Sesquiotica

Oceania: wandering butterflies, wandering people

The world’s second largest migration of butterflies takes place every year in Taiwan.

Given what I’ve said about the long distances that some butterflies travel, you may wonder “between Taiwan and where?” But I don’t mean the second longest distance – this migration covers only about 400 kilometres. I just mean the second largest number (after the monarch butterflies): millions of purple crow butterflies fly from the north of Taiwan to the south, and it can stop traffic – partly because they’re so beautiful and there are so many of them, and partly because some of them can end up on windshields. I suppose occasionally, on the other hand, some of them might fly into a car or truck and get a free lift. Perhaps they will wander from their flight path. But not all those who wander are lost.

Words for ‘butterfly’ also wander, with the languages that carry them. And it happens that one of the world’s longest-distance wanderings of languages started in Taiwan millennia ago: the Austronesian languages.

You may think of Taiwan as a Chinese-speaking country, and that’s true, but it’s true in about the same way as Australia is an English-speaking country. Chinese speakers arrived later and generally crowded out the indigenous languages – of which there were many. But by that time, the spread of languages across the islands to the south, west, and east had been in progress for a long time. By 6,000 years ago, the Austronesian languages had started spreading south to the Philippines. From there they moved, with the people who spoke them, to New Guinea, Borneo, and all of what is now Indonesia. And they kept going: west all the way across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar; east into Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean. Now their spread goes halfway around the world – Madagascar is almost exactly on the opposite side of the globe from Hawai‘i.

They have subdivisions, of course. The deepest divisions are between the languages of Taiwan itself, which is one way that historical linguists know it all started there – the farther from origin languages of a family are, the less concentrated the diversity. Alas, the indigenous languages of Taiwan have few speakers and a long history of suppression, and consequently few resources, so I have been able to find a word for ‘butterfly’ in only one Taiwanese indigenous language: in Paiwan, it is kalidungudungul.

Does that have a familiar characteristic? Yes: you see the dungul twice. Reduplication, as we have seen, shows up in many other places with words for ‘butterfly’ – but in Austronesian languages, it shows up very frequently throughout the language. It is one of the signal characteristics of many Austronesian languages. 

Another characteristic that is not universal among them but very common is one the Paiwan word does not show: very limiting phonological rules. Austronesian languages typically have relatively few phonemes – Hawai‘ian famously uses only twelve letters (well, thirteen, counting the ‘okina, which is ‘ ) – and in many languages their syllables can have only one consonant followed by one vowel (or in some cases a diphthong) or just a vowel by itself.

You’ll see what I mean when we fly across the waters from island to island seeing their words for ‘butterfly’. In Filipino (Tagalog) it’s paruparo. In Balinese, Indonesian (aka Bahasa Indonesia), and Malay – which are all very closely related – it’s kupu-kupu, and in Javanese (from Java, where Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is) it’s kupu. In Malagasy – from Madagascar, much closer to Africa than to Indonesia, and yet – it’s lolo. 

It’s not that they all have these characteristics. When we look to Micronesian languages, we see Nauruan iyewaeoe and Palauan bangikoi. Meanwhile, Melanesian languages, which include the languages of Papua New Guinea, have the world’s greatest density of languages per square kilometre of land, but Melanesian languages are a geographic grouping, and the Papuan languages in particular include quite a few languages that don’t appear to be related to each other and aren’t part of the Austronesian language family. And I don’t have the resources to tell you what ‘butterfly’ is in any of the Papuan languages, even though some of them have more than a hundred thousand speakers.

But one well-known member of the Melanesian languages is definitely Austronesian, and is also culturally and geographically close to Polynesia: Fijian, in which ‘butterfly’ is bebe. And when we move into the Polynesian languages, which have the simplest syllables and the most reduplication, we see that in Samoan, Tuvaluan, Tahitian, and – I suspect – several others, ‘butterfly’ is pepe; in Māori, of New Zealand, it’s pēpepe, though Google gives me pūrerehua (and I have also gotten pūrehua as an alternative in Tahitian); and in Hawai‘ian, it’s pulelehua, though Google Translate gives me lelelele. (But I’ll trust my actual printed-and-bound dictionaries of Māori and Hawai‘ian over Google Translate.)

That is not much variety over quite a dispersed area, spread originally by boat across long distances with no land in sight for long stretches. And it took time – Samoa has had humans on it for perhaps 5,000 years; Tonga, 3,000 or so years; Tahiti, at least 2,500 years; Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and Hawai‘i, both about 1,000 years; New Zealand (Aotearoa), about 700 years. And over most of Polynesia, the first humans arrived with their Polynesian language.

And then, mostly in the last half millennium or less, other humans arrived with Indo-European languages. It’s like if a butterfly hopped into a car – or onto a boat, as the monarch butterfly did. We know that monarch butterflies are from the Americas, but there are lots of them in Australia, and have been since… the late 1800s. At first there weren’t so many, but then Europeans planted the kinds of plants that monarch butterflies like, and now there are lots, wandering (but not lost) all over the continent. Oh, by the way, monarch butterflies are called wanderer butterflies in Australia.

It’s not that Australia didn’t have butterflies before then. Of course it did! Australia, famous for its odd animals and big bugs, has the largest kind of butterfly in the world: the birdwings, which can have a wingspan of up to almost a foot (although the very biggest of them are actually found in New Guinea, not Australia). And the wanderers haven’t crowded out the indigenous butterflies in Australia. But the same can’t be said for people and languages. There were more than 250 Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia at the time Europeans first arrived. Now there are not much more than 100, and all but about 10 of them have very few remaining speakers. And I can’t tell you too much about them, alas, but I can tell you words for ‘butterfly’ in three of them, according to Glosbe.com: in Dhuwal, it’s buurnba; in Murrinh-Patha, it’s manman; in Warlpiri, it’s cinci-maɭu-maɭu.

And in most of Australia now, the word for ‘butterfly’ is… butterfly, of course, since English speakers are dominant throughout the country now. Indo-European languages have wandered and left their mark throughout the region. Consider the place names, so many of which are formed from our usual Latinized Greek linguistic Lego kit: Oceania, obviously related to ocean; Austronesian, from roots meaning ‘south island’; Micronesia, ‘small islands’; Melanesia, ‘black islands’ (as in dark-skinned people); Polynesia, ‘many islands’; Australia, ‘south place’; and then there are names like New Guinea, New Zealand, Philippines (named after Philip II of Spain), Marshall Islands, Gilbert Islands…

Wait, though: the Gilbert Islands are now called Kiribati. That’s good, right? It’s a Polynesian word? Well… it’s really the name Gilbert as adapted by the local language: gi becomes ki; l becomes ri; ber becomes ba; t becomes ti (actually pronounced “s” but that’s just the way t is said before i in that language, sort of like how ng in English is not the usual “n” sound plus “g”).

