by Stephen Moss
Given these dramatic changes, it is little short of astonishing that so many bird names with Anglo-Saxon origins have lasted to the present day – albeit often in a rather different form from the original. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story of our bird names, and one to which I shall return many times, for it tells us much about the crucial importance of the natural world in our society, history and culture.
But before I do, we need to go even further back in time. For although many of the names we use for birds today have changed, or been lost and forgotten along the way, a handful go back well before the beginnings of English: to the very dawn of human civilisation, roughly 3,000 years before the birth of Christ.
Their origins lie very far from here: with a small group of early farmers living thousands of miles to the east of Britain, on the vast open grasslands of central Eurasia – the place we now know as the Russian steppes.
2: Trade Routes and Translations
Try to imagine, if you can, the day-to-day existence of those first farmers on the steppes of central Eurasia, so distant from us in space and time. In the words of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, we can surely guess that their lives would have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
We can picture them spending long, hard days cultivating the steppe grasslands, planting and harvesting their meagre crops, and caring for their precious livestock. They would also have needed to cope with the vagaries of weather and climate, which could so easily mean the difference between success and failure and, ultimately, survival and death.
For these early farmers, life had changed little for several millennia, ever since their own ancestors had first renounced the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of agriculture, which required a permanent, settled home. Life in one place may have been easier, in some ways, yet it would still have been very tough and unrelenting.
But then, roughly 5,000 years ago, the world began to change. Two developments – one cultural, the other technological – dramatically improved the lives of these ancient people.
The first was the domestication of the horse, arguably the most important wild creature ever to be subjugated for human use. The second, which followed soon afterwards, was the invention of the spoked wheel. For the first time in human history, this simple breakthrough allowed people to build fast, light and manoeuvrable vehicles. These could in turn be pulled over longer and longer distances by the newly tamed horse. The eventual dominance of vehicular transport over our lives had begun.
The newly developed wagons and carts, pulled by horses, made life much easier, allowing heavy items such as firewood and crops to be carried on short journeys from woods and fields to villages and homes. But more importantly for our story, they also opened up the possibility of moving goods and people over far longer distances.
Thanks to these long-forgotten people, the greatest change in human history was set in motion: the beginning of trade between different groups, communities and, ultimately, nations. At first, they would have simply bartered their produce with their immediate neighbours, perhaps exchanging a bushel of wheat for a couple of chickens. But over time, the bleak, hostile and treeless steppe where they lived turned into a thriving trade corridor, which would eventually stretch for thousands of miles, to and from Europe in the west and Asia in the east.
Opening up this transcontinental route had another, even more profound, effect on later civilisations. As these ancient steppe-dwellers gradually migrated westwards and eastwards, their language – originally spoken by only a handful of people in this remote and landlocked location – began to spread across a vast swathe of Europe and Asia. In the process, it changed and developed into a huge range of new tongues, including Latin, Welsh, French, German, Hindi, Swedish, Spanish, Greek and English.
At first sight, these languages do not appear to have all that much in common. They do of course share some common terms, borrowed from one another relatively recently: English in particular has proved adept at appropriating words as varied as chutney and bungalow (from Hindi), schadenfreude and kitsch (from German) and coracle and corgi (from Welsh). But we are far more aware of the differences in vocabulary, word and sentence structure between one language and another, than any similarities.
Yet as linguists first discovered back in the eighteenth century, many of these differences are in fact superficial, and even apparently dissimilar languages may be related. And just as the similarities in facial appearance between two people are often because they share a common ancestor, languages too have a ‘family tree’.
So, while it may come as a surprise to anyone who has struggled with a phrasebook while attempting to make themselves understood abroad, all these languages, and many more, are ultimately descended from a single tongue. Known by linguists as ‘Proto-Indo-European’ or PIE, this was first spoken on those windswept central Eurasian grasslands, roughly three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Extraordinary though it may seem, the languages that descend from it are still spoken by roughly half the world’s population – almost four billion people. And as David Anthony points out in his book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language,6 this means that the languages we speak today are almost entirely the result of those two developments that give his book its intriguing title.
We have no written records of the actual words those people used to speak to one another as they went about their day-to-day lives. Yet by comparing words still used in one modern language with their equivalents in another, linguists have been able to painstakingly reconstruct some of their lost vocabulary.
Amongst those words, there are a tiny number that, amazingly, have lasted – albeit in different forms in various modern languages – all the way down to the present day. These include the name of a species of bird that would have been very familiar indeed to our distant ancestors: the goose – or, as linguists now believe it would have been originally called, ghans.
