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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Thus, the Anglo-Saxon “yellow ammer†(from the German word for a bunting) became yellowhammer |
This is so utterly bizarre it requires an ammering. Let’s suppose there is a general root word in Western Indo-European for buntings which is ‘ammer’. When you want to describe a yellow bunting I expect you will call it a ‘yellow ammer’. When you start writing your language down it becomes gentrified because literary languages are mainly the preserve of the gentry. Now (true story) Henry Cooper was once treated by my father and he had "enry’s ammer", which once put Muhamed Ali on the floor. But in literary form it is "Henry’s Hammer". If you think a gentleman would ever say “Look, darling, over there, I think it's a yellow ammer†you don’t know much about gentlemen.
Now do your own etymological musings on these
| “red steort†(meaning red tail) turned into redstart; and “wheteres†– literally white arse, changed into wheatear. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Norman French also had a major influence on the names of ducks (mallard and wigeon), game birds (pheasant and partridge), and raptors (peregrine and hobby). What these all have in common is that they were important to the Norman nobility – either as food, or for hunting and sport – so their French names took precedence over the older, English ones. |
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Why, how and, above all, when did we give our birds their names? Let us muse on ‘buntings’ since apparently this is an 'English' peculiarity. Why would we want a local term for such inconsequential birds? Because they weren't inconsequential, that's why. Our first task then is to run down the etymology of bunting. Two etymologies it seems because there are two buntings
1. light woollen stuff loosely woven, flag-material
2. popular name of a lark-like bird
We need not rubbish the usual explanations because they rubbish themselves
1. [the cloth] perhaps from a dialectal survival of Middle English bonting "sifting," verbal noun from bonten "to sift," because cloth was used for sifting grain. The Middle English verb is via Old French, from Vulgar Latin *bonitare "to make good," from Latin bonus "good" (see bonus).
2. [the bird] bountyng, a word of unknown origin. Perhaps from buntin"plump" (compare baby bunting, also Scots buntin "short and thick;" Welsh bontin "rump," and bontinog "big-assed"), or a double diminutive of French bon. Or it might be named in reference to speckled plumage and be from an unrecorded Old English word akin to German bunt "speckled," Dutch bont, which are perhaps from Latin punctus. |
So we shall have to provide our own and since we have a rule round here 'one input/one output', it will have to do for both
bunting: a bulging or swelling of a sail or fishing net
to bunt: to furl a sail in the middle, to swell like a partly furled sail
bunt: a pouched part of something
Of unknown origin |
Oh no it isn’t.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| a pouched part of something |
The link is commemorated in a well-known nursery rhyme. Why people should think it is a nursery rhyme--even a lullaby--is because when we moderns don’t know what pre-moderns are up to (much less able to do it ourselves) we belittle it to the point of non-existence. Anyway the folk song goes like this
Bye, baby Bunting,
Father's gone a-hunting,
Mother's gone a-milking,
Sister's gone a-silking,
Brother's gone to buy a skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in
Whatever it was, it seems to have been a routine yet important task, judging by what everybody else is doing. At first sight it might appear to be swaddling a baby but this doesn’t make much sense since it wouldn’t be a brother, he wouldn’t be buying anything and they wouldn’t be saying goodbye to the baby. More likely, it’s our old friend, Megalithic-style domestication. The song may even be literally describing the process:
1. Father hunts the animal and brings back the (very) young
2. Mother prepares the milk for its sustenance
3. Daughter does [God knows]
4. Son does [God knows].
But anyway the young animal is swaddled in it all until it is old enough to say goodbye whereupon it joins the rest of the grown-up domesticated animals. Something like that. My ornithology is not up to the task of saying where actual buntings fit into this. Presumably skylarks have some role to play in the Megalithic economy. One of you will have to work out which are feral domesticates and which are not.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Wile E. Coyote wrote: |
I like the way Hats slyly gets in Tea Urn |
Etymology online says tern = maidservant. It's also known as a sea-swallow. We may need to start listing the types of bird that are normally land-dwelling but have marine cousins.
Wiki article on Polynesian long distance sea voyages says
| Certain seabirds such as the White tern and Noddy tern feed on fish in the morning and return to rest on land at night time. Navigators use these birds to guide them to land by following where the birds are flying from in the morning which they are flying so they would lead them to the land. |
According to the OED, tern is a variant of Anglo-Saxon "stearn". The naming of the tern family rests on its authority
| Sterna is derived from Old English "stearn" which appears in the poem The Seafarer; a similar word was used to refer to terns by the Frisians | |
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Could bunting be a sort of popular onomatopoeia to convey the sound of yellowhammers, to reflect chattering, banter? Come to think of it, it's not a bad word for baby chatter.
Yellowhammers aren't especially noticeable in folklore but the sound they make was of interest to musicians and to Enid Blyton who wrote a children's story called '...a little bit of bread and no cheese' which seems to have caught on.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The bits of cloth or 'clooties' hung from branches at or near sacred springs/wishing wells are very similar to bunting. They're presumed to be offerings to some Celtic deity or other (like Christian prayer rags for getting rid of evil spirits?) though a bit underwhelming as a form of 'payment'.