So, yes, as we have seen before, languages can take words that have wandered in and make them local. But the process can happen in a much more involved way, too. Local people and international traders develop business languages using reduced versions of the grammar and phonology of the local language along with modified words from the traders’ language, to create what is called a pidgin – in fact, the word pidgin comes from a modified version of the word business in one such. Pidgins are simplified languages, but once a pidgin becomes well developed and situated in a community, children start to grow up speaking it and it becomes a fully elaborated language, known as a creole. There are several of these throughout Oceania; the most widely known one is Tok Pisin (Tok Pisin is from the words talk and pidgin), a language of Papua New Guinea, with about a million people who speak it as their main language and a few million more who are conversant in it; as it spreads it’s increasingly dominating other languages of Papua New Guinea. 

And what is the Tok Pisin word for ‘butterfly’? It’s bataplai.

Next: panambi, pillpintu, and more.

East and Southeast Asia: the lepidopteran effect

The thing about butterfly effects is that they’re chaotic – the butterfly effect is an idea from chaos theory, after all. What that means is that sometimes it carries through to where you’d think it wouldn’t, and sometimes it doesn’t carry through to where you’d think it would. And, because it doesn’t generally give pictures of where it came from, sometimes – most of the time, in reality – you’re not entirely sure. You can have similar things happening at great distance and have no reason to think they’re connected – right? And you can have very different things happening close together that are connected …maybe.

We can make our best guesses, of course, and rate things as more or less likely. So just because, for instance, butterflies are Lepidoptera and that has given us words such as Croatian leptir, it does not mean that some butterfly word halfway around the world that also has lep- is related. As linguistics like to say, etymology by sound is not sound etymology! Yes, of course similar-sounding words may be related, and similarity of sound can be a lead to follow, but you can’t conclude anything on the basis of sound resemblance alone – for instance, isle and island are unrelated, and the s in island got there by mistake. And on the other hand, as we have already seen, words can sound quite different and yet still be related.

So when we look at the Proto-Sino-Tibetan *lep root, which meant ‘butterfly’, we have no good reason to think it’s related to lepidoptera, nor, for that matter, to flap or any other similar-sounding word from the farther west world. There are various theories on exactly where it comes from. Could be a root meaning ‘thin, flat’; could be one meaning ‘flash; lightning; glitter’; could be ‘flapping’. If you’re interested in more details, Wiktionary is a place to start. But we do know that it descended into Burmese လိပ်ပြာ (/leɪʔpjà/, often rendered as lippra) and to Tibetan ཕྱེ་མ་ལེབ (phye ma leb), with some added bits. 

And we know that it added a prefix in Old Chinese to be *ɡaː l’eːb, which became Middle Chinese *ɦuo dep, which became modern Cantonese wu dip, Hakka fu tiab, Wu hhu diq, words in other varieties of Chinese that look more or less like one or more of the preceding, and modern Mandarin húdié. And all of the modern Chinese versions are written the same: 蝴蝶.

Let’s take quick look at those characters, because who doesn’t like to take apart Chinese characters to understand how they work? After all, they literally give you pictures of where they came from. If you’re wondering what the meaning decomposes to, since it’s two characters, the answer is that both of them mean ‘butterfly’ – a redundancy similar to the word pussycat, say, but they’re always used together. And the first thing you can see is that both of them, 蝴 and 蝶, have the same bit on the left: 虫. It’s the semantic component of each, and the right side is the phonetic component (Chinese compound characters are normally composed of semantic and phonetic parts – so they indicate ‘thing with this kind of meaning and this kind of sound’). Want to guess what it means? The answer is ‘insect’ – or ‘worm, snake, or other creepy crawly thing’. The original character looked more like a slithering snake, but it’s changed much over the ages.

As to the phonetic components, the hú, on the left, has 胡, which when used by itself has a lot of meanings, including ‘barbarian’ and ‘recklessly’, and – you may have noticed – it is itself made from two bits: the one on the left, 古, which by itself means ‘old, ancient’, is made further from the character for ‘ten’ (十, but it might originally have been something else) on top of the character for ‘mouth’ (口), and the one on the right looks like the character for moon (月) but is actually a simplified form of the character 肉, which is from something like a side of beef (hmm… maybe a tauriņš? Nah). Even the evidence before your eyes can mislead!

Meanwhile, the dié, on the right, has 枼, which by itself means ‘table, slat, slip, leaf’ and is also made of two parts: 世, made from three of the character for ‘ten’, and meaning ‘thirty’ as in years and thus ‘generation’, and 木, meaning ‘wood’ and looking originally – and still – like a tree. Each year’s worth of leaves are a generation for a tree, you see. Not that that has any reference to the generations of butterflies it takes to complete a migration.

That second half of the Chinese butterfly, 蝶, is also the character used in Japanese for ‘butterfly’. That’s not surprising, since Japanese uses a lot of characters of Chinese origin – although it also uses a lot of characters you won’t see in Chinese. And the Japanese language is historically unrelated to Chinese; grammatically and phonetically it is strikingly different, and, though it has many Chinese influences, its core of vocabulary is also altogether different, even when it uses characters from Chinese to represent the words. 

Thus, in Japanese you can see a Chinese character with a pronunciation (sometimes more than one available pronunciation for the same thing) entirely different from any Chinese pronunciation. The way 蝶 is pronounced in modern Japanese (and rendered in Roman), for example is chō. That traces, historically, to teu, which came from tewu, from tefu, from tepu, from… Middle Chinese dep. Yes, Mandarin dié and Japanese chō not only use the same character, they come from the same original pronunciation. Don’t ask me why Japanese took its word for ‘butterfly’ from Chinese – it took quite a few things from Chinese, but far from everything!

We can’t talk about Chinese and Japanese without talking about Korean, though it’s not related to either of them (unless so far back that it’s all arrant speculation). The Korean word for ‘butterfly’ is 나비 (nabi), which might – might – originally have meant ‘flutterer’.

We also can’t move away from East Asia without looking at the other language families spoken in the area. One of them is the Austroasiatic family, the best-known members of which are Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese, though it has a large number of other members spoken as far south as Malaysia and as far west as India. The Khmer word for ‘butterfly’ is មេអំបៅ (mei ʼɑmbaw). In Vietnamese, the word for ‘butterfly’ is bướm – but sometimes they call it bướm bướm, and some related languages also reduplicate the word: Wiktionary lists as cognates Thổ pəmpɨam, Hoà Bình Muong pɨəm pɨəm, Sơn La Muong pɨəm, Thanh Hoá Muong bɨəm, and Muong Bi pươm pưởm. All of those seem to mean just ‘butterfly’ and not come from anything else – though of course other things may be named subsequently after butterflies, and if you’re curious about what kinds of other things, you can always look at, for instance, the Wiktionary entry.

