Reading Jonathan Franzen’s annoyingly self-absorbed “My Bird Problem” [archived] in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin… Then I hit “parauque” (at the bottom of the middle column on page 66, if you’re following along at home) and thought I’d better look it up so I’d know whether to mentally pronounce it as if it were French or Spanish. Well, it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, so of course I googled it, and was suprised to find only a few hundred hits—bird names shouldn’t be that rare. Following my usual practice with unfamiliar plants and animals, I googled the Linnean name, in this case Nyctidromus albicollis, and what do you know, every hit gave the English name as “pauraque.” So I googled that, and sure enough, there were over 15,000 hits, and when I looked it up in my massive Webster’s Third New International, there it was (pronounced \pau‘räkā\ in their transcription, like “pow RAH kay”). The New Yorker had allowed a misspelled word into their once famously perfect pages. Once again, the modern world had let me down.
I was a bit consoled, or at least distracted, when I followed the trail left by Webster’s laconic definition (pauraque n [MexSp] : CUIEJO) and looked up cuiejo. I was rewarded with this:
cuiejo \kü‘yāhō\ n [modif. of AmerSp cuyeo] : a tropical American nighthawk (Nyctidromus albicollis) the dried and ground bones of which are highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion — called also pauraque
“Highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion”—why, it’s lexicographical poetry! And the endearingly awkward phrasing “the dried and ground bones of which,” contorted to avoid the perfectly good “whose dried and ground bones,” was the icing on the cake.
Later in the same paragraph Franzen mentions “my first northern beardless tyrannulet”; I liked “tyrannulet” very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the big Webster’s, not the OED. And yet it’s an English word in good standing; not only does it get 20,000 Google hits (besides the northern beardless, this page lists dozens of others: Rufous-lored, Cinnamon-faced, Minas Gerais, Oustalet’s, Mottle-cheeked, Rough-legged, Greenish, Tawny-rumped…) [June 2020: the Wayback Machine has no record of that page, but this Wikipedia Category page has quite a few], it’s the subject of an Encyclopædia Britannica article. So why isn’t it in the dictionary, not even the OED? I’m mystified and annoyed; at least the pronunciation is clear, but what if it weren’t? I’d be lost in the sea of words without a compass!
Reality is too prickly for your grand nature. (“Bottom”, A. Rimbaud).
Dunno, dude. The OS X dictionary widget, which takes its results from The Oxford American Dictionary, produces an entry with little to no fuss nor muss.
I’m glad it’s in somebody’s dictionary. But if the Oxford people are aware of it… well, I guess they just haven’t gotten around to the t’s in the revision of the OED.
*drums fingers impatiently*
Is “pauraque” etymologically related to the word for “fear”? Or is my bad Spanish misleading me again?
Seems to be that the only name which appears in Diccionario de la Real Academia Española is:
cuyeo:1. m. C. Rica. Pájaro de canto estridente.
pauraque appears in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05. http://www.bartleby.com/65/go/goatsuck.html
“…their monotonous, repetitious song are factors in their superstitious significance. Their weird cries are reflected in the common names for many of the species, e.g., whippoorwill, chuck-will’s-widow, poorwill, poor-me-one, potoo, and pauraque.”
Another popular name for this bird is “curiango” ( if course its popularity is not reflected in dictionaries)
pauraque’s etymology may be related with pavor, form latin pavoris, as italian paúra. Or just being an onomatopeic word.
What a lovely coincidence. Last night as we were leaving the ballpark, my friends and I were discussing a Spanish word for hummingbird they’d learned from a native speaking co-worker: chotarosa. This means ‘rose sucker’. I couldn’t find this in any online dictionary, but it is a similar compound to picaflor or “flower snacker”. This led us to discuss the Spanish word of parallel construction, chotacabras or goatsucker. The goatsuckers are a group of birds whose members include the poorwill (whip or not), the nighthawk, and yes, the pauraque.
Yvonne, I think you want “chuparosa” and “chupacabra”. My Harper-Collins SE-ES dictionary lists “chupaflor” and “chupamirto” (“mirto” is myrtle) as meaning “hummingbird”, but doesn’t have “chuparosa” (or “chupacabra”).
