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Hydrobatidae / 海燕科 (Hǎi-yàn kē)

海燕科 Hǎi-yàn kē * ウミツバメ科 Umi-tsubame ka * 바다제비과 Bada-jebi-gwa

General names

Information is based on dictionaries and other sources. Comments and corrections welcome.

The word for 'petrel' is 海燕 hǎi-yàn meaning 'sea swallow'. The storm petrels are all known as 'fork-tailed sea swallows' in Chinese.

The fact that both Chinese and Japanese use 海燕 'sea swallow' for the petrels (unlike German, for instance, where 'sea swallow' is used for the terns) suggests influence between the two languages. Linguistically, there are reasons for suspecting that the direction of influence may have been from Japanese to Chinese. First, in referring to petrels, Japanese features regional and dialectal variations on the word for 'swallow', namely ウミツバクラ umi-tsubakura and ウミツバクロ umi-tsubakuro, which suggests that the term is native. On the other hand, Chinese appears at one stage to have used 海燕 hǎi-yàn for birds other than the petrels, including the terns and possibly the swiftlets. This leads one to suspect that 海燕 hǎi-yàn in modern terminology is due to Japanese influence.

Species names

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HYDROBATINAE
SCIENTIFIC & ENGLISH
CHINESE
JAPANESE
OTHER
Latin
English
Chinese (Taiwan)
Chinese (Mainland)
Other Ch
Japanese
Other J
Korean
Vietnamese
Oceanodroma                
Oceanodroma monorhis Swinhoe's storm petrel
Swinhoe's storm-petrel
Swinhoe's petrel		 黑叉尾海燕
hēi chā-wěi hǎi-yàn
'black fork-tailed sea-swallow'		 黑叉尾海燕
hēi chā-wěi hǎi-yàn
'black fork-tailed sea-swallow'		   ヒメクロウミツバメ
(姫黒海燕)
hime kuro umi-tsubame
'princess black sea-swallow'		   바다제비
bada-jebi
'sea swallow'		  
Oceanodroma tristrami
link to photo		 Tristram's storm petrel
Tristram's storm-petrel
Tristram's petrel		 褐翅叉尾海燕
hè-chì chā-wěi hǎi-yàn
'brown-winged fork-tailed sea-swallow'		 褐翅叉尾海燕
hè-chì chā-wěi hǎi-yàn
'brown-winged fork-tailed sea-swallow'		   オーストンウミツバメ
(オーストン海燕)
Ōsuton umi-tsubame
'Austen's (?) sea-swallow'		      

Notes

Under Sibley and Monroe, the Hydrobatidae are a subfamily of the Procellariiidae. Other subfamilies are the Diomedeinae (albatrosses) and the Procellariinae (fulmars, petrels).