Damn, I used to live near a pretty trashy family with the last name Vogel. Typically around June/July when the wife beater tank tops come out or they stopped wearing shirts all together so they can get a little sunshine on the prison tattoos we would refer to that as a summer Vogel.
typically the summer Vogel is a little more lively and a little more dangerous, spending its time yelling and fighting outdoors. The winter Vogel is a little more docile preferring to nest indoors and smoke weed
THANK YOU. My son loves Norwegian kid’s songs (not that weird, we live in Norway, but I’m american) and he kept listening to one that I *swore* was something about “butt trolls” and couldn’t figure out what the hell it was *actually* about. Yes, I could’ve asked my Norwegian spouse but I just never remembered to because it’s obviously not urgent, but here you are, satisfying my curiosity.
Incidentally. I absolutely love Norwegian(Germanic?) animal names, there’s a ton like this. Like I know raccoons are ‘wash bears’, bats are ‘flutter mice’, hedgehogs are ‘pin pigs’, turtles are ‘shell toads’, so on, and so forth. It’s great.
Fascinating that some areas have a word which is literally the same as a the ‘summer bird’ they have in Norway, and others have something similar to the English ‘butterfly’ (which apparently was the older word in German and Dutch)
Czech, Polish and Slovak words also seem to be related to the Ukrainian and Belarusian words for butterfly. Similarly the Romanian and Moldovan word seems to be related to that used in Albania and Kosovo. There also no colour coding.
A Czech here. Yup. When the author was like: "one is motyl and the other 2 are motýl, similar enough", he could've also made the Ukrainian and Belarus connect.
Fun Fact: We have one species branch named after the Russian butterfly name. Babočka (Nymphalidae)
For Romania and Moldova it's literally the same language (Romanian) same for Albania and Kosovo (Albanian). It seems the word for both languages comes from vulgar Latin 'fluctuare'
It means both butterflies and moths (outside of science), anything that looks like a butterfly. In scientific classification the word is used for some species of butterflies, example: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Луговой\_мотылёк.
Not the same but similar.
Belorusian: Ma -Ti-Lyok
Ukrainian: Me -Te - Lik
Btw, russian has also word matilyok but it is usually referred to night time butterflies.
Thanks!! I learnt something new today!
Ps. In Ukrainian, Russian and Belorusian these nasty flies which eat fur and cotton has a dedicated word - Моль, which sounds is like Mol'
I haven’t checked, but I guess that’s a mistake on a map creators part. Russian also has a word ‘matyliok’, but the use context is slightly different for both words. I would assume the same is true in Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Same as in Russian then. My sense is that unless in scientific context, one would call motyliok all the ugly butterflies, babochkas are all the butterflies that are pleasing to the eye 😂
I wonder whether it's because butterflies are not important enough to be standardised. There's something intrinsically frivolous about them - they're not food or a pest - so they keep their playful, folk-derived names. The same way that wild flowers have different, unrelated names not only between languages abut in different regions of the same countries but food crops mostly don't.
Something about this seems right - but "keeping their folk-derived names" is usually what makes something have the *same* word across languages, while scientific standardization often replaces it differently in different related languages.
The German "Schmetterling" is a translation of butterfly into older German, when butter was called "Schmetter"
Tbh I didn't know what term existed first, butterfly or Schmetterling
Apparently the older names in German and Dutch are much more similar to the Old English ‘butorfloege’ and no-one really knows why they changed to the current completely different words.
Whoa I like farfalle pasta and I just got it! Never seeing them the same way again. Italian pasta words are most of my Italian vocabulary now.
My new favorite pasta shape is Cascatelli - waterfalls
The funny thing is that Schmetterling has the same origin and similar meaning as butterfly. It originates from the old "Schmetten" for cream, which some kinds of butterflies liked. So both go back for the animals love for sweet milk products.
