In my opera days, I had plenty of opportunity to become familiar with Italian, German, and French vocabularies — albeit in a peculiar context that taught me a lot about poetic forms and not so much about ordinary contemporary idiom. Having studied Spanish a bit in high school, I was familiar with Romance grammar, which helped a great deal with Italian and French. German was always the worst for me, and to this day I still struggle to translate it.

I enjoy words for their beauty, whether it's beauty of sound, meaning, or some curious story. It is a special pleasure to find a word which is diverse across several languages but lovely in all of them. My favorite is butterfly, which is papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish, and farfalla in Italian, all of which seem lovelier words to me than our clumsy "butterfly". It wasn't until I looked it up just this evening that I knew that in German it is Schmetterling.

(Those who know me will see irony here, in that I loathe the actual creatures. I think caterpillars are vile, and I don't think adding wings redeems them any more than it redeems cockroaches.)

Papillon is clearly related to the Latin papilio. Our pavilion derives from the same root, because of some resemblance to the butterfly's wings, I suppose.

My Italian dictionary tells me that the origin of farfalla is unknown. In case you're wondering, in the Italian text of the opera Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio San's lover does indeed call her "Butterfly", borrowing the English word. He then comments on the appropriateness of the name, given how she does resemble a farfalla. (Her response — in a stunning bit of poetry that is simultaneously gruesome, sexual, and symbolic of her fate to come — is to observe, "Dicon ch'oltre mare se cade in man dell'uom, ogni farfalla da uno spillo è trafitta ed in tavola infitta." Loosely translated, "They say that in America, when a man catches a butterfly, he sticks her with a pin and tacks her to a board.")

Mariposa seems to derive from a form of the personal name Mary. (The idea that it is a short imperative sentence asking Mary to alight — "Mari, posa!" — is surely a folk etymology.) Assigning personal names to bugs or other animals is even commoner in Spanish than in English. The ladybug (aka ladybird beetle) in Spanish is mariquita.

On first glance it would appear that Schmetterling has something to do with schmettern, a verb meaning something along the lines of making a loud noise. (I told you my German isn't good. "Blare"?) But in fact, it comes from smetana, a sort of sour cream common in northeastern Europe, the Slavic name being imported to German as Schmetten or Schmand. The German and English names thus carry the same story, that butterflies like to hover around dairy products.

I have often read that in ancient Greek, psyche meant either soul or butterfly. The mythological character Psyche comes from very late mythology, and as such is simply a personification of the soul, not a goddess per se. From this name we have numerous scientific terms which have evolved in such a way that in modern English usage the Greek root suggests mind more than soul. What any of this has to do with butterflies, I don't know; in modern Greek the word for butterfly is petaloúda.

Another word I always liked in three languages is perhaps. In English, it was and is one of my favorite words; I have a very early memory of my mother telling me that peut-être is her favorite word in French; and although I'm not generally a lover of the German language, I have great affection for vieleicht — possibly because the word is sung so memorably by Tamino shortly after he first plays the titular magic flute in Mozart's opera of that name. Like most Mozart tenors, Tamino doesn't have much in the way of high notes. The extended high A on the third "vieleicht" in that scene is possibly the closest thing to a real money note in the entire Mozartean tenor repertoire. In his English singing version, Andrew Porter renders it as "perhaps", which isn't nearly as glorious.

What's especially fun about these words is seeing how many different phrases are idiomatically hijacked and squashed into a single word to suggest something that may or may not be. In English we have two of them. The more literal is maybe, which exactly translates the French peut-être. The alternative, perhaps means "by chance", hap being an old-fashioned English word meaning luck. (And thus one who is hapless has no luck at all.) The old-fashioned perchance is a variation on the theme, as is peradventure, which appears 32 times in the King James version of the Bible, exactly half of them in the book of Genesis.

"By chance" is also the phrase that generates the drab-sounding Italian equivalent, forse. It comes from Latin fors sit, which translates to something like "chance be". German uses an entirely difference phrase. If you break vieleicht into two parts, retaining an "l" on either side of the break, you get viel leicht, which Babelfish renders as "much easily".

This morning as I was driving to work, when thoughts of these words began meandering through my head for no apparent reason, I could not for the life of me think of how to say "maybe" in Spanish. Babelfish now tells me that the Spanish word I seek is quizá, which I'm sure I've never seen before. It doesn't break down to any phrase I recognize in Spanish, but it sounds exactly like Italian chissà. The latter comes from chi sa — literally, "who knows" — and is used in Italian very much like we'd use "who knows?" idiomatically, in the sense of "what the heck, anything is possible". That's not quite the same meaning as "maybe", but it's close enough that one can easily imagine the Spanish abducting the word from Italian and pressing it into use for that purpose.

Another way to say "maybe" in Spanish is with the phrase "tal vez". Vez is an extremely common word in Spanish, with no good English equivalent. We generally translate it as "time", as it is used in numerous idioms where the English equivalent would say "time", eg, "one at a time", "at the same time", "sometimes", but without any connotation of that dimension that the clock measures, which is tiempo. Tal vez, then, means "such time". Exactly how that becomes "perhaps" I'm not sure, but somehow it does. Evidently the phrase has even more traction in Portuguese. When I ask Babelfish to translate "perhaps" to Portuguese I get talvez as a single word.

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