Turaco & Haliaeetus
White-cheeked Turaco
To zoologists, this cheerful West African berry-eater is Touraco leucotis. The first word is its genus name, the second its specific epithet or species adjective name. Turaco or touraco is the bird’s name in one of the West African languages. The species adjective leucotis is Greek for ‘white-eared’ from Greek λευκός leukos ‘white’ + Greek οὖς, ὠτóς ous, otis ‘ear.’ Compare the English medical word otitis, our general word for inflammation of the ear. Or my punny name for the advertising agency that makes all those loud TV commercials, Otitis Media.
Bird Name Wrong? Who Gives A Cluck! Say Many Ornithologists.
Now, of course, white-eared is not the same as white-cheeked. And, as we all know, class, most birds don’t have ears at the sides of their heads. The turaco’s ears are under its feathers on the top of its head, for reasons having to do with the reduction of wind noise and consequent improved hearing precision. Nevertheless the turaco’s white feathers are on the sides of its head, so a specific epithet that means white-eared is not accurate or helpful. But, trying to find the classical Greek word for cheek was simply too much trouble for the zoologist third-raters who named this bird. The Homeric word for cheek was παρειά pareia, so white-cheeked as a learned specific adjective could be *leucopareic or *leucopareiic and it could easily have been conventionally Latinized as *leucopareicus. The initial asterisk denotes a hypothetical form.
But, as we can see by the accepted word leucotis, that was too much trouble. Oh well, its guardians are always been content to let zoology bloat and burgeon with imprecise denomination. Nothing is new there since Linnaeus himself first made naming mistakes and later zoologists slumped like lazy slugs and permited his errors to be canonized forever.
When you ask zoologists why they never change animal names with mistakes in them, they actually say that correcting the mistakes would make dozens of textbooks wrong or obsolete and cause “trouble” changing all the errors. Can you believe that so-called scientists could utter that lame an excuse! “It's too much trouble.” Precision in measurement is an integral part of ornithology, but precision in the naming of the animals one is studying is obviously of little importance. From such a response, only one conclusion may be drawn: it is obvious that many ornithologists are not scientists at all, but mere slovenly birdwatchers. I do not deprecate or vilipend all birdwatchers. Many I've met are multilingual and quite aware of the astounding corpus of bad naming still residual in the printed annals of ornithology. See the next bird name below.
More about the Turaco
This brash, engaging, inquisitive bird of West Africa is not presently endangered. The white-cheeked turaco is sweetly tempered but monkey-voiced and does well in captivity in roomy zoo aviaries. But let us not imprison earth’s genial feathered flotilla of tiny sky ships. Instead, remember the couplet by William Blake in his Auguries of Innocence (written 1803, published 1863):
“A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all of Heaven in a rage.”
This winsome birdlet is of the Musophagidae, which delightful mouthful of name means ‘banana-plaintain-eating-family.’ The botanical genus name for our banana is Musa, borrowed into English botany from the Arabic word for banana, موز mauz. One of my favourite botanical names is that of a dwarf banana called Musa nana compacta. The banana, by the way, is not a tree. It is in botany—surprisingly—an herb! The Arabic word entered medieval English when an 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, was translated into Latin. Mauz became Latinized as musa. Our now common name banana is what the fruit is called in a Niger-Congo African language called Wolof.
Erne That Name
A clue familiar to crossword-puzzle fans is “white-tailed sea eagle” and the answer is ern or erne. Its zoological moniker is a real gulp-inducing doozie, Haliaeetus albicilla. But quail not, neither abandon verbal hope, for Uncle Billy is at hand, to disperse the fog of unknowing and to correct a gross mistake in the given meaning  of albicilla. Linnaeus himself, father of scientific naming, dubbed our sea eagle with its Greek-and-Latin-based binomial name tag. This raptor’s genus name Haliaeetus is a compound of Greek ἁλί hali ‘at sea’ + Greek αἰετός aietos ‘eagle.’ As a bird name, it is thousands of years old. Homer himself used the word, in the slightly different form of ἁλιαίετος haliaietos to denominate an osprey seen by Odysseus.
Gross Mistake in Quoted Meaning of Albicilla
The most ancient authorities and all the modern societies for the correct propagation of bird names state with solemn authority that albicilla is Latin and means ‘white-tailed.’ BUT IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT. Now, of course, this sea eagle does indeed have a white tail. And albus is certainly a Latin adjective that means ‘white.’ But there is NO Latin or Greek word *kilos or *cilla that means ‘tail.’ Not one. Latin cilium means ‘eyebrow’ but this species does not have white eyebrows. Not once, ever, in all of the history of these two languages does that group of letters means ‘tail.’ But, can those of us who spotted the error get the bird brains of ornithology to correct the meaning? Ha! Go squawk in the wind is what the uppity ornithologists caw out.
Now, there is a Latin suffix –cillus, -cilla, -cillum. It is a peculiar little verbal addendum apparently not well-known to the bird-naming folk who, in general, it must be said, have little Latin and less Greek. What the –cilla suffix does in its role in word formation is simple: it makes already existing diminutive forms even smaller. Thus it is a diminutive of diminutives. So the most semantic weight that a form like albicilla could possibly bear is a meaning like “little teeny-weeny white thingies.” It clearly does apply to the noble eagle’s white tail feathers. But albicilla does not mean ‘white-tailed.’ Yes, my quibble is picayune, a small point. But correct zoological denomination is made up of small linguistic points—science is about, among other things, precision—thus it behooves the bird brains, appointed because of their learning, to care for proper ornithological labels and to revise names and correct mistakes with diligence and dispatch. So how about it, you chirping experts?
Sea & Salt
Permit me, word-lovers, to tiptoe up a short, concluding side-trail about the Greek word for ‘sea’ and ‘salt.’ They are the same word. Hals, halos ἅλς, ἁλός as a masculine noun means ‘salt’ in Greek. Hals, halos ἅλς, ἁλός as a feminine noun means ‘the sea’ in Greek. The great salt reservoir to the ancients was the sea.
The root word appears in many Indo-European languages. Greek hals is cognate with English salt, Dutch zout, German Salz, Latin sal and so French sal, Spanish sal, Italian sale, and with the Russian word for salt соль sol’.
The root supplies common and learned words in English, taken from many of these languages. Think of how valuable salt was to preserve meat before the days of electric refrigeration and you realize why Roman soldiers were partially paid in salt; it was their salary. The ocean is saline. But sometimes science uses the Greek derivative and dubs the salty sea with its Hellenic adjective—haline. In oceanography are a few technical terms like halibios, the total weight of all the living forms in the sea. Some minute marine organisms of saltwater are called haliplankton. In chemistry, a group of elements are termed halogens ‘salt-makers’ (bromine, chlorine, fluorine, iodine and astatine) because they readily produce salts directly with metals and other radicals. Their salts are called halides. Sodium chloride, common table salt, is a halide.
Now, gentles, I must take wing, lest I foul this nest with too profuse a cannonade of verbal droppings.
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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