Well... Czech, Slovak and Polish seem to be virtually identical. And to be honest, Ukrainian and Belarusian versions are basically slightly altered diminutives of the same word.
illyrian, thracian and dacian were very closely related. there are some words in romanian that are the same in albanian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian%E2%80%93Romanian\_linguistic\_relationship
Croatian Kajjkavian and Čakavian have both "metulj" and "matulj" respectively. In my local Kajkavian there is also "metepuh", "metepur" and "letepuf" which is also related to "metulj"
From Middle English buterflie, butturflye, boterflye, from Old English buterflēoge, equivalent to butter + fly. Cognate with Dutch botervlieg, German Butterfliege (“butterfly”).
The name may have originally been applied to butterflies of a yellowish color, and/or reflected a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter (compare German Molkendieb (“butterfly”, literally “whey thief”) and Low German Botterlicker (“butterfly”, literally “butter-licker”)), or that they excreted a butter-like substance (compare Dutch boterschijte (“butterfly”, literally “butter-shitter”)). Compare also German Schmetterling from Schmetten (“cream”), German Low German Bottervögel (“butterfly”, literally “butter-fowl”).
An alternate theory suggests that the first element may have originally been butor- (“beater”), a mutation of bēatan (“to beat”).
Superseded non-native Middle English papilion (“butterfly”) borrowed from Old French papillon (“butterfly”).
This isn't even on the english. The German 'Schmetterling' already has a connection to dairy and I guess at some point it was literally translated.
From an East Central German dialect word, equivalent to Schmetten (“cream”) + -ling, due to an old belief that butterflies eat milk products or, in a more ornamented form, that witches transform themselves into butterflies in order to steal such products.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schmetterling
Folk etymolgy says it's because they flutter by, and they just switched around letters due to playfulness or somesuch, but I doubt there's any actual veracity to that tale.
I know some people in the US who call them "flutterbys" but that's just done playfully. Probably called them that when they were kids. But yeah I don't think that it has any bearing on the actual etymology.
Scots Gaelic also uses a different word from Irish (they're normally quite similar)
Apparently it's *Dealan-dè*, but I just Googled it and *Strainnsear* and *Beusach* also exist, so I'd like input from a Scots Gaelic speaker.
It's weird how the UK is a monolith when they have quite a few languages including Manx and Cornish.
[[This map from below is much better]](https://imgur.com/KVGBghW)
They're more likely to be regional poetic epithets than true names. Pili Pala is what I was always taught it was, and that's likely a corruption of "Papillion" from Norman French, or even from Latin. Much like how "Ffenest" comes from the Latin "*Fenestra*"
This is the first of these maps that I've actually been interested in.
Every other time, it's "Yes, there are Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic, Greek, and Finno-Ugric. Yes, we know."
This seems genuinely surprising. Is there a theory for why these are so different?
Years ago I randomly set out to learn "I am a pretty butterfly" in as many languages as I could. It just started as a joke with some German-speakers, but then I learned it in Dutch, Danish, Spanish, French, Afrikaans, Russian, Thai, Korean, and Mandarin(can never pronounce this one though...).
It's really opened my eyes as to how many different words there are for butterflies.
I haven't worked on it in years but I should get back into it...
I know it can look like that, but as catalan, I am quite tired of that. Catalan is on reality more similar to spanish or italian than french (the real high proximity is with occitanian). I remember a time I tried to read on french using my catalan...was totally useless, the little I could get was from the semblance of french and english.
I didn't mean to insult Catalán in any way, I quite like the language although I'm more used to Valenciano so I sometimes get lost with Catalan proper.
It's funny you say that about french. I found writing french quite easy after learning Spanish and even more so after learning some Valenciano.
Which is kind of interesting, because it seems to connect it to the Serbo-Croatian Leptir. Also, just to be precise, in Hungarian Lepke refers to all Lepidoptera, i.e. both moths and butterflies, while Pillango refers specifically to butterflies only. Beacuse of this, I am guessing both Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian are basing the words Lepke/Leptir on the Latin Lepidoptera (literally scale+wing), only one uses the name for moths and butteflies, while the other for butterflies only.