No, the word is chotacabras. My dictionary doesn’t have chotarosa, but plant and animal names are notoriously difficult to find (as witness this entry); at any rate, a chuparosa is a plant, but apparently also means ‘hummingbird’ (see this page, for instance), so chotarosa is presumably an alternate form (different dialect?).
Google returns no hits for “chotarosa” or “chotarosas”.
I’m a little surprised, in my ignorance, that it’s chuparosa rather than chuparosas – I thought this construction usually took a plural noun (e.g. sacacorchos).
Drae,
Chuparrosa, mex, colibrí.(colibrí is a caribean loan to spanish)
Chotacabras, from “chotar”,suckle, lat. suctāre + “cabra” goat. Is an insectivore.
There is a dark latinamerican legend on “chotacabras”, kind of animal-eater vampire or demon.
Thanks a million, silmarillion!
Franzen is another example of what isn’t fair with the world.
Silmarillion, I’m pretty sure “chupacabras” is the mythical blood-sucker, not chotacabras, unless it’s a matter of dialect. Do a google search and you’ll see scary monster pictures.
Chotacabras is a kind of owl, Caprimulgus europaeus.
11 But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. Isaiah, 34.11
Chotacabras/chupacabras is dialectal. In Argentina and Uruguay “chupar” stands for “chotar”
Drae tells us that a “choto” is the babygoat (chotar=suckle) but in southamerica this word has a sexual meaning.
Seriously, Sil, do the google image search on both of these words. The chupacabras images will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The chotacabras pictures are kind of cute little birds.
Unfortunately this doesn’t help with the rose-sucker in either suggested form — must be a rarer word!
I report back now from my friends regarding the chupa-/chota- -rosa/-cabros debate. This says some interesting things about the nature of pop culture and sociolinguistics. My friends are not linguists, but birders who work at a zoo. They have received their information via Petersons’ field guides, their working class Spanish speaking coworkers from Mexico, Spanish speaking patrons of unknown economic class, education or country of origin visiting the zoo, and The Weekly World News. “Chupacabros” is used in WWN to indicate a succubus/incubus type demon. “Chuparrosa” is the word for hummingbird used by two Spanish speaking parents visiting the zoo. “Chotacabros” is the word for goatsucker (the group of insect-eating birds under original discussion).
As to whether either of the -cabros words indicates a pauraque or an owl, this is why birders and zoologists prefer Latin names. The common ones all too often refer to several, very different animals. But they make up for that lack by their wonderful nature and the fact that they engender discussions liks this.
Xris. the dark legend I am referring when speaking about “chotacabras” is the one relating owls with demons in biblical texts.
isaiah,34.11; isaiah,34.13; isaiah,34.14; isaiah,34.15
In spanish translations as “Español Sagradas Escrituras”, “owl” is translated as “lamia”. In “Sagrada Biblia de la Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Editorial Católica S. A., is translated as “Lilith”
Lamia in greek mithology is the daughter of Libya and Belus, and as result of Hera’s wrath, ( guess why :))Lamia was compelled to eat her own children.
Lamia suckles blood form children and men.
Caprimulgus europaeus is the European nightjar. Related to but different from the owls.
The Israeli translator of Harry Potter, Gili Bar Hillel, once sent me a long email explaining how she chose to translate the word ‘owl’ (actually it was a specific type of owl) into Hebrew. Apparently, Lilith is used in the official Hebrew name for this particular kind of owl, but she avoided ‘Lilith’ because of the dark and sinister connotations that it carries. Instead, she used Lilith to translate another word in the Harry Potter books; I believe it may have been ‘banshee’.
To my great regret, I failed to save the email she sent me (it was very interesting and well written) and it was lost in one of those disc crashes/email problems that I seem to run into periodically.
is the assonance between “pauraque” and “parakeet” entirely coincidental?
Yup, “parakeet” is probably from a diminutive of Pierre.
I’m so interested in these Spanish construction that I have begun collecting them some months ago here on Wiktionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_verb_plus_plural_noun_compounds
Please anybody here feel free to add more, anybody can edit the page.
The Eurasian collared dove owes its specific name decaocto (“18” in Greek) to its distinctive call (click to listen on the page).
