And if so, are songbirds called “birds of song” or whatever?
Yes, in many Indian languages. For example in Hindi :
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Very common to refer to Koyal (the Asian Koel / Indian Cuckoo) singing to find its mate Asian koel - Wikipedia
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The peacock sings to welcome the monsoon
…… and many other songbirds
[Moderating]
This is a US-based board, and most of our members speak only English. In particular, if the OP were familiar with any languages other than English, he wouldn’t have needed to ask the question. Please provide a translation for anything posted in other languages.
I’d be hard pressed to consider the sounds peacocks make as “song”.
They also occur naturally in scrub desert. Do they even get to experience monsoons?
The OP did not ask what you consider as “song”.
Of course. I think it is not so quick to translate poetry off the cuff; it is “A bird sings” by Guillaume Apollinaire which begins something like
“A bird is singing, I know not where / I believe it is your soul keeping watch / Amidst the twopenny soldiers / And the bird charms my ear”
followed by a (computer-generated?) link with pictures of the “world’s 10 most beautiful songbirds”
The German translation for “songbird” is the exact equivalent, “Singvogel”.
ETA: I think since birds all over the world sing, and people all over the world have music, almost all cultures equate birds’ and peoples’ songs.
Los pajaros cantan en Español tambien (Birds sing in Spanish too)
Pero también trinan. (But they also make tshrrrriiiip tshrrriiiip) y gorjean (like canary birds). Ravens and ducks graznan: they make kraaah! kraaah!. Yes, it’s the same word for both. Other birds estridulan (stridulate), a word that is also used for insects.
Song birds in Spanish are called pájaros cantores, which is another way to say singing birds, i.e. songbirds.
In general biologists say that birds vocalize (vocalizan). There are other words for the sounds birds make, like chicken cacarean, parrots talk! (hablan) and more I can’t think of right now of the top of my hat. Maybe I’ll come later when I remember them.
You could say the same about most birds, but their sounds are still called ‘song’ in English.
In Hebrew, songbird is “tzippor (bird) shir (song)”
(While “shir” can mean either “song” or “poem”, in context it means the former, as not many birds can quote T.S. Eliot.)
Norwegian also has songbirds and bird song.
In Afrikaans, birdsong is voëlgesang, exactly the same. And a songbird is a sangvoël, exactly the same.
With some rather prominent exceptions. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that chickens or turkeys “sing.”
(Yes I know you said “most,” and that the thread is about song birds specifically. Just making it explicit.)
There are many bird vocalizations (including from songbirds) that are not songs, either colloquially or technically.
The Danish surname Fuglsang means birdsong.
That’s funny, I just read the news that Jakob Fuglsang had to leave the Tour de France because of a broken rib.
Yes, but I honestly don’t know how long that phrase has been used, i.e., whether it is a native Hebrew word or just a translation from English or some other modern language.
What I do know is that the verb for how birds vocalize is “tziftzuf” (or “tziphtzuph”), and has been such for millennia. This is (to me) an untranslatable case of onomatopoeia. It is usually translated as “twitter” or “chirp”, and I leave it to the reader to opine on whether “sing” might also be an acceptable translation.
Is there a TzF root that could help disambiguate this?