But when we turn to the Kra-Dai family of languages, which include Lao, Thai, and a number of other languages, including some spoken in inland southern China, we find a more poetic approach. In both Lao ຜີເສື້ອ (phi seu) and Thai ผีเสื้อ (pǐi-sʉ̂ʉa), the name of the insect means literally ‘tutelary spirit’. Tutelary? That means ‘guardian’ – as in your guardian angel, or, in this case, perhaps an ancestor who is there to guide you. You may remember Persian parvâne, from a root meaning ‘guide’. Of course it’s not related – for one thing, in Lao and Thai the word order is ‘spirit guide’ and so you can forget about connecting the p’s. But why wouldn’t people in different parts of the world look at the same airborne miracles and get similar ideas about them?

Mind you, I’m sure that they had different ideas of who the guide might be. But, as I’m thinking about guides and butterfly coincidences, I must also mention the Mongolic languages, which include Buryat, Kalmyk, Santa (yes, really – but it’s also called Dongxiang), and of course Mongolian. Their words – as far as I can see – are all pretty similar: Buryat эрбээхэй, Kalmyk эрвәкә, Mongolian эрвээхэй (apologies for not including the Mongolian-alphabet versions, but I can’t render them in the proper vertical orientation here). In case you don’t read Cyrillic letters, they’re pronounced erbeehey, ervəkə, and erveehey (the ee is like “ehh” not “eee”). And they all trace to Proto-Mongolic *herbekei. Which, I assure you, has an only purely coincidental resemblance to Harbeck, though I am serving as your butterfly guide here.

Next: from island to island across the oceans.

Middle Eastern and African butterflies: keep on flapping

As we flew eastward into Asia, we bypassed Africa and much of the Middle East, so we’re going to double back now. I wanted to treat all the language families of Africa together, and one of the language families – Afro-Asiatic – is also dominant in the Middle East – particularly two of its members: Arabic and Hebrew.

You may not think of Arabic and Hebrew as African languages, but it’s not just that Arabic is spoken (in several varieties) across northern Africa; it’s that all of the other languages of the Afro-Asiatic family are found in Africa: Afar, Amharic, Berber, Hausa, Oromo, Somali, Tigrinya, and more. The languages are not all closely related, but you’ve already seen how much diversity there can be in a language family (a.k.a. phylum, such as Indo-European). And, as you might expect, the words for ‘butterfly’ in the different Afro-Asiatic languages are diverse: Amharic ቢራቢሮ (bīrabīro); Berber aferṭeṭṭu; Hausa malan boɗe ido; Oromo billaacha; Somali balanbaalis; Tigrinya ጽንብላሊዕ (ṣəmbəlaliʿ); Afar laahinti (which means ‘cow’s eye’).

For that matter, Arabic itself is diverse; it has quite a few varieties, just as English has. But the standard Arabic word for ‘butterfly’ is فراشة (farāša). I don’t know its etymology, alas, but I do notice that the word in Hebrew – which is closely enough related to Arabic that you can often notice similarities between the two – is פַּרְפַּר or, without the vowel marks, פרפר (parpar), which has par where Arabic has far.

And what is that par? Well, after we’ve seen papilio, farfalla, pilipala, pilipilinpauxa, peperutka, perhonen, and parvâne, it seems just about par for the course – both its form and its reduplication. I am told by a regular reader of Sesquiotica, Israel (Izzy) Cohen, that in Hebrew you can use parpar as a verb – specifically, l’parper – to mean ‘be indecisive’, i.e., ‘flounder, flip-flop’. And he says that the butterfly is called parpar in Hebrew “because of its spasmodic flight-pattern.” So it is, I think, imitative – like some other words for ‘butterfly’ we have seen.

Imitative? Well, you see those flat wings flapping up and down, and you can picture in your head how they must sound when you can hear them (which you seldom can). And of course it’s not just one flap; it keeps on flapping – ergo the reduplication.

I keep mentioning reduplication (repetition of part or all of a word, either exactly the same or in modified form), and that’s because it keeps showing up. Worldwide, languages use reduplication in varying amounts for an assortment of reasons, as we sometimes do – not always so formally – in English. Some use it for pluralization (“Cheeseburger! cheeseburger! cheeseburger!”). Some use it for emphasis or clarification (“a drink drink”). Some use it for an endearing diminutive or to express fond familiarity (“Night-night, choo-choo”). Some use it to indicate repetition (“tap-tap-tap”; “pitter-patter”). 

This last kind is quite common in many African languages – specifically, it is used as a frequentative form, which means it means something keeps happening. For example, in Swahili, the reduplicating verb root -pepea means ‘wave back and forth’. And when you add the right noun class prefix and the right suffix to it, you get kipepeo, which means a thing that waves back and forth… specifically, a butterfly.

Which is fun because, though kipepeo seems like it would be related to parpar, Swahili doesn’t even belong to the same language family as Hebrew. But of course languages in the same area can influence each other: for example, the Arabic word for ‘book’ is كتاب (kitab, pronunciation varying between kinds of Arabic) and the Swahili word for ‘book’ is kitabu – note that same ki- noun class prefix as on kipepeo: the Arabic word was reanalyzed as root -tabu plus noun class prefix ki-.

What language family does Swahili belong to? There are ongoing terminological discussions, but the established name (and the one I learned when studying African languages in university) is Niger-Congo, because they all seem to trace from the area around the Niger and Congo rivers, at the angle of the African west coast. They have spread widely from there, throughout sub-Saharan Africa all the way to the east coast and the southern tip, and there are a lot of them. Not only do I not have the resources to look up ‘butterfly’ in all of them, I don’t even have the resources to name all of them (nor the space here either). But I do have more than a dozen I have at least been able to find in online resources – though I can’t always vouch for the reliability of the resources (mutters something about the uneven distribution of resources and attention between colonizers and colonized).

The first language I’ll name, Bambara, spoken in Mali, may not even be Niger-Congo; the Mandé languages of the northwest of Africa are quite different from the rest of the Niger-Congo languages. But I cannot not tell you that the Bambara word for ‘butterfly’, according to Google Translate, is nfirinfirinin, which seems to me like a whole tree full of butterflies all taking to wing at once. On the other hand, Glosbe.com gives me two words: dimago and npɛrɛnpɛrɛ. The first seems dull, but the second is glorious to behold. Fula, a not-too-closely related language spoken throughout west Africa, uses bedelallah, and I would love to know if there’s an Arabic influence, but I don’t. Wolof, related to Fula and spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauretania, uses lëp-lëp, and I have a guess that it might be formed in about the same way as the Yoruba word.

