Butastur
byoo-TAS-ter
Genus
The buzzard-hawks — a group of Old World raptors with morphological traits intermediate between buzzards and goshawks
Literally: Buteo-hawk; a hawk that is both a buzzard and a goshawk
| Part | Meaning | Language | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| But- | a kind of hawk; a buzzard | Latin (=buteo, -onis) | Truncated stem of Buteo (bute- → but-) before following vowel; evokes the buzzard genus Buteo |
| -astur | a hawk (specifically a goshawk or accipiter-type hawk) | Latin (=astur) | Used standalone as the classical genus Astur (goshawks); directly appended without connecting vowel |
Butastur is a portmanteau genus name formed by telescoping the truncated stem of Buteo (the buzzard genus) directly onto astur (the goshawk genus), dropping the final vowel of Bute- before the initial vowel of astur. Bonaparte coined it in 1844 to signal that these hawks are morphologically and behaviorally intermediate between buzzards (Buteo) and goshawks (Astur). The name is treated as a Latin feminine noun, following the convention for bird genus names ending in -ur derived from Latin bird names.
Pronunciation
- byoo-TAS-ter Penult stress: the penult vowel 'a' is followed by two consonants (st), making the penult positionally heavy — stress falls on the penult.
Other readings
A minority reading could parse But- as an independent Latin root unrelated to Buteo, but the deliberate allusion to the genus Buteo + Astur is universally accepted by ornithological authorities.
But- is the truncated stem of the Latin word buteo (a kind of hawk, i.e. buzzard); the full form =buteo, -onis is in the dictionary. =astur is confirmed in the dictionary as Latin for 'a hawk'. No connecting vowel is used; the final -e- of Bute- is elided before the initial vowel of astur, a standard 19th-century portmanteau technique for bird genus names.