ere neu ae tO ON Sb Ue neal N aiak 
will and his relatives, chuck-will’s-widow and poor-will; old-time curlew 
(1377) and recent dickcissel (1887) ; aptly named killdeer, pewee, chickadee, 
and bob-white; less aptly named pipit and veery. 
Two of these imitative names have undergone marked simplification. 
The willet was called Will Willet as early as 1709, but appears as lower- 
case willet only late in the 18th century. In 1774 John Adams wrote, 
“Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob-o-Lincoln—a swallow, a sparrow, 
a peacock.” By stages simplification took place: Boblincoln in 1792, Bob- 
o’-link by 1844, and bobolink first recorded from 1848. 
The tally of 18 echoic names does not include owl (ante 1000), cuckoo 
(15th century), or caracara (1838), credited to Old English, French, and 
Spanish, respectively. Here the language of nature was first translated 
into some tongue other than modern English. Cuckoo is especially interest- 
ing. It is found soon after the Norman conquest, but has maintained an 
unusually stable pronunciation; as the lexicographer quaintly says, “The 
annual lessons given by the bird have prevented the phonetic changes 
which the word would normally have undergone.” 
In analyzing language backgrounds, I have tabulated the languages 
from which the words in question came into modern or Middle English, 
rather than the language of transit or ultimate origin. The many compound 
names such as bluebird and redpoll I have subdivided and totaled in frac- 
tions. The general summary of language sources thus computed is: 
Germanic languages, 7814; Italic languages, 474%; American Indian, 3%; 
Celtic, one. 
Of the Germanic element, all except nine words are of West Germanic 
origin. Representative of the small Scandinavian element are wing and 
legs (in combinations) and loon. In the late 17th century four words from 
Old Norse entered English: auk, fulmar (foul + mew, or gull), skua, and 
tern. From 17438 Icelandic eider is recorded, in Swedish form. Of neces- 
sity, these are characteristically northern birds. 
Isolated items are coot (Low German), siskin (Flemish), and jaeger 
(German). Siskin is the only word here considered to be of ultimate 
Slavie origin. The Polish cognate is czyzik. In 1768 Pennant wrote of the 
siskin, “an irregular visitant, said to come from Russia.” Jaeger is the 
modern German noun meaning hunter. 
Old English words form the largest single bloc, and also comprise 
three-fourths of the compound terms. Twenty-one simple bird names have 
been recorded, substantially as we now know them, by the year 1000. Birds 
with these names have obviously been (with one exception) conspicuously 
before the English speaking people for a millennium: chicken, crane, crow, 
duck, finch, gannet, goldfinch, goose, goshawk, hawk, kite, lark, owl, pelican, 
raven, sparrow, stare (i.e., starling), swallow, swan, thrush, and wren. 
The exception is pelican, a loan-word from Greek through late Latin, used 
with a vague ornithological meaning in Biblical translation (“I am like a 
pelican of the wilderness,” Psalm 102:6). There are no pelicans in England. 
