Re: USAGE: Butterfly (was: Reduplication enquiry)

John Cowan wrote:

> inherited Latin form, but Italian "farfalla" looks suspiciously like the
> "fif(r)ald-" forms from OE and ON, now preserved only in Icelandic).
Swedish has _fjäril_, which AFAIK is derived from the root FER/FAR, which
means 'to go, to travel' (and from which we have words like _fara_, _fjärran_,
_fjord_, etc.) and the suffix _-il_, which IIUC is an agentive suffix (or
possibly diminutive?). The {e} -> {jä} is obviously so called "breaking".

BPJ, please correct me if I'm mistaken.

What I'm trying to say here is that the Swedish word for butterfly
isn't transparent for everyone, but it is clearly analyzable.

Daniel Andreasson