Bird names based on people’s first names and covert onomatopoeia

Abstract

Some Hungarian popular bird names come from people’s first names, albeit none of them have become official names of the bird species concerned. Many of them are also onomatopoetic in addition to being based on first names; thus such bird names exhibit “covert onomatopoeia”. Examples include butamáté (< Máté) ‘hoopoe’, csicsipál (< Pál) ‘great tit’, gábor and gábormadár with many other variants (< Gábor) ‘shrike’, gegő (< Gergő), györgydiák (< György), both: ‘butcher bird’, lidike (< Lídia), lili, lilimadár (< Lili), all three: ‘redshank’, mátyás, mátyásmadár, matyi (< Mátyás), all three: ‘jay’. These bird names came into being such that a human first name that more or less resembled the given bird’s song was turned into (part of) a bird name. It was rather arbitrary (i) which birds received first name based names and (ii) which birds received names with “covert onomatopoeia”. In modern ethnobiology, American bird names like killdeer and whip-poor-will are similarly instances of “covert onomatopoeia”.