Incidentally, the owls are not closely related to the diurnal birds of prey (hawks, falcons, Old World Vultures) but are instead closer to the nightjars (nighthawks, whippoorwills, and other nocturnal species.)
My thread is going in all directions, but I’m now wondering if the custom of crucifying night birds (be they chouettes, effraies or owls) is a purely french one or if it exists (or more likely existed) in other european countries…
I didn’t even know such birds existed… Would you have some link about them?
Thanks. Actually, to my surprise, the depiction is fairly accurate and really looks like the real bird.
Most certainly. For me, an "effraie"was some sub-category of “chouette” and though I knew that “cheveches” existed, for al I knew about them, they culdhave been nightingales.
I also believed for a long time that “harfangs” were some kind of rodents :smack: until I saw a picture of one. Maybe I should abstain from making comments about other people’s unability to tell animals apart… :rolleyes:
Here are some illustrations, and here is some information.
Other related familes, such as the potoos (Nyctibidae), frogmouths (Podargidae), and owlet-nightjars (Aegothelidae) look even more like owls.
Weird birds…some look like a crossing betwen an owl and a parrot, and others like creatures from the star wars movies…
For what it’s worth, Colibri’s little owl (Athene noctua) is the same thing as the Chevêche d’Athéna.
Did I mention how much I’m enjoying this thread? Don’t know why, since I’m not a bird person in particular.
All right, here’s a bizarre but semi-related question – in the French translation of Harry Potter, what is Hedwig? A hibou or something else?
She’s a snowy owl, which translates as "harfang des neiges ".
And now I know what our own Nyctea Scandiaca’s name means.
As I understand it, isn’t an “étang” a pond?
At any rate, as for “fleuve,” some Canadians make the mistake of thinking that the translation for “fleuve” would be “seaway,” because of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. However, the Seaway is actually a system of canals that make the river navigable from Brockville to Montreal; the French is “Voie maritime du Saint-Laurent.” “Fleuve Saint-Laurent” is the Saint Lawrence River.
A further tangle: there are two major rivers in Canada called Churchill River; but the one in Manitoba flows into Hudson Bay, and the one in Labrador flows into the Atlantic. So they’re called “rivière Churchill” and “fleuve Churchill” respectively.
Getting back to owls, in Canada there are fairly standardized references for bird names. Check out the Grand Dictionnaire terminologique, run by the Office québécois de la langue française: http://www.granddictionnaire.com/ .
“Harfang des neiges” is the most common word for snowy owl, but apparently a “harfang” is regarded as a type of “chouette,” not “hibou,” as I also find “chouette blanche.”
I can’t find Hamish’s copy of Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers, so I can only note for the present that Google turns up both “Hedwig la chouette” and “Hedwig le harfang,” but with more for “chouette.” Since I suppose snowy owls are less well-known in Europe than in Canada (they’re Quebec’s provincial bird), a bit of terminological inexactitude might be expected.
(As far as I know, N. scandiaca is the only species of “harfang,” so I find it a little odd for it to be modified by “des neiges”.)
I suspect that most generalized comparisons about languages would not stand up to very serious scrutiny.
IF there is a serious distinction made along the lines that Northern Piper outlined, my wild assed guess would be that English has, in the last 300 years, been affected by the broad sweep of English-speaking colonization together with expanded literacy. People tend to pick up words in books and apply them to local phenomena, unaware that the same phenomena would have had a separate word among the original speakers. (We see a little bit of this between American English and British English.)
For example, there is a potential distinction between lac = lake and etang = pond in American English, but we cannot agree on what constitutes a pond. Two definitions I have seen have been 1) a small body of water shallow enough to support bottom-rooted plants and 2) a small body of water that is fed by springs and not by a stream. In reality, however, most Americans use “pond” to mean a small body of water, with absolutely no guideline as to how small a “lake” can get before it becomes a pond. (Walden Pond satisfies both of the previous definitions, being a spring-fed body of water that is too deep to support aquatic plants. On the other hand, it was named at a time when the American settlers were closer to their British ancestors. The body of water at the end of my street is substantially smaller than Walden’s 62 acres/25 hectares, is spring fed, and is too deep for aquatic growth, yet it appears on all maps (and is universally called) a lake.)
An example of my guess as to the process for the change in English can be demonstrated with the “Americanization” of the word creek. Originally, the word meant something similar to a small estuary or the channels or streams of water flowing through a salt marsh into an estuary. This, of course, was the first sort of stream that British settlers found in the swampy shores of Virginia and the Carolinas. However, as the children of the settlers moved inland, they applied the word to any stream smaller than a river. This would have explained its new use in the Central Appalachians, but as the word was used in print, it spread (with its new meaning) to places never settled by people moving up from the Central Atlantic states. And, again, we have the problem of relative size applied to names: I grew up near Paint Creek in Southeast Michigan, but have seen several smaller streams in the much drier American West called “rivers.” Similarly, the Porcupine Mountains of Upper Michigan would hardly rate as foothills to a person growing up in the shadow of the Rockies.