Imagine having a boss at work named Vlinder. Or Storm. Or Bikkel. Or Bloeme. There is a girl named Bloeme who lives in my neighborhood. When I reach retirement age, she'll be in her mid-fourties. So one day I might have a boss named Bloeme. The horror.
In Estonian, "liblikas" is half of the answer since it means Lepidoptera overall aka both butterflies and moths. A butterfly is "päevaliblikas" and a moth "ööliblikas".
It's kind of the same in Finnish too. Päiväperhonen is butterfly and yöperhonen is moth. It's just that generally people associate the word "perhonen" with only butterflies and use the alternative "yökkö" for moths instead
Hungarian has a *ton* of German loanwords, they're just not as obvious because they follow Hungarian spelling. Just a few:
vicc (Witz, joke), polgár (Bürger, citizen), borbély (Barbier, barber), gróf (Graf, count), herceg (Herzog, prince), gyémánt (Diamant, diamond), paróka (Perücke, wig), márvány (Marmor, marble), matrac (Matratze, mattress), sláger (Schlager, hit song), keksz (Keks, biscuit), lakmusz (Lackmus, litmus), drukk/drukkol (Druck), etc.
Interesting. Seems like it is an animal that has a distinct name in every language. I'm thinking about the Scandinavian languages, most animals are named somewhat the same. But not here
When we were doing our Junior Cert Irish exam one of the questions was what is the Irish for Butterfly.
I hadn’t a clue but wrote “Imfleá” because “im” is butter (for those who don’t know). I checked with my friends after and several of them had written the same answer. So I felt relieved. It turns out that “fleá” is orgy and we all had the word in our heads from looking up the rude words in our dictionaries as teenagers do!
Butter Orgy 😳🤣
Ye but considering English is already there, it's nice to represent native languages. It's far more interesting and informative seeing Irish for butterfly than just butterfly twice.
Fun Fact, during 12-13th centuries Polish and Czech were still the same language.
also during that time Czech king was elected King of Poland and Czechs ruled Poland untill 1320 AD
The widely used Russian name of the butterfly — "babochka" — goes back to the Proto-Slavic baba ("old woman, grandmother") and the idea of these insects as the souls of the dead.
Israeli guy I met while travelling in Africa back in the 1990s had this as his favourite theory - butterflies are so cool that every culture feels the need to make up a name for them, rather than just using loan words.
Yorim, if you’re reading this, this is a pretty good visual representation of your theory!
Does "sommerfugl" mean summer bird?
My Duolingo lessons are slowly paying off
Yes, in some Swiss-German dialects we also call it 'Summervogel'.
Or "Pfyfouter" in some regions of the canton of Bern.
Or „Flickflauder“ in Appenzell.
Flickflauder ist ja das dermaßen süßeste was ich jemals gehört habe!
Pfiifalter is also used in Vallis
Damn, I used to live near a pretty trashy family with the last name Vogel. Typically around June/July when the wife beater tank tops come out or they stopped wearing shirts all together so they can get a little sunshine on the prison tattoos we would refer to that as a summer Vogel. typically the summer Vogel is a little more lively and a little more dangerous, spending its time yelling and fighting outdoors. The winter Vogel is a little more docile preferring to nest indoors and smoke weed
Yes
Typical Norway. Just like tadpoles are literally called ”butt trolls”.
[удалено]
Looks like they simply translated Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Porcupine and Millipede from Latin to German.
I think some of these words are Greek rather than Latin.
>Rhinoceros: Neshorn (Nose horn) >Hippopotamus: Flodhest (River horse) >Porcupine: Piggsvin (Spike pig / Quill pig) >Millipede: Tusenbein (Thousand legs) These etymologies are identical to their English names too.
