{"id":5185,"date":"2013-04-13T05:33:33","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T12:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=5185"},"modified":"2015-07-13T05:33:13","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T12:33:13","slug":"not-to-seize-her-berry-but-to-praise-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/13\/not-to-seize-her-berry-but-to-praise-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Not to Seize Her Berry, but to Praise It"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think of that old joke every time I see a Cooper’s Hawk<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Admittedly, it’s a roundabout process: the\u00a0Cooper’s Hawk\u00a0<\/strong>is an accipiter, “accipiter” is a Latin word, and as we all know, that word is derived from the verb\u00a0accipio<\/em>, “I seize.” I know, they don’t eat much fruit; but who can resist the thrill of mentally juggling a birdhawk, Shakespeare, and Flip Wilson?<\/p>\n

Uh-oh. I just wrote “as we all know.” A very, very bad sign.<\/p>\n

The etymology from “accipio” is an ancient one. Here is Isidore of Seville<\/a>, who died 1,337 years ago last week (my translation, as always):<\/p>\n

The accipiter is a bird better armed in its spirit than in its claws, bearing great courage in rather a small body. It has taken its name from accipiendo, that is to say, from taking. And this is a bird very eager to seize other birds, and thus it is called “seizer,” that is to say, raptor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gregory the Great, who, incidentally, dedicated his\u00a0Moralia in Job<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>to Isidore’s brother Leander, refers to the same notion:<\/p>\n

We sometimes say “accipere” for “to take away,” whence we call “accipiters” those birds that seize others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to imagine more authoritative authorities than those, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. A noun formed on the Latin verb should have come out “acceptor,” a word that exists, of course, but apparently not ever in the meaning “a bird that seizes.”<\/p>\n

Jacob Theodor Klein<\/a>, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, tells a different story. The name<\/p>\n

is usually derived from the Greek ‘Occypteros, that is to say, having long wings that come to a point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Klein doesn’t especially like that etymology (he points out that there are lots of birds with long, pointed wings that are\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>called “accipitres”), but this seems to be the one that has carried the day. Coues, in the Century Dictionary<\/em><\/a>, appears to suggest that the Greek word, attested as early as Homer’s Iliad<\/em>, was, shall we say, informally altered to appear Latin — exactly the explanation given by the OED<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Neither Coues nor the Oxonians appear to have been aware of what is perhaps the strongest evidence for the Greek, and not Latin, origin of the name.<\/p>\n

The gun smokes in the\u00a0Kyranides,<\/em>\u00a0a fourth-century encyclopedia, three books of which make up a zoological treatise.\u00a0According to Savigny<\/a>, the Greek encyclopedist in his Book III describes the Sparrowhawk<\/strong>\u00a0under the title “Ocypteros<\/a>.” There we have it: the original Greek name applied to precisely the bird that the rest of us call “accipiter.” That fake-Latin name is the result of folk etymology, the assimilation of an incomprehensible term — here a Greek word — to a more comfortable, more familiar, more immediately understandable form — here a made-up “Latin” word that was then furnished with a reassuring, but equally fictitious, etymology.<\/p>\n

It worked, for almost fifteen hundred years. Choate<\/a>\u00a0and Leahy<\/a> and, well, everybody, including me, have swallowed the spurious explanation hawk, line, and sinker — until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think of that old joke every time I see a Cooper’s Hawk. Admittedly, it’s a roundabout process: the\u00a0Cooper’s Hawk\u00a0is an accipiter, “accipiter” is a Latin word, and as we all know, that word is derived from the verb\u00a0accipio, “I seize.” I know, they don’t eat much fruit; but who can resist the thrill of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Not to Seize Her Berry, but to Praise It”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5185"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5185"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10185,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5185\/revisions\/10185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}