columbine

Note: The name columbīna supposedly alludes to the five petals of the inverted flower of Aquilegia vulgaris, said to resemble five doves clustered together; this has the look of an after-the-fact explanation, however. — The interrelationship of the Latin, Greek and Slavic words is a perhaps insoluble puzzle. It has been assumed that the initial col-/gol- of the Latin and Slavic words describes a color, presumably a shade of blue, and that -b- continues an Indo-European suffix *-b^ho- of color and animal names. W.B. Lockwood ("Latin columba, palumbēs, Greek κόλυμβος," Historische Sprachforschung, Band 103 [1990], pp. 261-63) compares Greek ellós, hellós "young deer, fawn" (from *elnós) beside élaphos "red deer (Cervus elaphus)," but as the base here is probably an original n-stem *h₁el-en- with evidence in a number of other Indo-European languages (see elk), the internal vowel-nasal sequence in columba and golǫbĭ is not really accounted for. The Slavic words have been compared with Lithuanian gelumbė̃̃ "rather thick machine-made woolen fabric" (originally dove-colored, i.e., blue or blue-gray?) and less likely with gul̃bė "swan," though these hardly illuminate. (Old Prussian golimban "blue" may be a loan from Slavic.) Lockwood (op. cit.) rejects the relevance of Greek kólymbos on the grounds that names for the grebe in languages generally are based on their diving habits, not on color words. The resemblance of kólymbos to the Latin and Slavic words is nevertheless inescapable, and the presence of -b- rather -ph- in the putative suffix would rule out any connection with Indo-European *-b^ho-. R. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009), based on the variants kolýmbaina/kolýbdaina as the name for a kind of crab, believes the word is of pre-Greek substratal origin. If, pace Lockwood, kólybos is of any relevance to columba and golǫbĭ, a European substratum might be behind all three.