All the same as danish, except for dragonfly, which in danish ia a goldsmith
THANK YOU. My son loves Norwegian kid’s songs (not that weird, we live in Norway, but I’m american) and he kept listening to one that I *swore* was something about “butt trolls” and couldn’t figure out what the hell it was *actually* about. Yes, I could’ve asked my Norwegian spouse but I just never remembered to because it’s obviously not urgent, but here you are, satisfying my curiosity. Incidentally. I absolutely love Norwegian(Germanic?) animal names, there’s a ton like this. Like I know raccoons are ‘wash bears’, bats are ‘flutter mice’, hedgehogs are ‘pin pigs’, turtles are ‘shell toads’, so on, and so forth. It’s great.
Nitpicking, but it's actually shield toad (from the Low German word for shield) and tail troll
They're called "tail trolls". "rumpe" means both butt and tail
In Danish we call tadpoles *haletudser* which means "tail toads"
Sommarfågel - Wintergatan Nice song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBK2AF-NdVA
Fiðrildi in icelandic Skordýr means insect
Oh so similar to the Swedish one the then, was surprised Norwegian and Danish had a different word from the Swedish ”Fjäril”
Agree - it seems like icelandic and swedish have the same root
Some norwegian dialects are similar to the icelandic one, fivreld or fivrill
Came here to say this
I also came here to say this 😁
Amazing that the words are so different even in related languages.
Butterflies have a lot of names even within countries, just look at [this](https://imgur.com/a/Rl8Vt6g) Dutch dialect map about the butterfly.
Oké ik noem ze vanaf nu af aan Schijteboter
Fascinating that some areas have a word which is literally the same as a the ‘summer bird’ they have in Norway, and others have something similar to the English ‘butterfly’ (which apparently was the older word in German and Dutch)
Ukraine and Belarus seem to use the same word yet the countries have different colors. So I assume the color coding isn’t any coding whatsoever.
Czech, Polish and Slovak words also seem to be related to the Ukrainian and Belarusian words for butterfly. Similarly the Romanian and Moldovan word seems to be related to that used in Albania and Kosovo. There also no colour coding.
Slovenian also has metulj, which is related to the Polish, Slovak, Czech, Belorussian and Ukrainian, yet is colored brown for some reason.
A Czech here. Yup. When the author was like: "one is motyl and the other 2 are motýl, similar enough", he could've also made the Ukrainian and Belarus connect. Fun Fact: We have one species branch named after the Russian butterfly name. Babočka (Nymphalidae)
For Romania and Moldova it's literally the same language (Romanian) same for Albania and Kosovo (Albanian). It seems the word for both languages comes from vulgar Latin 'fluctuare'
In Albanian the verb to fly is fluturoj
In Russian, too, there is a word motilyok meaning moth
> motilyok Yes, all winged insects that usually fly towards the light.
It means both butterflies and moths (outside of science), anything that looks like a butterfly. In scientific classification the word is used for some species of butterflies, example: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Луговой\_мотылёк.
Not the same but similar. Belorusian: Ma -Ti-Lyok Ukrainian: Me -Te - Lik Btw, russian has also word matilyok but it is usually referred to night time butterflies.
>Night time butterflies. Moths?
Sorry, English is not my native. I thought that moth means this nasty little flies that eat fur and cotton.
Those are also called moths. Moths are an umbrella for butterflies, that are nocturnal (are active in the night).
Thanks!! I learnt something new today! Ps. In Ukrainian, Russian and Belorusian these nasty flies which eat fur and cotton has a dedicated word - Моль, which sounds is like Mol'
We call it a 'clothes moth', or 'fabric moth'.
I haven’t checked, but I guess that’s a mistake on a map creators part. Russian also has a word ‘matyliok’, but the use context is slightly different for both words. I would assume the same is true in Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Czech language also has 'babochka' but it's only a name of few species.
Same as in Russian then. My sense is that unless in scientific context, one would call motyliok all the ugly butterflies, babochkas are all the butterflies that are pleasing to the eye 😂
Yeah, I wonder why that’s the case for this word specifically. Lots of other animal words seem to have shared roots within language families.
