BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="l_raty" data-source="post: 3236841" data-attributes="member: 24811">I have serious doubts on this one, James..."Mascarin" is not unique to the parrot's name, it is the real French word for an <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mascareignes#D.C3.A9mographie" target="_blank">inhabitant of the Mascarenes</a>. But, on the other hand, it's certainly not a frequent word: many native speakers won't know it, and you'd need a pretty big dictionary to find it. I think it is quite plausible that Brisson was told this name when he saw the bird in Paris, but that he failed to understand that it did tell him where the bird came from; and that Buffon's later comment about a "masque" derivation was just a (bad) guess from someone who didn't really know.In any case, the alternative -- that the bird was named for its "masque", using a wholly newly coined French word that, by chance, ended up identical to the standard French word telling its geographical origin -- seems still much more improbable to me.Also, <a href="http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/36195848" target="_blank">Brisson</a> was not Levaillant: forging neologisms was not really part of his usual business. Brisson's French names were typically dull, formed either only from common French words, or from such words coupled to a locality name ("Perruche jaune de X", "Perruche jaune de Y", "Perruche jaune de Z"; repeat with "Perruche rouge"; etc.). Had he decided to name a bird for its black mask, you can be quite sure that we would know it as "masqué" or "à masque noir", not as "mascarin". Thus even under the mask hypothesis, Brisson doesn't seem at all likely to have coined the name himself; and if he hadn't, his ignorance of the bird's origin is no indication that the bird wasn't named for it.---PS -- Although not unseen in recent times, referring to Buffon as "de Buffon" is quite unusual, and arguably incorrect.</blockquote>

Verification