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Long before the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel, or even the earliest agriculture, prehistoric peoples right across Europe and Asia would have been aware of the twice-yearly migration of geese.
Looking up each autumn, they would have seen straggling, V-shaped skeins of birds arriving from the north, silhouettes etched against the grey skies as the land echoed with their distinctive, honking calls. They also would have noted the date when the flocks headed back north towards their breeding grounds in spring.viii
During the winter months, when vast flocks of geese fed on grasslands and wetlands, they would no doubt have used whatever primitive weapons they had – rocks, stones and perhaps flint spears – to try to kill the plump, tasty birds, so they could supplement their meagre diet.
It would only have been a matter of time before it occurred to more intelligent individuals that, rather than spending time and effort trying to hunt and kill geese, there might be an easier way to ensure a regular, reliable and year-round supply of eggs, flesh and feathers. So it was that, almost 5,000 years ago, the greylag goose became only the third (or possibly fourth) species of bird – after the chicken, duck and perhaps the pigeon – to be domesticated.
The central importance of geese to our ancestors’ lives meant that these birds would have been given a vernacular name far earlier than more obscure, less useful species. That is no surprise. But what is truly extraordinary is that this name has lasted – in different forms in different languages – all the way down to the present – especially given the ways languages have evolved, and vocabulary has changed, over thousands of years.
Take a look at the modern name for goose in both German and Dutch: gans. At first sight this does not appear very similar to the word we use in English; but think of the name we give to a male goose, ‘gander’, and the connection becomes clearer. Likewise, the Spanish name, ánsar, may not appear to have much in common with ‘goose’. But it is remarkably similar to the scientific name of the greylag goose, Anser anser and, via ga
ns, to goose. So even if bird names in different languages may not appear to be related, a closer look reveals that they often are.
The point of this exercise in linguistic archaeology is this: because these European languages began to diverge from one another roughly 5,000 years ago, we can show that the precursor of these related words for goose in use today must have already been in existence at that time. And that means it must go all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European spoken by those early traders, on the Central Asian steppes.
Thus, of all our bird names, ‘goose’ can justifiably claim to be the oldest.
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Other names we still use today go almost as far back in time; again, we can demonstrate this by looking at another crucial period: the Early Iron Age. Lasting from roughly 1000 to 500 BC, this period saw the first widespread use of iron and steel, smelted from iron ore, to make tools and weapons.
This major technological breakthrough coincided with – and also triggered – a series of important social and cultural changes. These included more advanced agriculture, the first major religious written texts (including the early books of the Old Testament) and, most importantly for our story, the development of the earliest written languages, through the invention of abstract alphabetic characters.
The first alphabets arose in the Middle East, later spreading westwards into Europe, where the Greeks developed the form that would become the ancestor of all European alphabets. In north-west Europe, another ancestral tongue had not yet been written down, but was spoken across a wide geographical area. Proto-Germanic, as it was later called, eventually split into two forms. One branch, to the north, evolved into the various Scandinavian languages such as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, while the other developed into modern German and Dutch and – following successive invasions into Britain from continental Europe – English.
Although English has since diverged markedly from these continental tongues, we can still identify many words that share a common origin, and therefore must date back to this distant time. Prominent amongst these are some of our best-known bird names, including swallow and swan.
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The swallow and the swan are two birds that, like the goose, would have been very familiar to our ancestors right across northern Europe.
Like the cuckoo, the swallow is one of the classic signs of the coming of spring. A long-distance migrant, it spends about half the year raising a family in our rural barns and outbuildings, before returning south to Africa each autumn to spend the winter there, hunting for insects amongst the vast gatherings of game animals on the grassy savannah.
‘Swan’ could refer to one of three closely related species: the resident mute swan, with its black-and-orange bill, or the black-and-yellow-billed Bewick’s and whooper swans. These are both winter visitors to Britain and north-west Europe, and like the geese they fly south and west in autumn and head back north and east in spring.
The English word swan is linguistically almost identical to the German schwan and the Dutch zwaan, the differences simply being the result of the standard shifts in pronunciation and spelling between the three languages. Likewise, swallow is Schwalbe in German and zwaluw in Dutch. That these birds have virtually the same name in all three modern European tongues is clear evidence that they share a common origin in the language known as West Germanic, which was spoken around the time of Christ’s birth.
But that’s not the whole story. For the names of both species can also be found in Old Norse, as svanr and svala.ix Because, like West Germanic, Old Norse is also derived from Proto-Germanic, we know these names must go back even further, to at least 500 BC.x
Simply knowing that these names have a common origin in the ancestral language of northern Europe still leaves one crucial thing unexplained: how did they end up being used here in Britain? As with so many aspects of our culture, they did so via a series of dramatic events: a series of invasions that brought people – and their languages – from mainland Europe to our island home.