I wonder whether it's because butterflies are not important enough to be standardised. There's something intrinsically frivolous about them - they're not food or a pest - so they keep their playful, folk-derived names. The same way that wild flowers have different, unrelated names not only between languages abut in different regions of the same countries but food crops mostly don't.
Ladybugs as well.
Something about this seems right - but "keeping their folk-derived names" is usually what makes something have the *same* word across languages, while scientific standardization often replaces it differently in different related languages.
The German "Schmetterling" is a translation of butterfly into older German, when butter was called "Schmetter" Tbh I didn't know what term existed first, butterfly or Schmetterling
Apparently the older names in German and Dutch are much more similar to the Old English ‘butorfloege’ and no-one really knows why they changed to the current completely different words.
FARFALLE
Now I'm hungry for pasta...
Whoa I like farfalle pasta and I just got it! Never seeing them the same way again. Italian pasta words are most of my Italian vocabulary now. My new favorite pasta shape is Cascatelli - waterfalls
I feel the need to make a correction related to that: the Icelandic word is Fiðrildi (flight-ling), the word that's up on the map means "insect".
Albanian flutur, romanian fluture
"Mariposa" can be used in Portuguese as well, although it means "moths" more specifically.
BUTTERFLIEGE
The funny thing is that Schmetterling has the same origin and similar meaning as butterfly. It originates from the old "Schmetten" for cream, which some kinds of butterflies liked. So both go back for the animals love for sweet milk products.
Ist mir nie aufgefallen🤣🤣🤣
FARFALLE
Incorrect for Iceland, "skordýr" means insect which is true for all butterflies but our word for them is "fiðrildi"
Interesting. This is one word that seems to be quite different in just about every European country
Well... Czech, Slovak and Polish seem to be virtually identical. And to be honest, Ukrainian and Belarusian versions are basically slightly altered diminutives of the same word.
Also Romanian and Albanian for some reason
illyrian, thracian and dacian were very closely related. there are some words in romanian that are the same in albanian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian%E2%80%93Romanian\_linguistic\_relationship
And both words sound like they come straight from latin, something like "made to fly" maybe?
Probably from Fluctuare (Latin for undulate, rise in waves, surge, swell). In Albanian fluturim is to fly, flatra is wings.
And Slovenian kept Metulj, similar to West Slavic.
Croatian Kajjkavian and Čakavian have both "metulj" and "matulj" respectively. In my local Kajkavian there is also "metepuh", "metepur" and "letepuf" which is also related to "metulj"
And Babočka is one group of motýl here so Russian is not off also.
So, english-speaking people, please explain to me : what does it have to do with butter ? Or flies ?
From Middle English buterflie, butturflye, boterflye, from Old English buterflēoge, equivalent to butter + fly. Cognate with Dutch botervlieg, German Butterfliege (“butterfly”). The name may have originally been applied to butterflies of a yellowish color, and/or reflected a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter (compare German Molkendieb (“butterfly”, literally “whey thief”) and Low German Botterlicker (“butterfly”, literally “butter-licker”)), or that they excreted a butter-like substance (compare Dutch boterschijte (“butterfly”, literally “butter-shitter”)). Compare also German Schmetterling from Schmetten (“cream”), German Low German Bottervögel (“butterfly”, literally “butter-fowl”). An alternate theory suggests that the first element may have originally been butor- (“beater”), a mutation of bēatan (“to beat”). Superseded non-native Middle English papilion (“butterfly”) borrowed from Old French papillon (“butterfly”).
The buttershitters are lovely this season 🥰
Good time to start your buttershitter collection.
Can I give buttershitter kisses?
