Dear all,

Some of you may be familiar with the Yahoo birding group Oriental
Birding (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/orientalbirding/?yguid=291132901)
where there has recently been an interesting discussion on the subject
of the merits or otherwise of bird names in various languages.

Here is a quote from a recent post at OB:

"People are proud of their own languages, and many countries have
active committees just as passionately disposed to standardizing their
vernacular names as are the English-speaking countries, whose naming
systems are in perpetual chaos (much to the confusion of foreigners, I
dare say). We cannot even get the North American and South American
name committees of the AOU to agree.

Not that Howard and Moore, Sibley and Monroe, Clements, both AOU
committees, the BOU, and HBW were enough, now we have more recently
Gill and Wright muscling in with another "authoritative" English list.

Or do you think the Francophone nations (who do agree in large part)
should just pack it in with their excellent and widely-recognized
CINFO list?

In fact, the problem that is viewed so lightly here is precisely what
led me to start compiling non-English names of birds. Many years ago I
was traveling in rural Mexico with a popular guidebook that shall
remain unnamed. This book had just one fault: it was written in
English and did not even have to common-sense addition of the bird
names in Spanish. So I was confronted with the absurdity of asking
some local, "¿Dónde están los thick-billed kingbirds?"

This IS a big deal in the real world. Oddly enough...picks on the
Swedes, and they are the ones most likely to use English in their own
literature. Swedish verancular names are actually fairly hard to come
by, unlike the complete official lists easily available in Danish and
Norwegian, even Finnish and Estonian.

As to where the Norwegians came up with AKROBATSPETT, why don't you go
directly to the source and ask Per Ole Syvertsen of the Norwegian
Names Committee (NNKF)?

That is certainly not as absurd as some English names. CARBONATED
SIERRA FINCH? Give me a break."

Any comments? We of course work with birds in languages other than
English all the time and may have some perspectives or comments on
this matter.

Cheers,

Bob