Thread by @_roryturnbull

This is a great question, and a good topic for a Tuesday afternoon thread about etymology. Buckle up! /1

All else being equal, we generally expect words to be similar between related languages. However, there are always times when words shift in meaning, perhaps becoming more or less specialised than they used to be. /2

An example is the word for "dog" in German _Hund_, Dutch _hond_, Danish _hund_, and other Germanic languages. The English cognate of this word is _hound_, which has a more specialised meaning: specifically, a hound is a dog used for work or hunting, not a pet. /3

Another example is English _deer_, which is cognate with German _Tier_, Dutch _dier_, Danish _dyr_, all of which mean "animal". So _deer_ in English underwent specialisation in its meaning, and we use the Latin-derived word _animal_ to refer to the general category. /4

So, on to butterflies. Modern English _butterfly_ originates as Old English _buterflēoge_. We see similar words in Old Dutch & Old High German, and indeed you might see _botervlieg_ or _Butterfliege_ in older Dutch or German texts. These words all literally mean "butter fly". /5

Of course, Modern German uses _Schmetterling_, which is a beautiful word. It is likely derived from Middle German _Schmetten_ "cream" plus _ling_, which is an association suffix. A rough translation could be "creamling" or "little creamy". /6

There appears to be a fairly widespread association between butterflies and dairy products in Western Germanic cultures. Don't ask me why. We can see this further in dialects of German which call them the _Molkendieb_ "whey thief" or _Botterlicker_ "butter licker". /7

The Dutch, always the odd ones out, took a different approach, and you can find _boterschijte_, "butter shitter" in some dialects. Thanks, guys. /8

The more common word in Modern Dutch is actually _vlinder_. Here's our first word which doesn't have anything to do with dairy products! /9

Dutch _vlinder_ also appears to be cognate with Swedish _fjäril_ - our first connection outside of the Western Germanic subfamily! It's likely that this word goes back to proto-Germanic. /10

While we're in Scandinavia, it's worth noting that Danish and Norwegian prefer _sommerfugl_, literally "summer bird". /11

Over in the Romance languages, the picture is less clear. French _papillon_ comes from Latin _papilio_ "butterfly, moth". But in other Romance languages we see different words: Spanish _mariposa_, Italian _farfalla_, Portuguese _borboleta_, Romanian _fluture_. /12

One account of _mariposa_ is that it's a contraction of _¡María, posate!_ "Maria, land!". Apparently this was a common way of addressing butterflies in children's rhymes and stories. I'm sceptical although it's one of the more widely-accepted accounts. /13

There's a similar account of _mariquita_ "ladybird" too, asking María the ladybird to leave, however the use of _quitar_ as an intransitive verb seems odd to me. (I'm not an expert in Spanish, though, and I'm happy to be corrected on this point.) /14

Aside from _mariposa_, I don't know that any of these Romance words have well-understood origins. Etymology is not an experimental science and we're not able to run experiments to easily test hypotheses. For many words we just have educated guesses or wild speculation. /15

(Generally speaking, however, the more fantastical-sounding an etymology is, the less likely it is to be true. Sorry!) /16

Circling back, though, we can ask: why does this common insect keep having its name changed? You'd think that names would be relatively stable, except for a little semantic shift wiggling here and there. /17

And indeed, we do see a little semantic wiggle room between languages - for example, Danish _somerfugl_ can refer to both butterflies and moths (with the terms _dagsomerfugl_ "day summer bird" and _natsomerfugl_ "night summer bird" used to disambiguate when necessary). /18

To answer the question, though: I think that butterflies have so many names because butterflies are both appealing and unimportant. /19

Appealing in that they're visually striking, both in their colouration and their movement. They're quite charming little insects, really. This lends itself well to poetic names and allusions that we might want to call them by, just for the sheer verbal joy of it. /20

Unimportant in that they are not central to a trade, a craft, or form a major component of human activity. They're not something we talk about a lot, and the talk is not serious business talk. We don't need standardised terms or unambiguous names. /21

(Unless of course you're an entomologist (reading a thread about etymology!), in which case you might talk about them a lot! But there weren't many of your kind in the early Old English period.) /22

Butterflies are fun and trivial, which makes tracking down their word history difficult. Thanks for reading! /fin

Addendum: If you're the nit-picking type (this is Twitter, after all...), you're probably thinking that my example of "dog" earlier disproves this thesis. English, for whatever perverse reasons, disregarded the wonderful word _hound_ and adopted the word of unknown origins _dog_.

This is despite the fact that dogs are a major part of human activity (hunting, guarding, companionship)! So, Rory is wrong, don't listen to him, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

My response is that the "dog" case is exceptional, and English is an outlier. All the other Germanic languages (except Scots) use the _hound_-derived word.

For "butterfly", on the other hand, it seems that everyone just wanted to pick and choose a brand new name. There's very little systematicity about it. So, I think my hypothesis still stands.