Tre schede ornitonimiche salentine: documentare passaggi semantici e irregolarità fonetiche per rinsaldare il legame tra lingua e cultura

This paper offers a series of reflections about dialect words used to call the most common diurnal birds of prey of the Sallentine Peninsula (south-east Italy). Three synthetic linguistic cards are proposed, aiming at developing a larger framework around traditional zoonyms within the linguistic domain covered by the surveys of the ALI. These cards are intended to explore the main bibliographical sources available (mainly for southern Italo-Romance) and to reconnect a set of semantic threads which are probably intertwined in the motivation of the basic common lexical forms. By connecting dialect data offered by widely available dictionaries, such as the DDS or the VDS, to ornithological classifications provided by the specialised literature and to data coming from direct fieldwork, the paper suggests a tighter collaboration between linguists, zoologists, anthropologists and school teachers in order to encourage a recovery of the traditional knowledge. This has been too often sacrificed for the sake of the diffusion of a national encyclopaedia which in most cases failed to be adopted as a valid substitute. On the contrary, these attempts contributed to the obsolescence of the cultural heritage that for millennia connected people from different regions of southern Europe and of the Mediterranean.