I liked “tyrannulet” very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the big Webster’s, not the OED.
Since it’s been almost fifteen years, I thought the OED might have gotten around to it, but no; a full-text search turns up only this citation, added in 2011 to the rough-legged entry:
*drums fingers impatiently*
“Cinnamon-faced tyrannulet” seems an appropriate description for a politician. Maybe there’s an injunction against its inclusion?
Turns out it’s Phyllomyias.
Not to be confused with the flies named Phyllomya.
I’ve just posted “cinnamon-faced tyrannulet” on FB as a new name for you-know-who.
Birds’ Rights activists make up a large portion of his supporters…
Hey, wait a minute, that archive link isn’t exactly what appeared in the New Yorker — there’s a prefatory note “My Bird Problem” began as an essay for the August 8, 2005, issue of The New Yorker …, so who knows how much may have changed? I’m guessing the linked text is probably as it appeared in Franzen’s book The Discomfort Zone (2006), and it must have gone through a non-New Yorker copyedit, since it contains “reemerging” and “reeducate” with no diaeresis. And it also contains “pauraque”, not “parauque” — maybe somebody checked a dictionary! But shortly after the pauraque, it also has “fulvous whistling-duck”, “ferruginous pygmy-owl”, and “northern beardless-tyrannulet” — those hyphens look weird to me, and the Wikipedia article titles don’t use them, but all of them *are* used at allaboutbirds.org (run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), maybe they’re a birding insider thing?
If you googled that today, you *would* find some hits with the spelling “parauque”, even in some books. But it’s much less common than “pauraque”, and since the latter is the only one that’s given in current references such as Wikipedia and allaboutbirds, I think it’s fair to call the one with “par-” a misspelling. The interesting thing, though, is that it *used to be* in Merriam-Webster. The New International first edition (1909) has it, in the small-type bottom section for rare words: “pa-rau′que (pä-rou′kā), n. [Native name in Mexico.] A goatsucker (Nyctidromus albicollis), larger than the whippoorwill, ranging from Texas to South America.” I don’t have the 1934 Second Edition to hand, but I wonder if the New Yorker’s spelling was a product of their fetishization of older editions — they wouldn’t soil their fingers looking things up in the Third. If the Google ngram can be believed, the preferred spelling changed from “parauque” to “pauraque” about 1940; there’s a snippet view of something in National Geographic from the 1930s saying “The name pauraque, in early accounts of the bird erroneously written ‘parauque,’ is given in imitation of its call…”
Merriam-Webster’s Third wasn’t infallible, either, though: it’s a bit odd that they made cuiejo the main entry and pauraque just a cross-reference, since “cuiejo” is much less common in English.
Pauraque was added to AHD in the 2011 edition, with etymology:
For the pronunciation, check out this discussion at a site called 10,000 Birds …
Gratuitous promo for the NZ 2025 Bird of the Year vote-in. This is the competition hijacked by John Oliver in 2023, to vote in an Australian imposter — it only visits NZ during our Summer.
My local farmers market organic apple stall is sponsoring the Ngutu pare/Wrybill, because it nests on the riverbeds alongside their orchard.
Here’s a whole bunch of silliness from Susan Myers’ The Bird Name Book: a History of English Bird Names:
Meanwhile, the word for it in Guerrero Nahuatl is recorded as po:xakwatl in Amith’s Nahuatl Cultural Encyclopedia: Botany and Zoology, Balsas River, Guerrero. I don’t know if it’s native Nahuatl or borrowed from some other language, but if the words are related (which I think they are), that puts away the ethnonym explanation.
po:xakwal looks close enough to pa(u)ra(u)que that the Spanish name could be the attempt at rendering or (especially paraque) a folk-etymologization of this, or more likely a similar-sounding name in some other indigenous language.
If anyone wants another ornithonomous puzzle, there’s the beautiful Prothonotary Warbler. What’s the connection to prothonotaries?
(@Bathrobe: Nightjars were formerly considered related to owls, but not now. Stay tuned for further changes.)
An excellent discussion; here’s the crucial bit:
There’s a discussion of prothonotary/protonotary here and here (“‘Prothonotary’ seems to have arrived as a piece of mediaeval decorative spelling”), as well as here (with following bird-related comments).