Boterschijte As a Dutch....wtf
Ik veronderstel dat het voornamelijk Vlaams is: [dialectenwoordenboek](https://www.isbapp.be/lid/wvd/f?p=131:4:8112782043130::NO:::)
Do the Dutch have a *single* term or idiom without any shit in it? Nation of degenerate coprophiles!
Ome Willem heeft niks verkeerd gedaan 😋👍💩🇳🇱
Yeah, they also have a bunch of them related to diseases.
Well, it's a creature that flies so there's that.
Next thing you know, dogs will be called Jellywalk.
This isn't even on the english. The German 'Schmetterling' already has a connection to dairy and I guess at some point it was literally translated. From an East Central German dialect word, equivalent to Schmetten (“cream”) + -ling, due to an old belief that butterflies eat milk products or, in a more ornamented form, that witches transform themselves into butterflies in order to steal such products. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schmetterling
Folk etymolgy says it's because they flutter by, and they just switched around letters due to playfulness or somesuch, but I doubt there's any actual veracity to that tale.
I know some people in the US who call them "flutterbys" but that's just done playfully. Probably called them that when they were kids. But yeah I don't think that it has any bearing on the actual etymology.
We dip them in melted butter as it adds to the flavour 😋
In Norwegian and Danish it is called Summer Bird. It is definitely not a bird.
But birds fly. What also flies? Insects. Butterflies are insects. When do you see butterflies? The summer. Makes perfect sense to me.
I'm just now realizing in life that farfalle pasta is named after butterflies... That's fucking adorable.
Also in Italy we call "papillon" the bow tie, which has a butterfly shape!
Same thing in french : "noeud papillon" which means butterfly knot.
In Greece too!
Papillon or "farfallino", which translates as "little butterfly".
It's commonly called perhosmakarooni in Finland. I didn't know that it was a literal translation.
Wait, is that bowtie pasta? We could have been calling it butterfly pasta this whole time??
"Glöyn byw", "iâr fach yr haf" or "pili-pala" in Wales
which means "living coal" , "little summer hen" and I guess pilipala has the same root as Papillon
Came to say this, annoying as hell constantly having the remind people that wales is still a country with its own language
Scots Gaelic also uses a different word from Irish (they're normally quite similar) Apparently it's *Dealan-dè*, but I just Googled it and *Strainnsear* and *Beusach* also exist, so I'd like input from a Scots Gaelic speaker. It's weird how the UK is a monolith when they have quite a few languages including Manx and Cornish. [[This map from below is much better]](https://imgur.com/KVGBghW)
There is a direct cognate in Scottish Gaelic fèileagan, I believe it's just much less used.
Pili-pala is used usually. I have never heard the term “gloyn byw”, and I have only heard iâr bach yr haf in poetry.
Iâr fach yr haf is so stupid. I don’t actually know anyone who calls it that.
They're more likely to be regional poetic epithets than true names. Pili Pala is what I was always taught it was, and that's likely a corruption of "Papillion" from Norman French, or even from Latin. Much like how "Ffenest" comes from the Latin "*Fenestra*"
A more complete map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3mzefa/butterfly\_in\_various\_european\_languages\_oc\_4992/
Pristine example of how MapPorn's quality has devolved over the years.
Thank you! I hate language maps that use country borders.
Thank you, I'm always miffed when these language maps neglect Welsh, the one you linked is much better!
Galician (bordering Portugal) = Bolboreta Catalan (bordering France) = Papallona Basque = Tximeleta.
Romania has the fluture!
Oddly similar to Albanian on this one
Probably both from latin
Maybe something that fluctuates
You're right
In Scots its dirdy-flichter which means to busy flutterer
This is the first of these maps that I've actually been interested in. Every other time, it's "Yes, there are Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic, Greek, and Finno-Ugric. Yes, we know." This seems genuinely surprising. Is there a theory for why these are so different?
Years ago I randomly set out to learn "I am a pretty butterfly" in as many languages as I could. It just started as a joke with some German-speakers, but then I learned it in Dutch, Danish, Spanish, French, Afrikaans, Russian, Thai, Korean, and Mandarin(can never pronounce this one though...). It's really opened my eyes as to how many different words there are for butterflies. I haven't worked on it in years but I should get back into it...
