The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Butterflies of the World

For some reason the languages of the world put more effort into the names of butterflies than those of any other creature. From Norway to Malaysia the words are extraordinary.

Malay doesn’t have plurals like ours. In English you simply add an S to the end of the word. But in Malay you form your plural by repeating the noun, so tables would become table table. It’s a system with some sort of logic to it. When there’s more than one word, that means there’s more than one thing.

It works out fine for the speaker of Malay, so long as the original singular noun wasn’t formed by reduplication itself, as is the case with their butterflies. The Malay for butterfly is rama-rama, so butterflies is rama-rama rama-rama. And it doesn’t stop there. The Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so I really like would be rendered as I like like, or suka suka. We occasionally do this in English, when somebody says, ‘I’ve got to, got to see that film’. All of which means that the Malay for I love butterflies is:

In Italian, butterflies are called farfalle and there’s a kind of butterfly-shaped pasta named after them that you can buy in most supermarkets. Outside Italy, though, most people don’t realise that it’s butterfly pasta, and in America they ignore the Italian name entirely and call farfalle bow-ties, because a butterfly resembles a bow-tie, and in an emergency could probably serve as a substitute.

This is a point of dress not lost upon the Russians, who call a bow-tie a butterfly. And as a butterfly is, in Russian, a little lady, bow-ties, butterflies and girls are all called babochkas (like babushkas).

In the bleak Norwegian winter there are no butterflies at all, so when they emerge from their chrysalises in the bleak Norwegian summer they are called summer-birds, or somerfogl.

In French they rather boringly just took the Latin papilio and called their butterflies papillons. But then, in a fit of inventiveness, they realised that the grand tents in which kings sat at tournaments and jousts were shaped like the wings of a butterfly, so they called them papillons, and we call them pavilions, which means that there’s a butterfly at one end of Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Why all these intricate and exquisite names? Nobody bothers with the humble fly (which does exactly what it says on the tin) or the beetle (biter) or the bee (quiverer), or the lousily-named louse. Butterflies hog all the attention of the word-makers.

Perhaps this is because in many quite distinct and unconnected cultures the butterfly is imagined to be a human soul that has shaken off this mortal coil of woes and now flutters happily through a gaily-coloured afterlife.

This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.

There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche, and Psyche was the goddess of the soul. There’s a lovely allegorical poem about her called ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and she’s also the origin of the study of the soul: psychoanalysis.