Talk:List of birds of Lithuania

Names
Please could I raise a query about this page. I don't know how to do this, as I'm fairly new to the process. If I've committed some terrible breach of the rules by writing a note in this way, please excuse me and accept my apologies.

The query is that some of the bird names in the English version of this site won't be familiar to many English speaking Europeans. What I suspect may have happened is that the article has originally been written in Lithuanian, with Lithuanian bird names and then translated into English to create an English speaking version, but the Lithuanian-English dictionary used has been a specifically Lithuanian-American English dictionary.

This is a bit disconcerting because the two English speaking countries nearest Lithuania, and having a Palearctic fauna, actually use different names for quite a lot of these birds. Mergus merganser for example, in the UK and Ireland is a Goosander, and Common Loon doesn't europeanise into Common Diver, but has the completely different name of Great Northern Diver. Anything with Buteo as its Latin name is Buzzard in european English nomenaclature, and so Rough legged Buzzard. Hawk as a species name - rather than a general word for bird of prey, is normally restricted specifically to accipters, as in Goshawk and Sparrowhawk.

There's been quite a lot of argument about names in the last few years, but it's noticeable that when one clicks on the links to the birds' actual pages, usually, the names seem to be the more recognisable ones.

Browne-Windsor 22:53, 30 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The list is taken from Clements 5th edition which uses the American English names. There is an argument for "Europeanising" names, but probably an equally powerful argument for standardising them across the bird lists. As you say, the links often go to the British English version of the name, so that should clear up any confusion. Probably the best solution is to give the alternative names in the list (but then we get into arguments over which should come first) I've created 177 country lists (with one more to go) over the past few days working from the point of view that a referenced list with some oddities for each country was better than no list. There are other idiosyncrasies to the lists - at some point I'll probably write a bot to clear up some of the odd links and when the 6th edition comes out next month, there will probably be some species counts that need changing and families that need rearranging. Yomangani talk 23:54, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. I'd obviously guessed wrong as to how the names had arisen.

There's been a lot of debate about names in recent years, with some attempts to standardise them, but this link gives what are currently the standard anglophone names on the palearctic side of the Atlantic. http://www.birdguides.com/species/. Because of recent changes, they aren't automatically the same as Cramp & Perrins, which is the standard text in English on the Western Palearctic, particularly since there's quite a lot of argument as to which are full species and which aren't. Although Britain and Ireland have their own individual lists, for a lot of purposes, these days the Western Palearctic tends to be treated as the significant bird area. The least controversial solution for anglophone bird lists for parts of the world would be to use the name current in that area in the sort of English spoken there. So for a western palearctic list, one would use the names used in the UK and Ireland, for a nearctic one, the names used in the USA and Canada, for a southern Pacific one, the names prevalent in Australia etc. Browne-Windsor 17:56, 1 May 2007 (UTC)