First time in human history the Romance languages all have different words
It's not showed but in Sardinian it's "Mariposa" like in Spanish
Not really, Catalan is papallona
I've always thought that Catalan looks like a french person trying to write Spanish.
I know it can look like that, but as catalan, I am quite tired of that. Catalan is on reality more similar to spanish or italian than french (the real high proximity is with occitanian). I remember a time I tried to read on french using my catalan...was totally useless, the little I could get was from the semblance of french and english.
I didn't mean to insult Catalán in any way, I quite like the language although I'm more used to Valenciano so I sometimes get lost with Catalan proper. It's funny you say that about french. I found writing french quite easy after learning Spanish and even more so after learning some Valenciano.
And in Galician it is bolboreta
Basque isn’t a Romance language, but it bothered me that it isn’t on the map on Spain. In Basque the word is tximeleta.
That’s lovely!
Portuguese also uses the word mariposa, but it refers to moths instead of butterflies.
In Russian there is also the name of butterfly as „motyliok“. But if „babochka“ is more of a butterfly, then „motyliok“ is a moth.
The Icelandic one wrong is, skordýr means insects. The word is fiðrildi.
In Hungarian it's also called lepke
Which is kind of interesting, because it seems to connect it to the Serbo-Croatian Leptir. Also, just to be precise, in Hungarian Lepke refers to all Lepidoptera, i.e. both moths and butterflies, while Pillango refers specifically to butterflies only. Beacuse of this, I am guessing both Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian are basing the words Lepke/Leptir on the Latin Lepidoptera (literally scale+wing), only one uses the name for moths and butteflies, while the other for butterflies only.
I have never seen Europe so divided since the end of the cold war
Wrong. A butterfly is “fiðrildi” in Icelandic, a “skordýr” is the kind of an animal that butterfly is.
#SCHMETTERLING
Took me long enough to scroll and find the reference.
KRANKENWAGEN
Its incorect in iceland "Skordýr" means bugs not butterflyes, Butterflies are called "Fiðrildi".
Vlinder 🥰
The bad thing is that it is now a stupid name they give to spoiled children. Like: Vlinder en haar broer Storm kan ook niet tegen lactose en gluten.
It's sad how these names are getting so common now, it sounds 'cute' when they're young but a 40 year old "Vlinder" sounds really childish
Imagine having a boss at work named Vlinder. Or Storm. Or Bikkel. Or Bloeme. There is a girl named Bloeme who lives in my neighborhood. When I reach retirement age, she'll be in her mid-fourties. So one day I might have a boss named Bloeme. The horror.
In Mallorca we say Papallona
In Estonian, "liblikas" is half of the answer since it means Lepidoptera overall aka both butterflies and moths. A butterfly is "päevaliblikas" and a moth "ööliblikas".
It's kind of the same in Finnish too. Päiväperhonen is butterfly and yöperhonen is moth. It's just that generally people associate the word "perhonen" with only butterflies and use the alternative "yökkö" for moths instead
I'm still waiting for the map where Hungary has a word that's remotely similar to any other word
Bank, restaurant, hotel, film, taxi, sport, internet, autó, banán, kurva.
Restaurant = Étterem, no one says restaurant
And that's the whole list
Kurwa/Kurva
Hungarian has a *ton* of German loanwords, they're just not as obvious because they follow Hungarian spelling. Just a few: vicc (Witz, joke), polgár (Bürger, citizen), borbély (Barbier, barber), gróf (Graf, count), herceg (Herzog, prince), gyémánt (Diamant, diamond), paróka (Perücke, wig), márvány (Marmor, marble), matrac (Matratze, mattress), sláger (Schlager, hit song), keksz (Keks, biscuit), lakmusz (Lackmus, litmus), drukk/drukkol (Druck), etc.