We have words with which we are all familiar from reading and we apply those words to things we know in ways that the original speakers would find astonishing. With more people spread across more land, English has more possibilities to generate that sort of confusion.
This would not explain the use of the single word “owl” for a broad spectrum of birds, in English. However, there are other factors at play, here. In English, “owl” means any nocturnal bird with a relatively flat face. The category is easily identified, regardless of later Linnaean efforts to parse out its members. English may very well be more “general” than French (subject to my initial caveat), and still find itself in possession of more words than other languages because of its widespread use. For example, English already had gorge and defile to describe one particular set of landforms, but once the Americans emigrating from the plains where there were no gorges or defiles began bumping into Mexican canyons (cañones), they adopted that word to describe the phenomenon. Writing of their locations, they passed the word back to those living in the East, so now we have an additional word to describe a narrow, steep-sided valley.
Walden Pond satisfies only one of the previous definitions, being a spring-fed body of water that is too deep to support aquatic plants.
Here’s the full AOU list of French bird names (warning: pdf).
This is the complete list of the owls of North America. (The first two names are the scientific names, the remainder, the French. Unfortunately the formatting didn’t come through:
TYTONIDAE
Tyto alba Effraie des clochers
Tyto glaucops Effraie d'Hispaniola
STRIGIDAE
Otus flammeolus Petit-duc nain
Otus sunia Petit-duc d'Orient
Megascops kennicottii Petit-duc des montagnes
Megascops asio Petit-duc maculé
Megascops seductus Petit-duc du Balsas
Megascops cooperi Petit-duc de Cooper
Megascops trichopsis Petit-duc à moustaches
Megascops choliba Petit-duc choliba
Megascops barbarus Petit-duc bridé
Megascops guatemalae Petit-duc guatémaltèque
Megascops clarkii Petit-duc de Clark
Megascops nudipes Petit-duc de Porto Rico
Gymnoglaux lawrencii Petit-duc de Cuba
Lophostrix cristata Duc à aigrettes
Pulsatrix perspicillata Chouette à lunettes
Bubo virginianus Grand-duc d'Amérique
Bubo scandiacus Harfang des neiges
Surnia ulula Chouette épervière
Glaucidium gnoma Chevêchette naine
Glaucidium costaricanum Chevêchette du Costa Rica
Glaucidium griseiceps Chevêchette à tête grise
Glaucidium sanchezi Chevêchette du Tamaulipas
Glaucidium palmarum Chevêchette du Colima
Glaucidium brasilianum Chevêchette brune
Glaucidium siju Chevêchette de Cuba
Micrathene whitneyi Chevêchette des saguaros
Athene cunicularia Chevêche des terriers
Ciccaba virgata Chouette mouchetée
Ciccaba nigrolineata Chouette à lignes noires
Strix occidentalis Chouette tachetée
Strix varia Chouette rayée
Strix fulvescens Chouette fauve
Strix nebulosa Chouette lapone
Asio otus Hibou moyen-duc
Asio stygius Hibou maître-bois
Asio flammeus Hibou des marais
Pseudoscops clamator Hibou strié
Pseudoscops grammicus Hibou de la Jamaïque
Aegolius funereus Nyctale de Tengmalm
Aegolius acadicus Petite Nyctale
Aegolius ridgwayi Nyctale immaculée
I thought about that, but then, what is a “mare”?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m pretty taken with the chouette à lunettes. I wouldn’t mind having one for a pet.
Yes, Spectacled Owls are cool. They are one of the commonest owls here in Panama. However, its Spanish name in Peru is not quite so appealing: ataudero, “coffin-maker,” because its call supposedly sounds like the dull thud of a hammer nailing a coffin lid closed.
Never mind the rest of you. When I was in Tellin and Metz, chouette was a diminutive - a small owl whereas hibou was a generic term for owl. That is, any small owl, regardless of species, was a chouette; whereas any owl, regardless of size, was a hibou.
Perhaps, but what is chouette supposed to be a diminutive of? Nominally it might be presumed to refer to a small cabbage (chou), not a small owl. In any case, the owls that the name is applied to are not particularly small - mostly they are medium-sized, and one, the Great Gray Owl, is quite large.
A sea? as in the latin, “mare imbrium” (The Sea of Showers) on the moon.
The odd thing is, I can only think of three bodies of water to which I would apply “sea” – The Mediaterranean Sea (which is sometimes also called by ocean), The Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea.
I don’t know why the Great Lakes are called Lakes while the Black Sea is a Sea. Perhaps the first people to encounter and name them did not know how large they were.