Clooties were presumably useful for scaring birds away, in the absence of a resident hermit (they can't man every spring and well surely). The cloths look like small flapping wings.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Chris Packham showed how mother rabbits pull fur out from their bellies and line their nests in the burrow. The babies (without their own fur yet) are left alone all day -- he filmed them squirming around which pulled the fur even closer and kept them warm -- and it reminded me of the Baby Bunting rhyme. (Also reminiscent of the eider duck's habit of plucking its own down, another supremely warm material).
Rabbit mothers' milk is so rich in protein that one feeding session is enough to nourish the young (also true of seal mothers' milk). But why? Presumably because they have so many young and so often?
This may be borne out by pigeons who, though not mammals, produce a sort of milky stuff (males as well as females) which they feed to their young. Why do they need to supplement feed? Presumably because their young leave the nest so quickly, a month or less after hatching. Emperor penguins have this milk-producing ability too but they have to contend with Antarctic conditions and are allowed to be special.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You couldn't make it up.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The occurrence of 'llan' churches in Wales, many of which appear rather superfluous, seems another illustration of communal creativity.
A church is the equivalent of a charter, it's visible proof. That is surely why all these people with bogus genealogies are served up as local saints (or with suitable connections abroad). Convert a building, say a bothy, and your ownership of the llan is in writing so to speak.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Hatty wrote: | The occurrence of 'llan' churches in Wales, many of which appear rather superfluous, seems another illustration of communal creativity.
A church is the equivalent of a charter, it's visible proof. That is surely why all these people with bogus genealogies are served up as local saints (or with suitable connections abroad). Convert a building, say a bothy, and your ownership of the llan is in writing so to speak. |
I suspect llan/land........in actual fact = lend..... ie it's best understood by circular thinking.
The church = charter (circle word)
Land = Lend (circular transaction) cf. Lent
Land was originally loaned or lent rather than given.... as no-one could have permanent ownership of what God gave to all. Ownership of land is really guardianship (Gordian ship).
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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This is all extremely good stuff.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Due to a Twitter argument over the date of Essen Abbey I looked up the Annals of Quedlinburg and got sidetracked by more important matters.
It turns out that the Quedlinburg annals are said to contain the first mention of Lithuania. First of something is often suspect and this one reeks
| The Annals of Quedlinburg (Latin: Saxonicae Annales Quedlinburgenses, German: Quedlinburger Annalen) were written between 1008 and 1030 in the convent of Quedlinburg Abbey. In recent years a consensus has emerged that the annalist was a woman. The annals are mostly dedicated to the history of the Holy Roman Empire; they also contain the first written mention of the name of Lithuania ("Litua"), dated to March, 1009. |
The Duchy of Lithuania was a hotchpotch of territories, officially founded in the thirteenth century.
The next sentence explains why none of the above can be relied on even though the source is never questioned
| The original document has disappeared, surviving only as a 16th-century copy held in Dresden,[2] but its contents endure as a scholarly resource. |
Something else Beowulf-related caught my eye as part of the general oddness of this doc
| The Annals of Quedlinburg became an important research source; during the 12th century they were used by at least five contemporary historians. Felice Lifshitz asserts that the Annals of Quedlinburg played a key role in shaping the ways in which influential Germans of the 19th and 20th centuries saw their medieval past.[3] They continue to be analyzed in other contexts: by scholars of Beowulf discussing its use of the term Hugones to mean Franks, by climatologists, and in a book discussing fear of the millennium |
Huguenot was used in 16th century France to mean Protestants but Hugones sounds too much like Huguenots to be dismissed especially as the Junius Manuscript (aka Cadmon Manuscript) is the bedrock of Old English literature and Junius, we discovered, was a Huguenot from the Netherlands.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So many interest groups have an interest in either inventing or believing these taradiddles that we sometimes forget the biggest interest group of all is ... historians.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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A manuscript in the British Library, Cotton MS Augustus II. 2, contains the "oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon charter in contemporary form", dated 679
A.D. 679 (Reculver, May). Hlothhere, king of Kent, to Abbot Beorhtwald and his minster; grant of land at Westanae on the Isle of Thanet, and in Sturry, Kent. Latin
Archive:
Canterbury, Christ Church (ex Reculver) |
Reculver is 1) of Megalithic interest and 2) on my blacklist of Dark Age monasteries.
There is some dispute though. Some historians say it is the "earliest original" while others say it's "a later copy".
Reculver has never been found, at least nothing to suggest there was an Anglo-Saxon monastery there. All primary evidence has been destroyed -- vandalism is blamed, also coastal erosion -- but two towers minus their steeples, bought by Trinity House, are still on the cliff edge and used as navigation marks by ships.
MS Augustus II is stuffed with Kentish charters which are generally accepted as being originals by scholars. But it also contains the only surviving copy of Magna Carta from the Cotton Library (there was another copy but it was burnt in the 1731 fire). You'd think it'd be looked after very carefully, what with Canterbury being top dog. Not carefully enough it seems
| The original wax seal was lost over the centuries | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Along with the front cover, dedications and other hard-to-forge bits and pieces. All lost over the centuries. How many centuries has also been lost over the centuries.
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