Kitty Cats

Vixagoras

Banned
So, I am having serious trouble finding Indo-European words for "cat" older than Late Latin cattus, which, from everything I have read, seems to have supplanted older words by 700 CE almost completely. However, since my timeline is taking place before the debut of the word cattus, and we know at least from Irish sources that words for "cat" were used to construct names in Europe's tribal past, this presents something of a problem for making names in my timeline.


For Celtic, I went ahead and took the liberty of reconstructing *loux (Southern Brittonic *lōx, Northern Brittonic *lūx, Irish *laux), which would by cognates with Greek lýnx, stemming from PIE *lewk (in the case of my Celtic construction, it would be from an o-grade form of the word), which would probably be some kind of a reference to the animal's eyes glowing at night, but I am increasingly of the opinion that this is probably an improper construction. Of course, there is that, and the fact that surviving words for "cat" that are not derived from cattus are extremely rare, and the only ones I know, I can't find any source to trace back to the original PIE. For example, I know that Greek ailóuros means "nimble tail", but the Latin words fēlēs, mūriceps, mūrilegus, and pilax I don't have etymologies for. I have read that fēlēs may be related to Celtic belenos, which survives in Welsh as a word for "marten", and probably meant the same thing in Gaulish, where it is attested. If we are to accept that fēlēs is indeed a cognate with belenos, then this is most likely derived from from PIE *bhel, which means "light, shine" (PIE /bh/ merging with regular /b/ in Celtic, but becoming /f/ in Italic), which is almost certainly a reference to both animals having glowing eyes at night, and that words for "glowing" and "shining" in Celtic and Italic seem to otherwise be derived from PIE *lewk, I am inclined to believe that *loux has to be wrong.. as bad ass as it comes out in the names. This would mean that there seems to be either some affiliation of the two animals in the minds of speakers of these divergent Indo-European languages, which would make sense, since they look fairly similar, or with their glowing eyes. However, because a myriad of animals have eyes that glow at night (deer, lions, and foxes come to mind), I am inclined to believe that the words for "marten" and "cat" were probably synonymous in Italo-Celtic Europe for awhile. But what about the other Latin words? The two words beginning in mūri are quite obviously derived from the word for "mouse", and mean "mouse catcher" and "mouse gatherer", respectively, but pilax still eludes me. Is it derived from pilus, thus being a reference to it being furry? I don't know.


Other words I have been able to find include Romanian pisicǎ, which seems to just be derived from a call used for cats (pis, pis), as well as Romanian motan, which seems to be related to Proto-Slavic *maca, which leads me to a dead end on Wiktionary, but appears to have a possible cognate in French matou. Is *maca derived from a way of calling cats, like pisicǎ? I have no idea. It could very well be, (maybe calling cats using mac, mac, mac as long as the /c/ was pronounced as /ts/ was a thing once upon a time, I could definitely see it). Worse still, all of these seem to be words that refer to domestic cats or derived from words that refer to domestic cats. Even the Pashto word for "cat", though generically referring to felines, is pišo, and is probably derived from the same call - pis, pis. Alternatively, we can see a number of look-alike words all over Indo-Aryan languages, going all the way over to Sinhalese pūsā, which itself might be a cognate to English puss, which English shares with other Germanic languages. Is puss derived from a call for cats, or is it an original Germanic word that has cognates in Indo-Iranian? Probably not, since Grimm's Law would have changed the /p/ to /f/ in Germanic, which brings us back to square one, wondering what the fuck people would have called wild cats as opposed to domestic cats, since domestic cats probably did not reach Western Europe in particular until the Common Era, and you don't call wild cats using cutesy calls like pis, pis/puss, puss, because you don't call them at all - they're wild. Worse still, Sanskrit has a couple of different words whose descendants, like Hindi billī/billā, that superficially resemble Celtic belenos. Of course, Wiktionary gives me Sanskrit viḍālī, which makes sense as the ancestor the Hindi words, since PIE /bh/ has been retained in Indo-Aryan, and so the Hindi words would violate that rule if they were derived from PIE *bhel, like belenos and fēlēs almost certainly are. Is the Sanskrit word somehow related to to PIE *weyd, meaning "to know"? I mean, that would kind of be a stretch, if you ask me, but in Hinduism, the goddess Shashthi is associated with expectant mothers, and in her story, a cat goes about stealing children it knows are going to be born to avenge injustices committed against it by the mother of the children in question. Maybe cats were perceived as being clairvoyant? Probably not, and that whole bit is seriously reaching. There is another word in Sanskrit given by Wiktionary, mārjāra, which doesn't seem to have a known etymology, and frankly doesn't even look Indo-European to me, and Middle Persian turns up gurbag, which... yeah. I don't even know.


