Ask Lemmy

@anon6789@lemmy.world @asklemmy@lemmy.world

Also very interesting about the confusion in Spanish about the confusion of the barn owl and screech owl. There is another person here I talk with about the confusion of them in Mesoamerican religion, so I’ll have to see that paper

The paper I mentioned is this one: https://digibuo.uniovi.es/dspace/handle/10651/23598

It's an open paper, but it's entirely in Spanish. Also, the things thereby described can't find much parallels in English because it involves gendered nouns (missing from English language which has just "the"; curiously it's a thing in German ("die/der/das"), with which English shares origins).

However, here's how I'd summarize it: in Spanish, both "lo buho" and "la lechuza" translate to English "the owl", but the latter is specifically a word for barn owls and it's a feminine noun ("la", the-she), while the former is the more broad of a word and it's a masculine noun ("lo", the-he). Given this context where owls are to be linked to feminine, it became consensus to use "lechuza", instead of "buho", to refer to the "Owl of Athene" (the Little owl), because Athene is feminine so the noun should be feminine as well. Hence the confusion.

In other romance languages, such as French and, to some extent, Portuguese, Strigidae owls (especially Athene noctua Little owl) is correctly feminine gendered.

French has chouette (Strigidae without prominent ear tufts, which includes Little owl), chevêche (specific word for Little owl) and chevêchette (Pygmy owl and other very small owls) are all feminine nouns (but they got hibou, which is masculine, for "horned" owls).

Portuguese varies. Here in Brazil, owl names are often compounds with the root "coruja" or "corujinha" ("corujinha-do-mato" screech-owl, "coruja-buraqueira" burrowing owl... even Tytonidae have no specific differentiation over here as she's called "coruja-das-torres"; not native from Brazil, but the Little owl would be called "Coruja de Atena", "corujinha" ou "coruja-pequena"), all feminine (except for the augmentative "corujão" which isn't exactly used for owls, rather a slang to refer to nocturnal people). In Portugal (and I suppose Angola, Moçambique and others), I learned they use the word "mocho", which is masculine, including for Little owl ("Mocho-galego").

When it comes to Latin, noctua is feminine, but būfus (seems to be specifically for eagle owl) is masculine. Greek has gláfka and koukouvágia, both feminine (but also got Latin cognate boúfos).

Linguistics in this regard is fascinating. My personal research also involves words across languages (including "dead" languages, such as Sumerian thanks to Halloran's Lexicon with transliterated entries e.g. "nínnamušen" owl, "mušennínna" is fearsome owl-woman). Many of the words for owl ("owl" itself) are onomatopoeias for hoot (Hindi uhoo, Japanese fukurō, etc), which quite of reminds me of the phenomenon in which "m" is a universal phoneme shared among words for "mother".