• Uruanna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    3 hours ago

    The English words bear and horse come from old Norse / Indo-European words meaning brown and fast. Languages do that all the time. We even do that for people, like Inuit and Ainu which mean human in their respective languages. Like “what are you?” “Human” “Ainu, got it”

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 hours ago

      There is a theory that says that the word bear /björn/bär is a euphemism for the real word for the animal, the prototype indo-European word *Rktos. That word was a taboo to use since our ancestors were afraid that saying that name would make a bear appear. The Slavic languages use the euphemism honey eater. Medvěd, niedźwiedź

      In Greek the word for bear is still derived from the Porto indo-European word, αρκούδα arkouda . Is also where the word Arctics comes from. Since Ursa Major (the big Bear constellation) is up north.

      • Uruanna@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        For bears, that works (especially since we know about other words like arctus etc.), but it’s odd that this was also done for other words like horse, linked to PIE “to run”. So yes for the euphemism theory and we consider that calling a cat species " Mau" because of their sound as a euphemism, or horses as a whole “run” because they’re hella fast, but I don’t know if we need to push that further with the taboo theory.

  • Cadenza@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    6 hours ago

    Wiki tells the specific breed information is incorrect (AE had different cats, the breed shown, the ma’u, was engineered in the 1950s), but the onomatopoeia part isn’t necessarily false for AE.

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    761·
    16 hours ago

    Also: ginger cats were first bred in Egypt for sacrifice because they were gold like the sun.

    When the Vikings got there they were so excited that the cats matched their hair they kept them on their ships.

    To this day everywhere there was a significant Viking population there is a large population of ginger cats.

    Still one brain cell, though

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.spaceEnglish
    401·
    16 hours ago

    The Japanese word for cat, “neko”, apparently etymologically translates as “quadruped that goes ‘nyan’” (which is the Japanese equivalent of “meow”). The Mandarin word for cat, IIRC, is “mao”.

  • Krik@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    16 hours ago

    Old English catt (c. 700) “domestic cat,” from West Germanic (c. 400-450), from Proto-Germanic *kattuz (source also of Old Frisian katte, Old Norse köttr, Dutch kat, Old High German kazza, German Katze), from Late Latin cattus.

    The near-universal European word now, it appeared in Europe as Latin catta (Martial, c. 75 C.E.), Byzantine Greek katta (c. 350) and was in general use on the continent by c. 700, replacing Latin feles. It is probably ultimately Afro-Asiatic (compare Nubian kadis, Berber kadiska, both meaning “cat”). Arabic qitt “tomcat” may be from the same source. Cats were domestic in Egypt from c. 2000 B.C.E. but not a familiar household animal to classical Greeks and Romans.

    The Late Latin word also is the source of Old Irish and Gaelic cat, Welsh kath, Breton kaz, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, French chat (12c.). Independent, but ultimately from the same source are words in the Slavic group: Old Church Slavonic kotuka, kotel’a, Bulgarian kotka, Russian koška, Polish kot, along with Lithuanian katė and (non-Indo-European) Finnish katti, which is via Lithuanian.

    Source

    So… our word for cat is derived from a 2000 year old latin word that itself probably derived from an earlier word from somewhere in Northern Africa and/or the Levant. I guess the people then didn’t pick the name by the sound it makes.