I should have known it would have been here before. In fact I thought I’d checked with Google, but obviously not.
Yes. The idea is to express that whistling-ducks aren’t ducks (but outside a clade of all other anseriforms except screamers), beardless-tyrannulets aren’t, it seems, tyrannulets, and pygmy-owls… wait… must be a hypercorrection.
We’ve talked before about ornithologists’ dream of establishing one externally and internally correct “common name” in each language for each species and subspecies of bird.
Around these parts, Douglas-firs aren’t firs.
Likewise with compounds written solid, meadowlarks aren’t larks, nighthawks aren’t hawks, meadowhawks aren’t birds…
In a somewhat parallel usage, some entomologists want you to write compounds such as “butterfly”, “dragonfly”, “stonefly” solid, since they’re not flies (Diptera), but “house fly”, “deer fly”, etc. open. This creates a bit of a problem with “black fly”.
“It only lasts a day,” said Tom mayfly.
Note, from 1758, the following passage from Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz Histoire de Louisiane, vol. 2, p. 139 here:
Le Page du Pratz discusses the cardinal and the évêque directly afterwards in the next two paragraphs. More on the pape here in French.
However, I can’t find any use of the bird name protonotaire earlier than Buffon 1778, cited in the article linked to by Jerry Friedman. Perhaps other LH readers can dig one up. Are we dealing here with birdsellers’ marketing jargon being relayed by Buffon? (Note that Buffon with his propensity for quirky adaptations is responsible for establishing many other current vernacular names of foreign animals in Europe: cougar, gibbon, loris, mangabey, mouffette, zébu, etc.)
I found the discussion of the use of cardinal as a bird name here (in French) to be very interesting. Note the early date, 1680. This gives us ample time for a naming tradition to develop. See also the discussion of évêque and especially the discussion of ministre in regard to a secular etymology for protonotaire (“ʟᴇ ᴍɪɴɪꜱᴛʀᴇ. C’est le nom que les Oiseleurs donnent à un oiseau de la Caroline que d’autres appellent l’évêque.”).
The plot thickens!
the word for it in Guerrero Nahuatl is recorded as po:xakwal in Amith’s Nahuatl Cultural Encyclopedia: Botany and Zoology, Balsas River, Guerrero.
Thanks for that, Y!
I mis-typed po:xakwatl, and spent an hour trying to think how this anomalous absolutive got in there.
Hat, could you please correct po:xakwal to po:xakwatl above?
Too bad. Now I won’t have reason to ask if the unusual form might suggest a loanword.
Another paper, by Blancas-Calva et al., on Guerrero Nahuatl bird names gives it as poxakwahtl. Maybe a dialectal or a transcription difference? Cf. Oapan (in Amith) tótli ‘northern harrier, Circus cyaneus’, vs. Xalitla, some 10 miles away (in Blancas-Calva et al.) tohtli ‘laughing falcon, Herpetotheres cachinnans’.
Hat, could you please correct po:xakwal to po:xakwatl above?
Done!
Thanks for the interesting comments,
Let’s see. Le Page du Pratz’s Pape is red and black, so it’s the Scarlet Tanager. However, Buffon’s Pape is blue, red, green, and brown, so it’s the Painted Bunting. And see this page from the site you linked to for the various uses of Pape, such as Audubon’s comment that people in Louisiana give that name “to all the smaller species of the thick-billed birds.” He specifically mentions the Orchard Oriole and Baltimore Oriole as well as the Painted Bunting (Pape nonpareil—the name “nonparell” is supposedly also used in English).
Le Page du Pratz’s Évêque is blue tending to violet, so that’s the Indigo Bunting. That’s one of the birds that Buffon objects to calling bishops (but he doesn’t seem to have a problem to calling one the pope). However, the French Wikipedia says the Indigo Bunting (Passerin indigo) is also called the Pape indigo, in keeping with Audubon’s comment, and doesn’t mention Évêque. At least the Indigo Bunting and Painted Bunting are in the same genus (Passerina) and very similar in size and shape.