3: Invasions and Conquests
The first great historical invasion of our isles is, as every schoolchild knows, the conquest of the Ancient Britons – led by Queen Boadicea (also known as Boudicca) – by the Roman Empire. Yet despite ruling much of Britain for close to half a millennium, following Julius Caesar’s arrival in 55 BC, the Romans never quite managed to fully subsume this outlying land and its recalcitrant people into their mighty empire. This was never more apparent than in the stubborn resistance amongst ordinary folk to speaking the language of their conquerors.
Although Latin was widely spoken amongst the Romans, and continued to be used as the language of scholarship long after they left, the Ancient Britons managed to keep hold of their own languages for the whole of the Roman occupation. This was very different from the situation in Gaul (modern-day France), where Latin rapidly replaced the indigenous language, driving it to outlying lands such as Brittany. This explains why the modern French language is so closely related to Latin.
Ironically, it was only when the Romans finally departed – more than four centuries after their initial invasion – that the various native tongues finally began to decline. The cause was the arrival of a new group of invaders, this time from the near continent.
They were a motley bunch: variously known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and hailing from Denmark, southern Sweden, the Low Countries and north-west Germany. They succeeded by taking advantage of the social chaos left by the decline of the Roman Empire, and the continued warring between the various groups of Britons left behind.
Having crossed the North Sea to land on the east coast, they eventually extended their influence throughout much of the area we now call England. Here, the existing Romano-British population intermingled and interbred with the newcomers. In the outlying parts of the British Isles – present-day Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man and Cornwall – which the invaders did not manage to reach, those peoples, often erroneously lumped together as Celts,xi retained their separate identity. They also continued to speak their own languages, the precursors of modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh.
But the conquest of these isles by those invaders from the east was not as brutal, or as sudden, as we might imagine. It took place over several hundred years, from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the seventh. So most historians, rather than seeing this as a single, momentous event, now regard it as a more gradual, measured process: not so much an invasion as a migration.
Of all the many lasting influences these newcomers had on their new home, by far the most important and enduring was their language. Known as Anglo-Saxon or Old English, this ancient tongue marked the birth of what is now spoken as a first or second language by more than two billion people, all over the world.
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This eventful period in our history also saw the first appearance of a significant number of English bird names, many of which – including rook and raven, sparrow and wheatear, gannet and crow – we still use today. And even though some species have since been given a more modern name, other old names still managed to cling on until relatively recently. These include ‘erne’, meaning sea eagle, and ‘ruddock’, for robin.
It is important to remember that all these names would have been part of an almost exclusively spoken language, rather than a written one. Centuries before the invention of the printing press, written works were rare indeed, and the vast majority of the population was functionally illiterate. As a result, the oral tradition thrived, with stories and poems – such as Beowulf – passed down the ages from one generation to another with remarkable fidelity. So it is not surprising that the names given to birds also arose in a purely oral setting, being coined by ordinary people to describe the creatures they saw every day as they toiled in the fields and forests.
Many of these early names are onomatopoeic: they imitate or echo the sounds made by the birds themselves. There are two good reasons for this: one cultural and one practical.
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nbsp; From a cultural point of view, there is growing evidence that we possess a ‘music instinct’: the ability to make sense of what we hear in the world around us, and the urge to imitate it ourselves.xii What could be more natural than a human being, having heard a bird sing, trying to mimic it? Surely one reason why so many ancient bird names are based on sound could be that our distant ancestors learned to sing by listening to birds. If so, that would make song the earliest art form – well before the emergence of cave paintings.
Another reason is more pragmatic. In an age long before the invention of optical aids such as binoculars and telescopes, which allow us to see feather-by-feather detail, visual features were far less important in identifying birds. By far the easiest way to tell one species apart from another, similar-looking one would have been by listening to the sound it made. If our ancestors then wanted to remember what a bird was called – perhaps because it was particularly good to eat or, like the cuckoo, marked the changing of the seasons – then the logical next step would be to turn this sound into the bird’s name.
But this process wasn’t as straightforward as simply repeating the sound; first this had to be transliterated into human speech. And as we shall now discover, this is not quite as simple as it might appear.
4: The Nature of Birdsong
At this stage in our story, we need to make a brief digression. Let’s start with the reason birds make sounds in the first place.
The primary way birds communicate with one another can be divided into songs and calls. The purpose of song is to defend a territory and attract a mate, while the various calls perform specific functions such as warning against predators, begging for food, or simply keeping in touch with other birds in the same flock.