Yoruba is definitely a Niger-Congo language, spoken in Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, and it uses a feature common in languages of the family (and many others around the world): ideophones. The Yoruba word for ‘butterfly’ is labalaba, from an ideophone indicating ‘light and floppy’. What’s an ideophone? A sort of demonstrative, expressive interjection; we use them some in English – “Bam, the lights come on, and whoosh, it’s like someone sucked all the air out of the room.” They’re like onomatopoeia but don’t necessarily imitate actual sounds. Think of the kinds of standardized interjections you often accompany with hand gestures. 

For instance, in Ewe, spoken in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, lilililili on a high tone means “nice good sweet smell” and on a low tone means “very bad smell.” I don’t know whether ideophones affected the Ewe word Google Translate gives me for ‘butterfly’, akpakpaluʋui, or either of the words Glosbe.com gives me, bakboloowhen and dyekpakpa. But I can see kpakpa in two of those words, and I can tell you that kpakpaxe means ‘duck’. (By the way, the syllables are kpa-kpa; you say the “kp” with the back of the tongue and the lips at the same time. These coarticulated stops are a common feature in Niger-Congo languages.)

I see something resemblant (though without the coarticulations) in lipekapeka, a word for ‘butterfly’ from Lingala, which is spoken in the region of the Congo river and nearby countries, but I don’t know whether it’s related. In Igbo, which is spoken in Nigeria, I find the word is urukurubụba. On the other hand, Twi, spoken in Ghana, has a soft and floppy word: afafrantɔ (by the way, that ɔ represents the vowel sound English speakers make in “court”).

As we follow the sweep of Niger-Congo languages across Africa to the east coast and then southward, we find the word in Kikuyu (spoken in Kenya) is kĩĩhuruta and the word in Luganda (spoken in Uganda) is ekiwojjolo. But in others we come back to the common theme of republication: in Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda), it’s ikinyugunyugu; in Chichewa (also called Nyanja, spoken in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia), it’s gulugufe; in Shona (spoken in Zimbabwe), it’s shavishavi; in Sesotho (spoken in Lesotho), it’s serurubele.

The Niger-Congo languages – and their speakers – made it all the way to South Africa, arriving within about the last five hundred years; the two most spoken languages in South Africa, Zulu and Xhosa, are both Niger-Congo languages… but with quite a lot of influence from languages that were already spoken in the area when they arrived. (The third most spoken is Afrikaans, a creolized language based on Dutch; its word for ‘butterfly’ is skoenlapper, which means ‘shoe-patcher’.) Zulu and Xhosa so famous for their “click” sounds that it may surprise you to know they’re not actually part of the famously click-using Khoisan family of languages, spoken by mainly desert-dwelling people of the region from time immemorial. And it should surprise you; it’s unusual for a language to pick up a striking and difficult sound from an unrelated language. But this is a thing that can happen when speakers of different languages get together and meld families and customs; indeed, research suggests that the clicks started appearing in Zulu and Xhosa specifically as a way of getting around taboos against saying names of certain relatives and animals (especially ones you’re afraid of).

Naturally, as I’ve said so much about clicks in these languages, you can only be expecting that their words for ‘butterfly’… have no clicks in them at all. Sorry. The Xhosa word is ibhabhathane; the Zulu word is uvemvane (though there is also ijubajubane – which is apparently related to ijuba, ‘pigeon’ – and itwabitwabi). Well, heck, butterflies don’t click, do they? And no one’s afraid of them. But the words do reduplicate!

But what about the Khoisan languages, which have a much higher density of click sounds? Alas, they have a much lower density of lexical resources available. Not Khoekhoe, not !Kung, certainly not any of the ones with very few speakers, and for that matter not Sandawe – spoken farther north, in Tanzania – not one of them is well enough covered in online resources that I can find its word for ‘butterfly’, though I’m sure they all have one, because butterflies live where they live.

But I have not quite covered all of the language families of Africa. There is one more, the Nilo-Saharan, a family of languages of the central-northeast part of Africa, including Dinka and Maasai; more than a dozen of the languages have over a million speakers. To say they are not all closely related is an understatement, however; in fact, many scholars view Nilo-Saharan not as an actual family but simply as a catch-all for languages not part of the other three families. 

But they’re still in Africa, and at least some of them also use reduplication. The Kanuri word for ‘butterfly’ it’s fátáfátámà (why all the accents, by the way? Kanuri, like many languages in Africa, including most Niger-Congo languages is a tone language – in fact, the majority of the world’s tone languages are in Africa, but their use of tone is somewhat different than the use of tone in East Asian languages). In Maasai, it’s ɔsámpúrimpúri. In Lugbara, it’s alapapa. And in Dinka? In Dinka, at least when referring to a small butterfly, I’m told it’s dap.

Next: lepidoptera of East Asia.

From Europe to India and beyond: bugs, birds, wings, flowers, gods

Butterflies can have an incredible range. It’s not just that they’re found on every continent except Antarctica (I presume the penguins simply ate them all, ha ha), it’s that some species of butterflies migrate for thousands of kilometres (or, when migrating across the US, thousands of miles). Monarch butterflies are famous for this, covering much of North America, but the British variety of the painted lady butterfly migrates even farther, from the edges of the desert in northern Africa to beautiful pastures in northern Europe and back, nearly 7,500 kilometres each way.

How does one butterfly fly so far? It doesn’t. No butterfly completes the whole migration. In fact, they can take up to six generations to make the whole round trip. Somehow the route is followed – again and again – by chains of generations of butterflies in a massive instinctive relay race of painted ladies of the sky. What a butterfly effect, for a movement to be carried across the globe by a chain of individuals that are connected in spite of their disconnection! 

It takes the butterflies a year to make their round trip. Meanwhile, you could fly from, say, London, England, to Ahemedabad, Gujarat, India, a distance of 9,000 kilometres one way, in just over nine hours. On the other hand, the languages of the two places – English and Gujarati – are separated by about 5,000 years of language evolution (depending on whom you ask) from their common root in Proto-Indo-European.

On the other other hand, the Gujarati word for ‘butterfly’ is બટરફ્લાય (baṭaraphlāya).

Yes, baṭaraphlāya certainly does look awfully similar to butterfly. Of course, that doesn’t trace all the way back to Proto-Indo-European and then all the way back up to English. It’s a loanword. Like if a butterfly got on an airplane. And all the other Indo-European languages of India (at least the ones I could look up ‘butterfly’ in) have words that look nothing like the English word, and for that matter often nothing like each other either.

You probably know that Sanskrit is to India and Hinduism what Latin is to western Europe and certain branches of Christianity, and you probably know that Sanskrit and Latin are related – in fact, it was Europeans in India noticing similarities between Sanskrit and European languages that led to the realization that they all traced back to a common ancestor, what we now call Proto-Indo-European (or PIE when we’re getting tired of typing). But if all the words for ‘butterfly’ in PIE languages of India descended from Sanskrit, you would expect them all to resemble चित्रपतङ्ग  (citrapataṅga) or पुष्पपतङ्ग (puṣpapataṅga) – which is pataṅga ‘flier, flying insect’ plus either citra ‘bright, conspicuous; speckled; strange, wonderful’ or puṣpa ‘flower’.

