Butterfly in all the languages of the world

Etymologically, some words are universal. The word 'mother' seems to have some version of an 'm' word in every language (despite the counterintuitive experience that 'm' is not usually the first linguistic sound an infant learns to make).

Some words will stay mostly the same within a historical group: pronouns and numbers tend to maintain meaning through centuries of phonetic changes.

Some words are unique to one language when other languages in the family keep the generic. 'Dog' in English is unique to English, but 'hound', from the Indo-European 'hund' (GE)/'canis' (LA)/'sag' (PE) remains elsewhere.

But are there words, or rather concepts, that are unique in every language. That is, is there a concept, such that in every language, the word for the concept is unique to that language and not shared by others?

If the idea that concept and word are not the same bothers you because, well, a word says what its concept is, then the following should convince you otherwise. Wait...instead just consider that a language foreign to you has mostly different words to you for the same concepts. Therefore words and concepts are not the same. Anyway, on to the main topic...)

Consider the word 'butterfly'. Sorry, consider the insect that in English is referred to as 'butterfly'. In English it is called ... yes, yes, I just said it. It's the usual English word made of two words. 'Butter' and 'fly'. There are all sorts of etymological theories:

• the insect is a fly the color of butter (some very particular species I presume)
• they hang out near butter
• they literally 'flutter by' and people are goofy and pulled a spoonerism
• the word as borrowed from Dutch who called it 'boterschijte' or, translated back, 'butter shit' because the insect's shit looks like butter, again presumably for some particular species whose shit I have not seen).

All somewhat sounding a little too convenient, like folk etymologies rather than scholarly exegeses. Except that Dutch one. Where did that come from?

But that's just English. The fun thing is is that most languages have their own strange fancy word for 'butterfly', seemingly not borrowed from any other nearby language.

• Romance
• Latin: papilio
• Italian: farfalle
• French: papillon
• Spanish: mariposa, 
• Catalan: papallona,parpalhòla
• Portuguese: borboleta
• Romanian: fluture
• Germanic
• German: Schmetterling
• Dutch: vlinder (note not boterschijte)
• Danish/Norwegian: sommerfugl
• Swedish: fjäril
• Icelandic: fiðrildi
• Slavic
• Bulgarian: peperuda
• Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian: leptir
• Czech/Slovak/Polish: motýl
• Belarussian: matyliok
• Ukrainian: metelyk
• Russian: babochka
• Celtic
• Irish: féileacán
• Scots-Gaelic: dealan-dè
• Welsh: glöyn byw

For every one of these mostly distinct entries (yes, yes, Slavic has a couple of derivatives of 'motil', and Romance of 'papilionem') there is an obscure etymology, mostly made up, just like the English one. The German 'Schmetterling' seems to come from 'schmettern' meaning 'make a loud noise' or 'strike' (butterflies tend to be quiet) but 'schmetter' is from an older Saxon dialect word usage, having to do with milk products, following the old folk belief that witches fly about in the form of butterflies, in order to steal milk and cream. A bit fanciful and sounds like my great aunt made it up. But then 'schmetten' is a dialect word for cream, deriving from the Czech “smetana”. So it's obvious! Cream, butter, butterfly! Which is to say nothing is obvious and it all sounds made up.

The Irish 'féileacán' also has multiple explanations. Maybe it is from 'feileach' which means 'festive' (butterflies certainly are festive) or it could come from 'eitleach' for flying. A possible sound change but not borne out elsewhere in Irish.

So, what's the point? Take any other language from your own. Almost the definition of it being another language is that there's a different word for everything. But for 'nearby' languages, really most of the words are cognate, just changed slightly, and it is only a handful of words that stand out as being different (e.g. English vs Scots English). The point is that the animal called 'butterfly' in English seems to have few cognates even in nearby languages. What is the explanation? What makes those insects so special? And even if they are special (they are!), aren't there other animals that are as special? A bear is pretty special especially if it's running after you. 

Te direction this is going in is that of all the words in the world, 'butterfly' has no cognates among any languages. By looking at the list that is obviously not true: motyl/matyliok, papilio/papillon/papallona, and others. But it does show that the word seems to vary quite a lot, as though a butterfly really brings out creative neologisms in everyone.

Linguistic note: I stopped at the European of Indo-European only because of familiarity and ease in checking. It would be instructive descriptive (that is non-theoretical) linguistics to investigate:

• other close families like the many close languages of India, Indic or separately Dravidian, or Chinese
• very close varieties (mutually intelligible dialects) to see if 'butterfly' is so volatile even in very close languages
• compare other concepts in a structured manner, e.g. one-for-one against mother, five, dog, fly to see if butterfly really is special (or is it a pattern that's not really a pattern and lots of other middlingly common words have a similar situation

Here's a start to that, a list of the word 'butterfly' in many many languages of the world.

(OK I lied at the beginning. 'Mother' is not considered a language universal by any linguist. It is certainly maintained as the main 'mom' word within Indo-European. But any 'm-' words in other languages are considered by linguists to be coincidences. There does seem to be some lexical universals over all human languages but currently there is only considered to be one, 'huh?'...so far)