like “war”, “sword”, “priest”, “honour”, “justice” and so forth were strongly fixed and unable to change.
In contrast, commoners were very isolated, most of them living and dying within 5 miles of where they were born. Words that concerned only commoners were thus able to mutate very fast. If a single village found it necessary to differentiate between, say, moths and butterflies because one was a pest, then they could invent a new word, and that word need never even leave their village.
Additionally, the original inhabitants of a conquered region would already have had their own language, and while the upper classes had an interest in forcing the peasants to adopt a common standard for language that concerned them, nobody cared if they used their own words for other matters. So the locals were forced to use the standardised word for “sword”, but nobody cared what they called a “sickle”. Since family was the basis for taxation, they had to use the standard word for “family”, but nobody cared what word they used for “uncle” or “grandfather”.
The way that this affects language can be unexpected if you don’t know the reason behind it. One of the examples the linguist I heard used was the subtle distinction between the tool “plough” and the word “cultivate”. Cultivation was important, since land under cultivation was the basis for all taxation, from the taxation levied on peasants to the taxes levied on local lords to the taxation levied on the kings themselves by the church. So the word “cultivate” is very consistent across all the romance languages and English through Norman French. In contrast the actual tool used for cultivation is something only a peasant would care about, and as a result differing regions within the the same country often used totally different words for it until relatively recently.
I guess “Butterfly” is the gold standard example of a word that had no relevance at all to the upper classes. It’s not a subject that is likely to come up in conversation between priests or diplomats, it’s not associated with war or religion or courtship in any obvious way. As a result it would never have been forced to change from the original local word, and it was free to mutate further on a local scale.
A quick fact-check, with the help of Google Translate:
Latin - pāpiliō
Catalan - papallona
French - papillon
Hatian Creole - papiyon
Itallian - farfalla
Portuguese - borboleta
Romanian - fluture
Spanish - Mariposa
So, it seems that half the Romance languages that Google Translate recognizes use some form of the same word the Latin used. But each that differs seems to do so in a different way, for what that’s worth.
Part of it is that there were words botervlieg in Dutch and butterfliege in German. These don’t show up with Google translate (they may have been supplanted by other forms), giving the mistaken impression that there are no cognates in these language.
Here is the OED:
I wonder where the Swedish word"Fjäril" comes from then - a very pretty word IMO and nicer than “Butterfly”.
That doesn’t sound right - I don’t think butterflies have excrement. As far as I know they don’t eat.
Butterflies mainly feed on nectar, if at all. A few eat pollen.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the name was originally applied to the common sulphur butterflies, which are yellow in color, and later extended to other kinds.