Needless to say, they do not.

It’s not that their words are all complete different from one another. The Hindi word for ‘butterfly’, तितली (titlī), and the Punjabi word, ਤਿਤਲੀ (titalī), are obviously versions of the same thing – whatever that thing may originally have been. I don’t have ready access to etymological dictionaries of either language, but I do note that the word in Nepali, another language of the family, is पुतली (putalī), which in Hindi means ‘puppet, doll’, which could conceivably have been altered with an endearing reduplication to the Hindi and Punjabi words. 

On the other hand, if we look to the west, to another more distantly related (and distant) PIE language, Armenian, we see թիթեռ (t’it’err), which is made by reduplication from PIE *pter- ‘wing’, and that same origin is no less plausible for the Hindi/Punjabi word, either by direct descent or by loan. But it is worth pointing out that the Sanskrit word for ‘wing’ is पक्ष (pakṣa), which is descended not from *pter- but from *peg- ‘side, flank’. And also that the Sanskrit pakṣa does have descendants in modern India meaning ‘butterfly’: Assamese পখিলা (pokhila) and Marathi फुलपाखरू (phulapākharū – literally ‘flower bird’).

For that matter, the modern Greek word for ‘butterfly’ has nothing to do with *pter- either. Lepidoptera, the Greek-derived Latin word for the whole genus – which, as I mentioned last time, is from λεπίς (lepís, ‘scale, flake’) and πτερόν (pterón, ‘wing’ – there’s that pter-) – was invented from classical roots in the 1700s. If you’d tried to use it in ancient Athens, it would have flown right by them. In modern Greece, you can call a butterfly πεταλούδα (petalouda), which came from an ancient word for ‘locust’ or perhaps from one meaning ‘spread open’. Or you can call it ψυχή (psykhé, the word that came to English as psyche), which in both modern and classical Greek literally means ‘soul, spirit’ and, poetically, ‘butterfly’ too.

If there is a soul, is there a psychopomp – a leader of the soul? There is, if you’re in Persia (Iran): the Persian word for ‘butterfly’ is پروانه (parvâne), from a Middle Persian root meaning ‘guide’ or ‘leader’. But where does the guide lead your soul? Perhaps to the creator – Bengali for ‘butterfly’ is প্রজাপতি (prajāpati), which is a Sanskrit name for a creator god, and literally means ‘lord of creatures’ (I’d rather meet a Bengali butterfly than a lion – let alone a Bengal tiger). But perhaps it leads it instead to one of the Hindu goddesses: Sīta, the wife of Rama. In Telugu, the word for ‘butterfly’ is సీతాకోకచిలుక (sītākōkaciluka), from సీత (Sīta) plus‎ కోక (kōka, ‘woman’s garment or cloth’) plus‎ చిలుక (ciluka, ‘parrot’). So, if I’m reading that right, it’s the Sīta’s robe parrot.

But Telugu is not an Indo-European language. It’s a Dravidian language, like a number of other languages in India. They’re historically unrelated to Indo-European – aside from the inevitable effects of being neighbours (such as “borrowings” like the name Sīta). So, for instance, the Tamil word may mean ‘colourful insect’ – not so different from the meaning of Sanskrit citrapataṅga – but the word is வண்ணத்துப்பூச்சி (vaṇṇattuppūcci) (and any resemblance of Tamil letter shapes to butterfly flight paths is pure coincidence). And the Malayalam word also means about the same as citrapataṅga, but it’s ചിത്രശലഭം (citraśalabhaṁ) – from… Sanskrit citra plus शलभ (śalabha) ‘cricket, locust’. Heh. Sanskrit flaps its wings and unrelated nearby languages feel the breeze, even while related languages show no effect. As for Kannada, the word is ಚಿಟ್ಟೆ (ciṭṭe), and I don’t know its etymology, but it does look suspiciously a bit like citra, doesn’t it.

There are, by the bye, other Indo-European languages of the same sweep across the west of Asia that I have words from but haven’t mentioned. This is because I don’t know their etymology. But I think it’s worth telling you that the word in Sinhala is සමනලයා  (samanalayā), and in Kurmanji Kurdish it’s pinpinîk – note once more the reduplication. And on the way from Greece to the east, we passed Georgia, where the language is not Indo-European – it’s Kartvelian, a completely unrelated family – but the word for ‘butterfly’ also has a curiously familiar look: it’s პეპელა (p’ep’ela), from a reduplication of the Proto-Kartvelian root *ṗer- ‘to fly’.

We also passed over Turkey, and I would not want to pass over Turkey, nor over the Turkic languages, which have a range of more than 6,500 kilometres – from Turkey all the way to Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia, although with gaps between clusters. The Turkish word for ‘butterfly’ is kelebek; it comes from Proto-Turkic *kepelek ‘butterfly’, with a flip of the middle consonants and a voicing of the “p” to “b”. The word has flown with little flaps and flutters into other Turkic languages too: in Azerbaijani, it’s kəpənək; east across the Caspian Sea in Turkmen, the word is kebelek; farther north and east, in Kazakh, the word is көбелек (köbelek); in Southern Altai, spoken in southern Siberia near Mongolia and China, the word is кӧбӧлӧк (köbölök); in Uyghur, the language of an ethnic group widely spread but mostly in Xinjiang, in northwestern China (as you may have heard), the word is كېپىنەك‎‎ (këpinek‎). 

That is, truly, a long trip on the silk route to find a word so little changed: it is a trip of 4,700 kilometres – and countless generations of speakers of the languages – from Istanbul to the largest city in Xinjiang, Ürümqi (the name of which means ‘beautiful pasture’, though it has desert at every edge of it – a whole painted lady butterfly migration course in itself). 

But when we get to the farthest reach of Turkic languages, the Sakha language of Yakutia has many loanwords from other languages of the area. So naturally you might expect a completely different word for ‘butterfly’. And, though you have to fly 3,400 kilometres from Ürümqi to Yakutsk to find one, you at last do: the Sakha word for ‘butterfly’ is үрүмэччи (ürümečči). Which, by such references as I can find for Sakha, seems to mean… yes, ‘beautiful pasture’: we’ve returned to Ürümqi.

Next: the Middle East and Africa – reduplications galore.

Balto-Slavic and Finno-Ugric butterflies: moths, mothers, bulls, and birds

Once you go east of the Germanic and Romance languages (and farther east of the Celtic ones), the linguistic landscape changes: it’s dominated by Slavic languages, which have a strong family resemblance, sort of like butterflies and moths do.

