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woodpecker
Turkish: aðaçkakan
German: Specht
French: pic
Italian: picchio
Spanish: pájaro carpintero
The above is from the Langtolang email mailing I've just started receiving. My question: In noticing the "pic" root, I wonder whether there's any connection between that root and the word "piccolo"? Emanuela?
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Dear WW: I suspect emanuela will tell you "piccolo" = small is from a different root.
Did you every hear Pete go tweet,tweet tweet on his piccolo?
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enthusiast
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Right, Bill, even if I am not sure, I have to check at home.
Anyway, picchio is obviously related to the verbe picchiare = to hit, to tap on, to knock at...
obviously referring at his hitting the wood.
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My question now is, where did the pic in piccolo come from? The -olo is obviously from the Latin diminutive suffix -ula/o.
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Just to add a slim picking to the woodpecker lexicon:
The woodpecker is described as one of the scansorial birds, scansorial meaning "climbing."
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I think we'll find the root means "small," the piccolo being a very small and high-pitched (read: "shrill") flute-like wind instrument
Recall that the prefix pico- means a very small part of something (one out of ten-to-the-ninth; a thousandth of a millionth)
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I've often wondered howcome a woodpecker's brain doesn't get homogenized
by his jackhammer excavating squarewave oscillations.
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the prefix pico- means a very small part of something
But it derives through Spanish from picar, to prick. AHD lists piccolo as of obscure origin.
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In reply to:
But it derives through Spanish from picar, to prick. AHD lists piccolo as of obscure origin.
Well, then, the prick/piccolo connection could be the pricking effect of the sound itself. Very different from the flute, I think. Think of "Stars and Stripes Forever"--the little piccolo solo that pricks the air with bursts of aural pinpoint notes. I suppose we could call the piccolo the prickolo... Sounds like the perfect instrument for a nit-picker.
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As Peter Schickele points out, the only two orchestral instruments that are adjectives are piano and piccolo.
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