búfalos
búfalos
Medieval Greek
“A Greek word for a kind of ox, borrowed by Latin, passed through Italian, and was carried to three continents by European explorers who applied it freely to every large bovine they encountered — creating a word that now names several different animals in different places.”
Buffalo enters English from Italian bufalo, which came from Late Latin bufalus, a variant of Latin bubalus, which was itself borrowed from Greek βούβαλος (boúbalos). The Greek word originally referred to the African buffalo or a similar large ox encountered in North Africa — boúbalos appears in ancient sources describing the fauna of Libya and Egypt, possibly applied to what we now call the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) or to a large antelope, the hartebeest. The Greek root is related to βοῦς (boûs, 'ox, cattle'), the same ancient root that appears in 'bovine,' 'butter' (from boutyron, 'ox-cheese'), and 'bucolic' (from boukolos, 'cowherd'). The ox-family connection was there from the beginning; the specific animal it named shifted with every new encounter.
Roman writers used bubalus loosely for large bovines of Africa and Asia, and the word was carried into Medieval Latin and then Italian as a term for water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), which had been introduced into Italy and southern Europe from South Asia and Southeast Asia during the early medieval period. Italian bufalo became the standard term for the domesticated water buffalo used in the Po Valley and southern Italy for agriculture and milk (Italian mozzarella di bufala is made from water buffalo milk). The word thus acquired a stable referent in European daily life: bufalo was the draft animal of the Italian south, enormous, dark, and semi-aquatic in its preferences, used for plowing wetlands where horses could not work.
When Portuguese and Spanish explorers reached the Americas and Africa, they brought the word with them and applied it to whatever large bovines they encountered. In North America, Spanish explorers used búfalo for the American bison (Bison bison), which is not a buffalo at all — it belongs to a different genus and is more closely related to European wisent than to any true buffalo. The application was understandable: bison are enormous, shaggy, and bovine, and the explorers lacked any other adequate term. The name stuck, and 'buffalo' became the standard American English word for bison, despite being scientifically inaccurate. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, 'Buffalo' New York, the Buffalo Bills — all named for an animal that is technically a bison.
In Africa, the word was applied to the Cape buffalo or African buffalo (Syncerus caffer), which is a true buffalo and may have been the original Greek boúbalos. In South and Southeast Asia, water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) carry the name in its most historically continuous form — the animal that traveled from Asian domestication into medieval Italy and back. The word buffalo thus names three distinct bovines on three continents: bison in North America, African buffalo in sub-Saharan Africa, and water buffalo in Asia and parts of Europe. No single animal fully owns the name, which has been stretched by five centuries of colonial encounter and loose application across a global distribution of large, bovine-looking mammals. The Greek ox-word, which began with one animal in North Africa, now belongs to all of them.
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Today
The American bison's near-extinction is one of the most documented ecological catastrophes in history. An estimated thirty to sixty million bison ranged the Great Plains before European settlement. By 1889, fewer than a thousand remained, reduced by industrial hunting — for hides, for tongues considered a delicacy, and deliberately as a strategy to starve the Plains nations whose cultures depended on the animal. The word 'buffalo' absorbed this history along with the animal: 'Buffalo Commons,' 'buffalo soldiers,' 'go where the buffalo roam' — these phrases carry the weight of a continent's transformation within a single misapplied word.
The Cape buffalo is known among hunters as one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, responsible for more human deaths than any other large herbivore on the continent. It is notoriously unpredictable — a wounded or cornered Cape buffalo will charge with a commitment and intelligence that makes it more dangerous than a lion or a hippo to an inexperienced hunter. The animal the Greeks may have originally named boúbalos, before the word migrated to Italy and then to the Americas, is still alive in sub-Saharan Africa and still living up to whatever it was about its presence that struck ancient observers as worth naming for the ox, the foundational animal of settled civilization. The Greek ox-word began with this animal. After five continents and two and a half millennia of semantic drift, it has come home.
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