Not everyone who speaks English thinks of moths and butterflies as such similar things – butterflies are crisp and metallic-pretty, and moths are fuzzy and mottled-dull and generally unpleasant, not to mention self-immolating on open flames. But the line is not so sharply drawn in some languages – and sometimes it’s drawn in other places than English draws it. Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, and Ukrainian all have words that seem vaguely similar to moth (and more so to mottle) – матылёк (matyliok), motýl, motýľ, motyl, metulj, and метелик (metelik) – that mean both ‘butterfly’ and ‘moth’.

More southern Slavs, however, beg to differ. First of all, they do not fold butterflies and moths together. Bulgarian пеперуда (peperuda) and Macedonian пеперутка (peperutka) have a peppy reduplication that may perhaps come from a Proto-Slavic *pero- root meaning ‘feather’ – but may rather related to Latin papilio; meanwhile, their ‘moth’ word is молец, molets. Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats, on the other hand, though having moljac and мољца (moljtsa) for ‘moth’, hew to Greek for ‘butterfly’: лептир and leptir, from the same roots as gave us the genus name Lepidoptera: λεπίς (lepís, ‘scale’) and‎ πτερόν (pterón, ‘wing’).

And Russians? The Russian language is very similar to Polish and moreso to Ukrainian, so you would expect a word like motyl and метелик. But the butterfly is not the only thing that is chaotically motile and rather fanciful, and Western Europeans do not have the patent on larks of exaltation. Yes, yes, there is a Russian word мотылёк (motylyok) for a small night moth, and моль (mol’) for the kind of moth that eats your sweaters and suits, but the word for ‘butterfly’ – and for the rest of the mothly crew – comes from the idea that the spirits of the dead live on as butterflies. Does it mean ‘ghost’? ‘ghoul’? ‘gremlin’? No. It means ‘granny’. The word is бабочка (babochka).

If that seems like babushka, it is. Russian has a word for ‘grandmother’ – бабка (babka) – and Russian has two diminutive suffixes, ушка (ushka) and очка (ochka). You can see them (modified as necessary) in other words, including ones that have made it into English: matryoshka, those famous Russian dolls, and devotchka, a term for a charming young woman. Of the two suffixes, the latter has the cuter implication. So whichever of gramma or granny seems cuter to you, бабочка is it. And that is a Russian butterfly.

If that sounds like bull, perhaps you are thinking of Latvian. True, unless you are of Latvian heritage or (like me) married to someone who is, you probably don’t think of Latvian much at all, but Latvian and Lithuanian are both Baltic languages, part of the Balto-Slavic family – more distant cousins of the Slavic languages. But on the other hand, if you like classical music and live in Canada, you may have heard the Latvian word for ‘butterfly’ without realizing it, because it’s the last name of a noted Latvian Canadian conductor: Ivars Taurins. The Latvian word, to be completely correct, is tauriņš. And if you were to think of one other word that that word looks like, what might it be? Taurus, perhaps? Guess why.

Yes, that’s right. It’s from the same root, which made it all the way to Proto-Balto-Slavic as *taurás, also meaning ‘bull’ or ‘aurochs’ or ‘bison’, and then the Latvians looked at this pretty little thing and apparently focused on its long curving antennae and called it a bull.

The Lithuanians, on the other hand, did not. No, they gave the little flitterer a fair shake. Specifically, their word, drugelis, is the diminutive of drugys, which also means ‘butterfly’ – or ‘moth’, or ‘malaria’ – and comes from a verb meaning ‘shake, shiver, quiver’, with relatives that show up in Slavic languages with meanings such as ‘tremble’ and ‘shudder’.

On the other side of Latvia from Lithuania is Estonia. Estonians do not speak a Balto-Slavic language. They do not speak an Indo-European language. Their language is no more closely related to Latvian than, say, Basque is – except for the inevitable cross-effects of being neighbours. Estonian, along with Finnish, Hungarian, and Sámi (the language of the people erstwhile known by others as Laplanders), is a Finno-Ugric language. Hungarian only very distantly resembles the others, and only to a learnèd eye, but Sámi has resemblances to Finnish, and Estonian and Finnish are quite obviously related (“Give me a beer” translates in Estonian as “Anna mulle õlut” and in Finnish as “Anna minulle olut,” for example). Which is why their words for ‘butterfly’ are…

…completely different, of course. The Estonian word is liblikas, whereas the Finnish word is perhonen (which in turn is a diminutive of perho, which meant the same thing but has been replaced by the cuter word). I am sorry to say I lack the etymological reference resources to tell you the source of either. But the Sámi word – well, the North Sámi word; there are several varieties of Sámi, as it stretches along the curve of the Scandinavian peninsula – I can tell you about: it’s beaiveloddi, and that means ‘day bird’.

Meanwhile, the Hungarians, in their somewhat warmer climate, blissfully discontinuous with the snow-sparkled peri-Arctic, use the word pillangó. Which means ‘twinkling’.

Next: taking wing from Greece to Bengal… and beyond.

Celtic butterflies: spark of God or spark of coal?

If you had never seen or heard of a butterfly before, and one fluttered past you, and you determined to give it a name, would you name it to exalt the familiar – comparing it to butter or cream, say – or would you name it to familiarize the exalted – invoking beauty or someone or something divine?

“Why bring exaltation into it at all?” someone might ask, but (a) it’s a frickin’ butterfly, have you seen them? and (b) whoever asks that is not likely of a Celtic background. Celtic cultures – Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton – have a well-earned reputation for existing at the intersection of heaven and earth, which is to say poetry and dirt.

Cornish is the once and future Celtic language of southwestern England, quite nearly rubbed out two centuries ago but more recently being revived. Its gifts to English include some place names and the personal name Jennifer, which George Bernard Shaw introduced to English audiences in his 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma: “My name is Jennifer.” “A strange name.” “Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.” And what is Cornish for ‘butterfly’? It’s tykki Duw, which is tykki ‘pretty thing’ and Duw ‘God’ – so God’s pretty thing, or divine pretty thing if you wish (even if you think that Jennifer is a prettier-sounding name than tykki Duw).

Up at in the north of Great Britain, in Scotland, they seem to see things similarly. Scots Gaelic has several words for ‘butterfly’ and I can’t say which is the most common in general use, but the readiest translation I get is dealan-dè, which means ‘spark of God’. Another one, only slightly less fanciful, is seillean-dè, ‘bee of God’.

And in between Cornwall and Scotland, aside from England, there is Wales. Welsh also has more than one word for ‘butterfly’. One is pilipala, which is pretty and fluttery and apparently (according to one source in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, anyway) a “childish” version of pilai, which in turn traces back to papilio – meaning that it lost its reduplication and then regained it. When the pressure of time turns the greenery of a word into so much coal, light it on fire.

