HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Language is a living entity which has its own roots and evolution. Society provides the mechanism of usage which drives those changes. This short section offers a brief and very general background to these matters.

ROOTS AND ROUTES

There will be frequent reference to the roots of words and to some of the routes taken by words towards their modern forms. It helps to realise that most modern European languages belong to an Indo-European group which includes Classical Greek and Latin, as well as those which we now refer to as Germanic and Romance (Italic) languages. Evolution in language happens a lot quicker than it does in birds, so words can change within a hundred years, and a lot more in a thousand, but the changes are often traceable. The diagram below shows the relationships between the main languages which contribute to this story.

In simple terms, Greek influenced Latin, because the later civilisation of Classical Rome looked to the Golden Age of culture and learning which had preceded theirs. The Romans created an empire which left a heavy legacy in the languages in Spain, Portugal, France and others, including modern Italy: these are the Romance languages, meaning that they were derived from the Roman tongue, spoken Latin.

Meanwhile, further north, the Germanic languages prevailed and included those of the Franks, the Goths, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Norse among others. These were the peoples whose languages evolved into such as modern German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. In Britain, and some other parts of Europe, an older Celtic civilisation left a legacy of Welsh, Gaelic, Breton, and others.

The Roman occupation of Britain left almost no direct influence on our language, because any Latin remaining after the Romans left was erased by the subsequent influx into Britain of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. By the time the Vikings arrived, England was Anglo-Saxon, and spoke a Germanic form of language, to which Viking Norse merely added another and different layer, but mainly in the north and east of the country. The influence of trade and the Church had reintroduced small elements of Latin into Anglo-Saxon. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was part of a Viking quarrel (the word Norman had evolved from Norse Men), but the court of William the Conqueror had espoused the culture and language of France and brought to England a Latin-based tongue, Old French. For several hundred years, this was the language of the ruling classes, who were constantly reinforced by new blood from France, through marriage and inheritance. Slowly and of necessity this Romance language blended with the Germanic to give English an enriched form which was unique in Europe. A very simple illustration is that the living cow or ox (both Germanic in root) becomes beef (from French) when slaughtered.

This blend was reinforced later, when the Renaissance (the rebirth of Classical learning) came to Tudor Britain, bringing with it a more intense study of Latin and Greek. By the time Dr Johnson formulated his dictionary in the eighteenth century, Latin, which had always been the language of Christian scholars, was the universal language of lay-scholars in Europe and had been re-injected into the bloodstream of formal English. For the first time there was 'correct' English, a norm for the educated classes – and that was to become available to the entire population within a hundred years or so.

But we also have to remember that there was no single form of universal spoken English in Britain in the eighteenth century. Regional differences were often huge, and locally developed words and turns of phrase made for a series of sub-languages, or dialects. In these different forms there was much colour and variety, often now lost, largely because of universal education and the advent of mass media – radio, television and cinema in particular.

WIDENING HORIZONS

So what happened to the local names which existed in dialect? Some of them didn't go anywhere, of course: 'wheatear' and 'wagtail', for example, remain and have been elevated to name whole families. Other historical and local vocabulary travelled abroad to become established in other parts of the world: for example the Cornish 'murre' and the Scottish 'dovekie' both emigrated and survived in North America.

In Britain today we have lost many of the subtle differences which existed in a population of largely rural communities before the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Industry and technology slowly drew people away from the countryside and created a new mix of relatively mobile workforces. With greater urban integration came an increasing separation from nature and from its vocabulary. The dialect forms, which gave me the Pewit as a child, were fading into history. Words need to be used to survive, and even technology has its ephemeral vocabulary: 'cat's whisker' and 'tranny' are already in the museum of radio vocabulary, yet both had currency in my lifetime.

From the Renaissance onwards, Natural Scientists tried to make sense of the world of nature, and that included agreeing formal names in the English language. Even in this sphere of influence, names are adopted and then changed. My Green Plover existed for a while as the accepted name for what we now formally call a Lapwing, but the latter has now become the name of a whole family.

Universal education made society more literate and gave it access to books: the language of scientists and of amateur birders eventually met on the same ground. There was now a 'correct' form, which left the colourful variants of the past strewn by the paths of history. More recently, the Internet has given us access to information about pretty well any bird in the world, while air travel allows a new breed of 'world birders' to see them. We now need bird names in a worldwide dimension: Lapwing in my own records is now prefaced with Northern, Southern or Masked, so that I can distinguish the familiar home species from those seen in Trinidad and Australia.

But for the popular language all is not lost. We should be eternally grateful to Bill Oddie, who knows a good dialect word when he hears one: thanks to his frequent use of the term on television, the Shetland dialect name Bonxie is now widely used even by Sassenachs and Southerners, because it is so much more fun than Great Skua. Birders do in fact like colourful names – witness the formal retention of Dunnock after the attempt to impose Hedge Accentor a few years ago. In any case, the wheel is turning all the time: new dialect is being formed, as birders communicate in a language born of haste and technology: shorthand words such as 'barwit' and 'mipit' seem to prove that formality has only so much influence. Add to that the power of knowledge, and its vocabulary of 'larids' and 'hirundines', 'primary projection' and 'secondary coverts', and you find that the birding community has its own enclave, separated this time by culture, rather than by geography. A new birder may often...