Piwin -> RE: Can a white man play the blues? (Apr. 22 2021 14:38:11)
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How the word naming Flemings and big pink birds came to be applied in the 19th century to gitanos remains mysterious It's quite possible that the demonym and the bird name are an example of "true homonyms". Like "school" in English: "school" as a place of learning and "school" as a group of fish have two very different etymologies, leading all the way back to separate roots in PIE. Despite sharing the same phonological and orthographic space, they are not at all the same word (and in a good dictionary they would each have their own entry, as opposed to being listed as different meanings of the same word). The Ancient Greeks called the flamingo "φoινικóπτερoς", which translates to "red-feathered" / "red-winged"). The Ancient Romans took the word as is, slapped a Latin ending to it, and called it "phoenicopterus". That is the name that stuck in scientific usage. So when natural historians / ornithologists started hearing words like flamingo/flamenco/flamant or whatever iteration the word had in their own language, they saw it as a translation of the Greek/Latin into their contemporary vernacular. At least as early as the 1600s, you can find writings by people like Francis Willughby, and later Leclerc de Buffon, writing about people who mistakenly saw a connection between the vernacular word for flamingo and the Flemish demonym. They observed that Flanders lay well outside the natural habitat of flamingos, which in Europe was limited to the Mediterranean region. To them, it was far more likely that it was simply a translation of the scientific name into the vernacular. Basically put, it would have been a derivation of the Latin "flamma". In several Latin-based languages, there is evidence that "flamma" evolved to describe a color, which was already a small but possible use of the term in Latin actually. Not always to the same extent though. In some languages it remained a metaphor, I suppose as in "of the same color as a flame"; in others it became a more literal word for some form of bright reddish color. Whether these scientists were correct or not in their observation is anyone's guess. But it attests that this was already a confusing term several hundred years ago. Personally, it's just a hunch but I would bet my money on those scientists. It's just a more straightforward route than Dutch nobility going down to the Mediterranean and their name somehow sticking to that of the bird. Of course, they may have held lavish garden parties where they played croquet using live flamingos and hedgehogs, and the name may have stuck. ^^ If they were correct, then we'd have a case of true homonyms, with one "flamenco" coming from an Ingvaeonic word for "flooded", and the other "flamenco" coming from a Latin word for "flame". Where the "flamenco" as in Andalusian music fits in all of this, who knows? Some want to add a 3rd cognate, usually some derivative of North African languages that would have been brought by the Moors. Those are usually dismissed, not because they're necessarily bad ideas per se, but because they require a big leap in time between when the root term used by the Moors is attested and when "flamenco" as a descriptor of Gypsies or music is attested. For now, the connection to the Flemish "flamenco" seems to me to be the more likely route. But even the better arguments for that are far from iron-clad.
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