Or just literally light coal on fire. Because that is the other common Welsh word for ‘butterfly’: glöyn byw, which means ‘live coal’, which is to say ‘burning coal’ – apparently butterflies in Wales are often orange and black. And so we come to the exaltation of the familiar, since Wales has a long history of coal mining. But wait, there’s a bit more: another Welsh term for ‘butterfly’ – not so much used now, it would seem – is glöyn Duw, and yes, that’s the same Duw as in Cornish: it means ‘God’s coal’ (of course God’s coal is burning; one need not specify that).

But what about across the water to the west, in Ireland? The standard Irish word is féileacán, which also shows up in Scots Gaelic as fèileagan and in Manx as follican. Now, if you get your etymology from Wiktionary (which is generally not a bad place to start), you will see that féileacán traces back to Old Irish etelachán, ‘little flying creature’, from etelach ‘flying’. But how does that etel become féile? Is it some kind of phonological metamorphosis, where it went into a cocoon with bare e and came out dressed in fancy f? Those who know some amount of Irish may suspect a changeling, a substitution perhaps made by leprechauns, because the word féile (which is pronounced about like the Brooklyn version of “failure”) means ‘holiday’ or ‘festival’ or ‘feast’ in the religious sense. So the gap may be not a failure of etymology but a féile of imagination, with a fancy bit of the holy.

But I suppose all butterfly flights are flights of fancy. The same is not always true of other flights, however. When the Anglo-Saxon invaders came in and took over Britain and pushed the Celtic peoples to the edges, one group – the one the island is named after – faced a choice of assimilating or fleeing across the channel. Those that did the latter set up in the part of northwest France now named after them: Brittany (speaking of popular names for girls). And they kept their language, now known as Breton. And what does Breton call a butterfly? Balafenn. And what does that mean? ‘Butterfly’ – I just told you. OK, but where does it come from? Brittany – do try to keep up!

OK, the truth is I don’t know where balafenn comes from, and I surveyed a number of sources and followed an assortment of hunches (including the possibility that the fenn is from penn, ‘head’, and some resemblance to balanenn, ‘broom’ – the implement and the flowering plant) and found nothing to tell me for sure. If you have information I didn’t find, please do tell me! We can notice that the bala seems similar to Welsh pilai and it might well be related to papilio, but if you notice a butterfly flying in the middle of a room with several windows open, how are you to know which window it flew in through? Or perhaps the butterfly was always there and someone built the room around it. Perhaps it was a dream.

And then there is Basque – it calls itself Euskara – a language of northern Spain and southern France at the bend of the Bay of Biscay. It’s unrelated to any other language in Europe. Speculation about where it came from and how it got there has run rampant but no one knows for sure – but it has been there for a very long time: they built the countries around it. We know it’s unrelated to Indo-European languages not just because of differences of vocabulary – and, after all, it has a number of words it got from neighbouring languages, as will always happen – but especially because its grammar has features that no Indo-European language has. For some time, the Spanish government – especially under Franco – tried to eradicate Basque, but it survived like a butterfly you can’t swat.

And what is the Basque word for ‘butterfly’? There’s more than one. There’s tximileta and pilipilinpauxa (the x is said somewhat like “sh”; tx is like “ch”), and pilipilin (no pauxa), and txilipitaiña… The only source for Basque etymology I could find online (I am not in a good position to look in a print reference just now) declares all of these to be “Expressive word.” Which is like accounting for all the different patterns of butterfly wings as “Pretty.” Well, they are expressive. Might as well bask in their prettiness and the charm of unknowing.

Next: Russian grandmothers and Latvian bulls.

The cream of the Germanic summer: butterfly, Schmetterling, vlinder, sommerfugl, fjäril, fiðrildi

At this point, the less dedicated etymologist might start to falter, and perhaps close the folder. The more dedicated etymologist may pause to consider that the flight of a butterfly seems faltering, that a butterfly flaps its flat wings like a folder, and that the older, more staid German name for ‘butterfly’ is Falter, which also means ‘folder’.

But they didn’t name the butterfly after a folder… well, not entirely. Falter as in ‘folder’ comes from falten, which traces to an entirely different Proto-Germanic root than Falter as in ‘butterfly’. The pretty bug Falter traces back to… the exact same Indo-European reduplicated *pal- as Latin papilio. It came into Proto-Germanic as *fifaldǭ, which almost has the same soft sound as butterfly flaps, except really you can’t hear butterfly flaps, can you. That got fancifully altered into different versions such as Zweifalter, and was backformed to Falter, perhaps under the influence of the other Falter. But then Germans decided that they preferred the idea that this ostentatious insect had something to do with cream and called it Schmetterling instead, from Schmetten, an Austrian word for ‘cream’ (more commonly called Sahne or, especially in compounds, Rahm).

But that *fifaldǭ root didn’t just flap away. It fluttered into Old Norse, where they got the idea that it had something to do with feathers (fiðri) and “corrected” it to fiðrildi, which is also the modern Icelandic word. And fiðrildi, in turn, got left in someone’s pocket and went through the wash and came out as Swedish fjäril. 

And maybe, just maybe, fifaldǭ somehow became Dutch vlinder and the now-disused English flinder. If it did, we can’t say how it got that way. Really it’s too hard to follow and it didn’t leave enough traces. But while the Dutch accepted vlinder and kept it, the English decided instead that they would prefer to name the bug after butter.

I mean, OK, German cream, English butter, why the heck not. But why the heck? Why are overdressed insects associated with fatty dairy products? Some people speculate that it’s because one particular butterfly is yellow like butter. And OK, if that’s a dominant kind of butterfly in England (sort of like how eggplant got named eggplant because the people who named it that knew just the white kind), but is it? Others speculate that it’s because it came out in summer butter season, or because it was thought to steal butter, or something like that. What we do know is that there have been assorted similar names for it in Dutch and German meaning not just ‘butter fly’ but things like ‘butter witch’, ‘butter bird’, and ‘butter wife’ – plus the Dutch boterschijte, ‘butter shit’ (are Dutch butterflies especially vexatious? or are the Dutch particularly put out by fancy little flighty things?). But we don’t know how this all started; whoever could have recorded its origins clearly had butter things to do. So it might as well be random.

And then there’s Danish. And Norwegian – the modern kind. They could also have had a descendant of *fifaldǭ. But they don’t. Instead, they liked the version confected by someone back in the Hanseatic period (or thereabouts – starting about the 13th century): ‘summer bird’ – Middle Low German somervogel (compare Yiddish zumer-feygele, not the most common Yiddish word for ‘butterfly’ but it exists), which became Danish and Norwegian sommerfugl. And why the heck not. Summer is short but pretty in Scandinavia, just like the life of a butterfly.

Next: like Welsh coal.

The butterfly of Romance: papilio, papillon, farfalla, mariposa, borboleta, fluture

The Romance languages – so called not because they’re romantic but because they come from Roman – have a surprising assortment of words for ‘butterfly’. 

