Tapera
TAP-er-uh
Genus
The abandoned-settlement [bird]
Literally: tapera (Tupi: an abandoned or ruined settlement/village)
| Part | Meaning | Language | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tapera | An abandoned or ruined settlement; a deserted village or farmstead | Tupi (Brazilian indigenous) (tapera) | Adopted into Brazilian Portuguese with the same meaning; used as a single uninflected word forming the genus name, treated as feminine Latin noun |
Tapera is a monotypic genus of cuckoo (family Cuculidae), established by Lesson in 1830. The name is taken wholesale from the Tupi-Guaraní word 'tapera,' meaning an old or abandoned settlement, widely used in Brazilian Portuguese. It is treated as a feminine Latin noun in apposition (a noun standing on its own rather than an adjective). The word has no classical Greek or Latin root structure; none of the apparent segments (tape-, -pera, -era, etc.) reflect the intended etymology, and the dictionary does not contain an entry for this Tupi term.
Pronunciation
- TAP-er-uh Three syllables (Ta-pe-ra). Penult vowel 'e' is short and followed by only one consonant (r), so stress falls on the ANTEPENULT 'Ta'. The antepenult vowel 'a' is short (followed by single consonant then one, not two, vowels). Result: TAP-er-uh.
Commonly: tuh-PEER-uh (sometimes heard in English birding contexts, by false analogy with 'tapir', but not supported by the pronunciation rules)
Other readings
A superficial Greek reading of tape- (Greek: a carpet) + -pera (Greek: a pouch) is phonetically possible but almost certainly not the author's intent; Lesson was naming the bird after its ecological association with overgrown, abandoned Brazilian farmland (taperas), which is where the Striped Cuckoo nests.
'Tapera' is not in the roots dictionary; its etymology is from Tupi-Guaraní, an indigenous South American language family, not from Greek or Latin. The word 'tapera' (also spelled 'taipera' in older sources) passed into Brazilian Portuguese meaning a ruined or abandoned farmstead or village, reflecting the Striped Cuckoo's (Tapera naevia) habit of inhabiting such overgrown, neglected clearings. Lesson, R.P. (1830) coined the genus in Traité d'Ornithologie. The name should not be confused with 'tapir' (Spanish/Portuguese, from Tupi 'tapyra'), a completely different borrowing from the same language family. No OCR corrections were needed; no roots were misread.