LatinLanguage.us

A speculation from UK Independent columnist Michael McCarthy as to Lesbia’s famous sparrow. A professor of ornithology offers an alternate theory:

Now Professor Birkhead (he’s at Sheffield University), in a splendid old-fashioned academic footnote, ventures the possibility that the bird may not have been a sparrow at all, but a bullfinch, pictured above. He bases his theory on the fact that hand-reared bullfinches show more devotion to their human owners than any other bird, and also on the word Catullus uses to describe its voice – “pipiabat". Classicists will recognise at once that this is the third-person singular of the imperfect tense of the verb “pipiare", which may mean “to cheep” – in which case the bird probably was a sparrow after all – but may also mean “to pipe", in which case it was possibly a bullfinch, as only a bullfinch “pipes".

As I understand it, a bird that “pipes” produces a lower whistling sound rather than a sharp higher-pitched chirp. The verb pipio and its cousins pipo and pipito are clearly onomatopoeias, but a quick check of the OLD shows they are used to describe the sound made by a gallina, the mewling of infants, and the squeak of mice, so the English term “cheep” may not be exactly equivalent.

Obviously there’s not enough evidence to make a definitive claim, but it is an interesting idea…