The formation and motivation of onomatopoeic ornithonyms as a result of ecological and communicative interactions of man and birds

Abstract

Recent research allows referring to onomatopoeic ornithonyms as a linguistic product of interaction of bird and man’s acoustic communicative systems. Within the assumed attitude the process of an onomatopoeic word formation is presented, types of onomatopoeic ornithonyms are classified and the results of etymological reconstruction of the onomatopoeic bases in the structure of Russian, English and French scientific names of passerine birds are described.

It is established that onomatopoeic ornithonyms in different languages are similar but not identical due to a number of factors, including man’s weak imitative ability, subjective sound perception, existence of dialectal variants of bird voices, reflection of different elements of a bird vocalization, various language standards. The study of the imitative bases of scientific bird nominations shows that both phonetically and semantically motivated ornithonyms prevail over purely phonetically motivated ones. As for ornithonyms with lost motivation they demonstrate high quantity in the languages of the investigation.