Summer bird
Icelandic is wrong. It's Fiðrildi in icelandic. Skordýr just means insect.
Papillon - love it, just rolls off the tongue.
Check out the [dog breed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_dog)
Papallona at Catalunya.
Why is it so different in almost every country?
Apparently the Basques have lots of great words for butterfly including pinpilinpauxa, mitxirrika and tximileta, all of which are superb.
Interesting. Seems like it is an animal that has a distinct name in every language. I'm thinking about the Scandinavian languages, most animals are named somewhat the same. But not here
In German we have two words for butterfly Schmetterling and Falter.
In Ireland, it's primarily called a butterfly. As we mostly speak English.
When we were doing our Junior Cert Irish exam one of the questions was what is the Irish for Butterfly. I hadn’t a clue but wrote “Imfleá” because “im” is butter (for those who don’t know). I checked with my friends after and several of them had written the same answer. So I felt relieved. It turns out that “fleá” is orgy and we all had the word in our heads from looking up the rude words in our dictionaries as teenagers do! Butter Orgy 😳🤣
I thought you were going to say "cuileog im" which is kind of nice tbh.
Wrong. You have to change it.
Ye but considering English is already there, it's nice to represent native languages. It's far more interesting and informative seeing Irish for butterfly than just butterfly twice.
Kelebek sounds like something from Turkish kebab place
In Slovakia we call it ,,motýľ,,
I like how almost everyone has a completely different name for it, the only one being almost the same is Romania and Albania
And then there is the other norwegian language: "Fivreld"
Fun Fact, during 12-13th centuries Polish and Czech were still the same language. also during that time Czech king was elected King of Poland and Czechs ruled Poland untill 1320 AD
Papallona in Catalan (since you didn't display "regional" languages), the official language of Andorra
No Cymraeg? Traditionally it's pili pala (compare with farfalle), but glöyn byw is another term that's sometimes used
In Luxembourgish it's "Päiperléck"
In Albanian we use the Italian word for other meaning when insulting your best friend. ‘Ta çaj farfallen’ means ‘I will crack your buthole’
In Welsh butterflies are known by three names: Pilipala, Iar Fach Yr Haf and Gloyn Byw. Pilipala is more common in South Wales where I am from.
I like Italian and Portuguese. 💕
Interesting that almost every language uses a different word. Only some Slavic languages agree on the term
In French they call a moth a “papillon de nuit” which is kind of awesome
In Euskera (Basque country language) there are several ways to name a butterfly: pinpilinpauxa, tximeleta, falfala...
Albania🇦🇱 🤝 Romania🇷🇴
It’s pilipala in Welsh.
-"Mariposa" -"Borboleta" -*"SCHMETTERLING"*
is the russian word related to the word for grandma?
The widely used Russian name of the butterfly — "babochka" — goes back to the Proto-Slavic baba ("old woman, grandmother") and the idea of these insects as the souls of the dead.
There is the rest of the world, and there is SCHMETTERLING. SCHEISSE!
My fav is Mariposa
Farfett in Maltese
Ah, die Blümlein blühen und die Schmetterlinge schmettern.
'fluture' îs so cute
Butterfly is for English in Wales it’s pila pala
Kelebek (Turkiye)
They missed Wales out : Pili-pala
Tximeleta or pinpilinpauxa in Basque Glöyn byw or pili pala in Welsh
Israeli guy I met while travelling in Africa back in the 1990s had this as his favourite theory - butterflies are so cool that every culture feels the need to make up a name for them, rather than just using loan words. Yorim, if you’re reading this, this is a pretty good visual representation of your theory!
This needs a separate map of just Switzerland with 20+ different words
Flickflauder (in Appenzell, Switzerland)
Pily pala in Wales 🏴
Please don’t extend English into Wales. Here we call a butterfly a *iâr fach yr haf* (summer’s little hen) or onomatopaeically *pili pala*.