But anyway, as I understand it, you’re raising the possibility that the French colonists had a tradition of naming colorful songbirds after religious and secular officials, so Protonotaire (for a bird too thin-billed to be called Pape according to Audubon’s criterion) would be another example. I don’t know why they’d have gone with that before more familiar figures such as curé or sacristain, but it seems more plausible to me than the other suggestions, for what my opinion is worth.
As mentioned far above (Yvonne on August 13, 2005 and following comments), the pauraque is a member of the nightjar family, aka goatsuckers. Language Hat has posted further on nightjars.
po:xakwal
po:xakwatl
Glancing at this, I originally assumed that po:xakwal simply showed the change of original Nahuan tl > l that is common in western Nahuatl varieties.
The Florentine Codex has this word (written poxaquatl) here, folio 50r. Scroll down for the direct translation of the Nahuatl text by Dibble and Anderson:
Compare the (modernized) Spanish text of the Codex:
In Book 10, which describes the different kinds of people making up society, the word poxaquatl as ‘boba, torpe’ is used to describe the ‘bad noblewoman’ (in amo qualli toxuiuhtzin) on folio 35v and the ‘bad weaver’ (in amo qualli tlamachchiuhqui) of folio 37r.
Which came first, ‘tonto’ or ‘chotacabras’? Probably ‘chotacabras’, if poxacuatl is onomatopoeic after the calls of caprimulgids? Alonso de Molina (1571) only has only ‘dormilón’ (nightjar) for poxaqua here.
the possibility that the French colonists had a tradition of naming colorful songbirds after religious and secular officials… I don’t know why they’d have gone with that before more familiar figures such as curé or sacristain
The point is that in the days of a thriving trade in cardinals, indigo buntings, painted buntings, and other showy song birds as caged birds, the name protonotaire would fit nicely in birdcatchers’ commercial jargon (cf. Guéneau de Montbeillard’s le nom que les Oiseleurs donnent), in the company of bishops, cardinals, and the pope, all well-known for their more colorful dress, especially ‘choir dress’. This is in contrast to the usual black and white of the parish priest, who only wore colors when he put on liturgical vestments.
I wonder if the curé may already have been named corbeau at the time, after his black garments—although the earliest citations suggesting the sense ‘priest’ of corbeau that I have been able to find date from 1791, somewhat after our period, in Le Père Duchesne. One instance of this use of corbeau here seems to be in reference to the supporters of Antoine Xavier Mayneaud de Pancemont, parish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who refused to accept the 1790 Constitution civile du clergé and was removed from his parish. Another reference here is in connexion to Jean-Sifrein Maury, preacher to the king at Versailles and opponent of Revolutionary reforms such as the Constitution civile du clergé and the emancipation of Jews. Note the clothing in the image of Maury here, I assume depicting him before he left France and was made cardinal.
Sacristain too apparently took on the sense of ‘sanctimonious person, bigot’ in that era, as in second issue of the moderate Revolutionary journal Le Vieux Cordelier, p. 19 here.
Two of my comments, on Nahuatl and French, have fallen into moderation for excessive links. As an afterthought, I wonder if there are any other bird names like ministre and possibly protonotaire originating in birdcatchers’ commercial names that might also make reference to excessive loquacity and volubility. In this regard, maybe part of the joke/appeal of these names was that many of these birds (cardinals, buntings) were excellent ‘preachers’. Some keep the Sabbath going to Church…
Buffon also appears to have played a large role in the establishment of the name of the secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius) of Africa, apparently inspired by the pens behind its ears.
Protonotaire made me think of secretary birds, named so for an entirely different reason.
Thanks, Xerîb! The manuscripts are so nice to look at, and clearly written.
These and other sources are well organized at the University of Oregon’s Nahuatl dictionary, here. Molina does have the word, under puxaquatl “cierta aue nocherniega, o tonto e inſipiente” (and note to the UO dictionary, insipiente means ‘foolish’, not ‘incipient’.)
Now, what is the etymology of poxacuatl ‘foolish’? And to our discussion, can the /ʃ/ of poxacuatl really have made its way to the /r/ of pauraque, or was I rashly optimistic?
secretary birds
Yòg-fíbdà “hole-fanner” in Mooré. No idea why. WP contains no references to hole-fanning behaviour.
