So, after that post I looked up the song on Youtube.

And along the way I was linked to another oh-so-old song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJr8uZPNm4Y

Now, this is much easier to read (and modernize singably), despite dating to about the same time:

Miri it is wile sumer y-last
And fugheles song;
Oc nu neheth windes blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei! What this nicht is long,
And ic with wel miccel wrong,
Soregh and murne and fast.

Happily, there's a translation given below the video anyway. But still, the only really tricky word there is "fugheles", which apparently means "birds". I read that and immediately flashed back to several years ago, at the SICM, seeing a Jewish mother exhorting her toddler to look at the "faygeles". You don't have to speak any Yiddish to work out that when you're pointing at a birdcage while saying "Rifky! Faygeles! Faygeles, Rifka!" that one of those two words has to mean "birdies" while the other is a name. (That'd be the Rifka, a diminutive of Rebecca. I've always thought it sounds nicer than the only common English shortening of the name, Becky, but if you named your kid that and weren't Jewish you'd be dooming her to explain to people all the time how come she has that name.)

And after a little thought I remembered that in German bird is Vogel, so it all makes sense. Or it mostly does. It seems pretty obvious that the three words are related*, but where the heck did "bird" come from then?

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bird

Apparently, nobody is really quite sure. Well, that's annoying. "Fugol" is preserved more or less in the word "fowl", anyway.

* Don't get carried away with this. Chance resemblances between languages are more common than you probably think. We happen to already *know* Yiddish and German and English and Dutch (vogel) and likewise are related (you can see all the various "bird" words for Germanic languages on the list linked) so I didn't think I was going too far out on a limb here.

Of course, one problem (as an American) with traditional English songs

Or simply very OLD English songs, is that they often refer to a small number of birds with various symbolic meanings. Cuckoos herald warm weather (and also unfaithfulness), larks have to do with the morning, turtledoves are about... love? (you can't convince me that's not because the words rhyme nicely), nightingales sing nicely, and there's always magpie poems.

Yeah, none of these exist where I live. We have mockingbirds and American robins (not like English robins at all) and blue jays and cardinals and the hermit thrush, but those don't make much of an appearance. Mourning doves do, but probably because it exactly matches the scansion of "turtledove".

And you know, awkward as I might find it to try to sing a piece in Middle English, it's even weirder when you think that cuckoos don't come here in the warm months and never will. I'm not likely to see one in my lifetime, nor hear one. (Well, I mean, there are cuckoos in the sense of "birds of the cuckoo family" in America, but not the one people think of when they think of cuckoos, the one that makes the classic call. The only one that springs instantly to mind is the roadrunner, so... yeah.)

There's not much to be done about this. Trying to change the references to local birds (or plants, when that occurs and they haven't been introduced to the Americas) would be pointless and almost certainly wouldn't rhyme or scan or have the same "meaning" even if it ought to. But it just... nags at me. I mean, the whole refrain is a lie to me! "Loudly sing, cuckoo?" Not likely! Sure, the meadow is blooming and all that, and I'm sure the sheep and cows are acting like sheep and cows, introduced species that they are, that the deer are the same the world over - but there's that cuckoo again! Poor thing must be lost.

*sighs*

Do you ever think you overthink things?

On the subject of native and non-native birdsongs, incidentally

I was playing some on my computer the other day as part of my seasonal attempt to learn to recognize at least ONE new bird per year. The boy-cat perked up and looked around when I played the song of a bird that's local to us, but ignored it when I played the song of a European bird. Not sure if he's very smart and recognized that the song wasn't from an actual bird or not-so-smart and only responds when he recognizes the bird. More testing is necessary.

He's getting smarter, though. The other day he brought a still-live mouse into the house and carefully trotted to the newly-cleaned closet before dropping it down. Clearly he worked out that this enclosed location offered fewer opportunities for little escapees to, well, escape. Good thing he's still smaller than people.