What's so great about a list of bird names? After all, the names that men give are just a pale reflection of the birds themselves.
Well, bird-lovers may rejoice in biodiversity, but in matters linguistic they tend to use common or garden English as a lowest common denominator. So, in the interest of 'lingua-diversity', this site offers the official names (or, less accurately, the 'common names') of bird species found in a number of major Asian nations, currently encompassing Mongolia, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Thailand and Malaysia are in preparation. Regrettably the author lacks knowledge of and information about Korean, and as a result Korea is the only major Asian nation with an official list of bird species that will not be included in this site.
The site is based on an earlier site about Bird Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese begun in about October of 2000 (later the Birds of Southeast Asia). The Bird Names subsite was principally concerned with recording and comparing bird names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese -- languages of the 'Sinosphere'. It necessarily focussed on the places in East Asia where those languages are spoken, namely, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam.
This site takes the information of cjvlang and repackages it in the following ways:
- The language coverage is expanded to include other major East and Central Asian birding languages, namely, Mongolian, Korean, Thai, Kazakh, Turkish, and Malay/Indonesian.
- Apart from Chinese and Japanese, East Asian languages only have names for birds in their own territories, leading to large blanks when the whole of East Asia is covered. In Sibagu, the focus will be on a specific region, country, or province, giving prominence to the language or languages spoken in that region/country/province, as well as languages of neighbouring countries or countries with a particular connection to that country. Lists are thus more focussed and hopefully more relevant.