“Hole-fanner” might do as a term of abuse for a Secretary of State, I suppose. Or anyone, really.
@de
It seems medicals can do microaggression without a course.I feel justified in apologising to the hole-fanning community on your behalf.
I am ashame.
It’s not who I am. I shall make a donation to a hole-fanning support group of your choice.
The first element, singular yòkó, plural yogdo, is specifically “hole in a tree-trunk.” Does that make it better, or worse? Have I inadvertently offended the eco-lobby as well?
You’ll provoke troops of boy scouts to smirk I put my finger in a woodpecker’s hole.
Though I don’t know of a verse that involves fanning.
It is as well I never progressed beyond the Cubs. Gracious!
A-ke-la we’ll DOB DOB DOB!
I wonder what became of my woggle?
puxaquatl “cierta aue nocherniega, o tonto e inſipiente”
Excellent! Thanks for that, Y.
protonotaire…
Le Pape est un oiseau dont le plumage est rouge & noir ; il a été nommé ainsi peut-être à cause que sa couleur… ou enfin parce qu’il falloit un oiseau de ce nom dans cette Colonie, où il y avait déjà deux espèces d’Oiseaux, dont les uns se nomment Cardinaux & les autres Evêques.
Looking at the bird feeder this morning, I realized that French moineau ‘sparrow’ (known from around 1200 onward) too is etymologically ‘little monk’, on account of his drab habit. I wonder if this contributed to the establishement of the naming pattern to any extent. Cf. also jacobin (lit., ‘Dominican friar’), from the second half of the 18th century, and also capucin—this last only from the 19th century, however (Les marchands-oiseliers réunissent plusieurs espèces appartenant au genre Munia sous le nom général de Capucin, à cause de leur plumage composé de deux couleurs dont l’une simule une sorte de capuchon sur la tête.).
@Xerib: I’m learning a lot here. I didn’t know about the trade in bright-colored American songbirds (though it should have been obvious) and had forgotten, if I ever knew, that jacobin originally referred to the Dominicans.
But I don’t see why bird-sellers should be more associated with protonotaire than ordinary French-speaking North Americans, who named the Indigo Bunting évêque. Since Prothonotary Warblers eat insects, they’re much less suitable as cage birds than seed-eaters such as buntings and cardinals.
On birds whose French names come from classes of people like moineau, but secular, there’s roitelet, genus Regulus, American English “kinglet”. I don’t have time to look into the origins of that at the moment.
Wrenlike birds, perhaps including the goldcrest (roitelet), seem to have had the name ‘little king’, Greek βασιλίσκος, Latin regulus, since at least the beginning of the 1st millennium CE. Plutarch mentions ὁ Αἰσώπου βασιλίσκος ἐπὶ τῶν ὤμων τοῦ ἀετοῦ κομισθεὶς ‘Aesop’s goldcrest(?) carried on the shoulders of an eagle’. And from Juventinus Albius Ovidius, Elegia de Philomela:
I suspect the Latin is simple calqued on the Greek.
Here, from 1675, is some advice on keeping insectivorous birds, in this instance the nightingale. All this makes me very sad.
Earlier than diminutive βασιλίσκος, the simplex βασιλεύς ‘king’ also shows up as a kind of small bird. For example, Aristotle, Historia animalium 8.3, 592b, in English here, § 8.3.2. Click on GR on the right hand side to open up the Greek text. It is translated as ‘wren’ there. A discussion on the identification of the bird βασιλεύς here (in French) with a collection of citations. There is doubtless a more modern study but I don’t have time to find it now.
Europe’s third-smallest bird, the basic wren, literally “fence king” and “snow king”.
@Xerîb: Thanks for pointing out that, despite the difficulties of feeding soft-beaked” or non-seed-eating birds, people did it back then. (In fact he says every country family keeps a caged blackbird—and I won’t mention any sadder details about caged birds ) Thanks also for the information on the ancient origin of “little king” for those tiny European birds that often seem to have been confused with each other.