Usually words for the same thing in the different Romance languages tend to resemble each other: for example, the words for ‘bread’ (Latin panis) are French pain, Italian pane, Spanish pan, Portuguese pão, and Romanian pâine(and there are similar words in Catalan, Provençal, and other related languages). Given that the Latin word for ‘butterfly’ is papilio, French papillon is unsurprising, but what about Italian farfalla, Spanish mariposa, Portuguese borboleta, and Romanian fluture?

Let’s start with why the Latin word is papilio. Every word comes from some previous version, all the way back into the mists of time and beyond; we can’t see into the mists of time, but we can sometimes guess what’s in them by the noises coming out of them and what emerges from them, sort of like a fight in a foggy forest. So scholars have done a lot of work reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, the language that is the great ancient ancestor of the Indo-European languages, a huge set that includes tongues such as Spanish, Gaelic, English, Swedish, Russian, and Hindi. And their best guess is that papilio comes from the root *pal- (the asterisk means it’s reconstructed from evidence, like museum dinosaurs), meaning ‘touch, tap, pat, feel, shake’, things like that. But the *pal- is reduplicated, as if they had decided to call a butterfly a papatty or tatappio. Why? I mean, I don’t know, but hey, look at butterflies!

So anyway, French didn’t change papilio much, just added the nasalizing n to the end as it did to assorted other words and gliding the l. But Italian, which usually keeps things recognizably close to the Latin, managed to come up with farfalla. Where the heck did that come from? It may have been something as simple (so to speak) as a Tuscan consonant shift that turns voiceless stops into fricatives: casa, ‘house’, is pronounced as “hasa” in Tuscan, for instance, and a similar thing could have happened to the p’s in papilio. But it’s not obvious what local perturbations would cause it to change this word in particular in standard Italian and not so many others. There’s also the question of where the r came from, though Provençal and Lombardy also got an r in their versions (parpalhos, parpaja). It may instead be that it all happened under Arabic influence; there’s a Tunisian Arabic word for ‘butterfly’, farfaṭṭu, that shows up as farfett in Maltese. A borrowing or cross-influence isn’t too far-fettched… though we don’t know for sure.

At this point you may look at Portuguese borboleta and think, hmm, just change those f’s to b’s – and “b” is as easily gotten from “p” as “f” is, in historic sound changes – and adjust the vowels a bit and Bob’s your uncle. And that might be what happened. But then again, it might not. Instead of papatty, it could be bebeauty – that is, Latin bellus ‘beautiful’ might have become *belbeleta in Old Portuguese, which easily enough changes to borboleta over the years. But, again, we’re not sure…

And how about Spanish mariposa? Does that seem a bridge too far to flutter across from papilio? It is. The Spanish descendant of papilio is pabellón, but it doesn’t mean ‘butterfly’; it means ‘pavilion’ – which, surprise surprise, is also descended from papilio and originally referred to the butterfly shape of an ornate tent (I’m taking someone else’s word for this). But that is a digression for us here to all in tents. Instead of keeping pabellón for the lovely little insect, the Spanish looked at it and said, “Mary, alight” – “María, pósate,” which shortened to mariposa. And may a blessing from the mother of God land on you too!

Meanwhile, Romanian flutters by with fluture. It’s probably related to Albanian flutur (yeah, probably!), but which one of the two came first is a kind of butterfly–hurricane problem. English spell checkers think fluture should be future, which it’s not related to, but it looks rather like flutter, and it might be related to that – very far back, though, because flutter traces all the way through Germanic to Proto-Indo-European, rather than, as one might hope, more directly to Latin fluctuare, which is the source of fluctuate and possibly – but just possibly – the source of fluture. Or maybe it’s something else carried loosely on the currents of language.

Next: the cream of the Germanic summer.

Papillon. Farfalla. Mariposa. Schmetterling. Vlinder. Sommerfugl. Fjäril. Tauriņš. Babochka. Butterfly. It is, to use a technical term, freakin’ weird how flagrantly unrelated the words for ‘butterfly’ often are even among closely related languages. 

We can chalk that up to the butterfly effect.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect? That staple of chaos theory, of the possible effect of small perturbations on large systems? The idea is that the flap of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon could, through small differences in air currents being relayed and increasing in effect, result in a change in the course of a hurricane in the Caribbean. I think of it as like the effect of my elevator having to stop on an extra floor, resulting in my missing a subway train by a few seconds, resulting in my missing a connecting bus that runs every half hour. But of course at least as much of the time the elevator stop has zero effect: I get to the subway and wait a few minutes, I get to the bus and wait a few minutes. 

Needless to say, most butterfly wing flaps couldn’t and don’t make such a huge difference either… and, more importantly, the paths of hurricanes are subject to countlessly many influences. Our best predictions of hurricane paths are probabilistic. There are so many influences, we can’t trace them all or even be aware of them all. It might as well be random chance, like a roll of dice: if you had all the information about the muscle movements, the weight and shape of the dice, and the details of the surface they’re rolled onto, you’d predict it 100% of the time, but you don’t. “Random” is a word we use when we don’t have all the information or even know what all the information to have is.

And why not turn the butterfly effect around? Have you seen those things fly? There are obviously many air currents affecting them; they flutter by through the air on a wild chaotic path impossible to predict precisely. Maybe a hurricane in the Caribbean is responsible for two millimetres of displacement on the path of a butterfly in Brazil. How the heck do they fly, anyway? Didn’t someone once say that according to aerodynamics, butterflies can’t fly?

If that were true, of course, it would just mean that aerodynamics didn’t have enough information, since obviously butterflies do fly. But as it happens, butterfly flight has been studied intensely precisely because it’s not immediately obvious how it works. In 2021, researchers at Lund University in Sweden published results of a study showing how butterfly wings are aerodynamically effective: they clap together at the top tips first, and from the front rolling to the back, resulting in effective propulsion by pushing an air pocket backwards, and then the downstrokes keep them aloft. (The researchers didn’t say it, but I think it’s a given that butterflies are not prone to motion sickness.) So once again, the butterfly effect has to do more with seeing things as random or chaotic just because we lack information.

And we can apply that to the utter chaotic weirdness of the multiplicity of seemingly unrelated words for ‘butterfly’ in different languages. There are a few factors we can look at to help explain it. One, and an important one, is how pretty and charming butterflies are; this can motivate people to come up with fanciful names or at least to make modifications to existing names. Another is the broken-telephone effects of transmission of words from generation to generation, especially among the general public who have historically not been big on writing things down. Another is the effect of contact between different languages.

I’m going to look at a few language families to see how this plays out around the world. But instead of unleashing one enormous flurry of words on you, I’m serializing it. This has been part one. Part two will be the butterfly of Romance.