elegy: [16] Greek élegos originally signified simply ‘song’ (Aristophanes, for example, used it for the song of a nightingale in his play Birds). It is not clear where it came from, although it has been speculated that the Greeks may have borrowed it from the Phrygians, an Indo- European people of western and central Asia Minor, and that originally it denoted ‘flute song’ (the long-held derivation from Greek e e légein ‘cry woe! woe!’ is not tenable). Later on it came to mean specifically ‘song of mourning’, and its adjective derivative elegeíā passed as a noun via Latin and French into English. [elegy etymology, elegy origin, 英语词源]