I took a look at Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteeth-Century Paris, by Louise Robbins . I can report that it has 9 hits on “cardinal” and 7 on “bunting” (all referring to birds), but none on “prothonotary” or “protonotaire” and only one on “warbler” (referring to Buffon’s description of a “warbler”, which I imagine is some Sylvia species native to France). It also has some of list of French names of cage birds from the volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique on birds, by Mauduyt, which mentions a lot of seed-eating birds but nothing that could be a New World warbler.
Of course that’s not a complete survey of the exotic birds available in France at that time. But since Buffon, who was quite familiar with the wares of the oiseleurs (as Robbins emphasizes), says protonotaire is the name of the bird in Lousiana, not as an article of commerce in France, I think it seems more likely that it was a local name than a bird-seller’s name.
A possibly interesting link in French, for contrast with the 18th century: the inventory of a oiselier in 1665. He offered only eight kinds of birds, the recognizable ones being found in France, but he couldn’t identify the cochenir or the brohair (if he read those names correctly).
The career of a protonotary apostolic in Louisiana… From Marc de Villiers du Terrage (1903) Les dernières années de la Louisiane française, p. 208f (apologies for any uncorrected text capture errors):
Also note from page 251:
The story continues (p. 351):
Hilarious!
Luca Codignola (2020) ‘The Catholic Clergy in the North Atlantic Area, 1763–1830: Patterns of Deviancy’, Almanack1(26) (available here) has the following:
An entry in a biographical dictionary sketches out his further career here (scroll to the entry HILAIRE DE GENEVAUX; some OCR errors there: should be Pointe Coupée, etc.).
Hilaire seems to have remained a person of importance in the region after this. In 1785, he apparently wrote a letter received by Benjamin Franklin in Paris on the question of resettlement of persecuted French from New Spain into territory east of the Mississippi newly assigned to the United States.This letter was forwarded by Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to John Jay in a packet of correspondence. Details here; see especially note 6.
Now, I wonder if Hilaire was somehow associated with color yellow in some way? There is a kind of yellow called capucine in English. Or did this religieux turbulent simply make his title famous in the territory—enough to compete with cardinal and évêque?
On the etymology of capucine (French « rouge-orangé, de la couleur de la fleur de capucine »), see the TLFi under capucine ‘nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus)’.
I was really interested to learn all this about Hilaire and a possible extra motivation for the name protonotaire that Buffon relays to us. Louise Robbins is a friend of mine and erstwhile colleague, and I think she will be delighted to learn of the notorious Monsignor Hilaire de Génevaux, protonotary apostolic in Louisiana. I wonder if this connexion has been made before. If not, I should write this up and send it as a squib to American Speech or somewhere.
Wonderful stuff! I took the liberty of adding some formatting to Père Hilaire’s letter (per the online copy) to give it a little more pizzazz.
Père Hilaire was quite a notorious prothonotary!
Just speculating baselessly on why people might have named a bird after him… Prothonotary Warblers are loud, though their song isn’t interesting, and they’re conspicuous, not only from their color but also because they forage fairly close to the ground, often over water, which would have given Louisianans in boats a clearer view than they’d get of the many colorful warblers that forage high in trees. (I got great views of my life Prothonotary on a boat tour of a swamp in Louisiana.) Also, they nest in tree holes, often fairly low (Cornell recommends placing a nest box 4–12 feet above the ground), so if they fight over nest sites as some hole-nesting species do, Louisianans could have seen examples of aggression.
If you do find a plausible etymology for this sense of “prothonotary”, I’d be interested to know about it, even more if you publish it.
On another subject, I didn’t see any references to a flower or a color at your TLFI link.
I didn’t see any references to a flower or a color at your TLFI link.
Click on the second tab, labelled “CAPUCINE, subst. fém.”.
Ah, there are tabs! Thanks.
An interesting recent piece on the lamentable decline in regional bird names caused by nationwide (or Anglosphere-wide?) standardization. https://birdhistory.substack.com/p/chunk-ducks-blatherskites-butterballs
“To most Americans, this situation was perfectly normal. Everyone knew the names of the birds in their backyards, and hunters knew the names of birds in their patches. Neighbors agreed on what birds were called, and didn’t concern themselves that people a hundred or a thousand miles away had decided on different ones.” But then the self-appointed experts got involved …