Am I missing something, here? Do you guys have any ideas? Or would it just be wise to use words derived from PIE *bhel for all Germano-Celtic names?
 
Um, can't remember the source, but the ancient 'Adriatic Coast' Greeks may have called their small ports' and little ships' 'working cats' by 'psipsina'...

Think 'Barn Cats' on modern farms-- The kitties are *so* cute but you cannot handle them beyond three or four months' age...
 

Vixagoras

Banned
There probably isn't going to be a PIE root for cat, because they were domesticated in the Near East.


But wild cats live all over Europe. People would have had to have called them something.


An interesting thing about my research today has been learning about what different peoples at different times saw when they looked at different things. I mentioned earlier the probably synonymous nature of the word belenos in Celtic languages, stemming from PIE *bhel, which has obvious cognates in Greek and Germanic, both of which wound up using the same word for "lynx", as most Germanic words for "lynx" actually derive from Proto-Germanic *luhsaz, again, referencing the glowing eyes of the animal at night. Though in most languages, the words for "cat" and "lynx", animals that we recognize today to be different kinds of cats, are very different, meaning that people may not have always seen these animals as being similar to one another as we do today. Balto-Slavic languages all seem to use a similar construction as well, though they also seem to use a similar word to refer to martens - Latvian: cauna, Lithuanian: kiaune, Russian: kuníca and Czech: kuna. All of these are apparently derived from a PIE root *keu, also meaning "shine". Interestingly enough though, the Albanian word for "lynx" is rrëqebull, which comes from luqerbull, means "werewolf", but is derived from Vulgar Latin lupus cervulus, essentially meaning "deer wolf", which would have had to have been a Latin term somewhere in Illyria at some point in time.


But what were speakers of Germanic languages saying for "cat" around this time? Were they synonymous with martens, or were they synonymous with lynxes, or did they have their own word? Words for "marten" in Germanic seem to universally derive from *marþuz, which originally meant "bride", but from what I can gather, all of these words are only attested from Late Antiquity. There was definitely a word for them before people decided to start calling them "brides", but was this word synonymous with the word for "cat" in the sense of a wild cat, as seems to have been the trend in Europe at the time? Would such a word be derived from the PIE root *keu? Maybe, and if we apply Proto-Germanic sound changes to that same word, we get a hypothetical *heunaz. But that is assuming that Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Germanic used the same word, and furthermore, that the two branches considered cats and martens to be more or less the same thing and closer to each other than they were to lynxes, as seems to be the case with Italic and Celtic languages, at least by nature of Latin fēlēs being a cognate to Celtic belenos, and applying those two rules to two other branches seems to be kind of a reach... at least to me, though I might not be left with another option.
 
Romanian pisica might mean fish-lover. Cats are fond of fish.
Lynx is the only Indo-/European word for a cat. Although their homeland is said to be near the Caucasus, they have no word for leopard or tiger, which lived in the Caucasus until the 1900's
 

Vixagoras

Banned
Romanian pisica might mean fish-lover. Cats are fond of fish.
Lynx is the only Indo-/European word for a cat. Although their homeland is said to be near the Caucasus, they have no word for leopard or tiger, which lived in the Caucasus until the 1900's


The Romanian and Aromanian words for "fish" that I know of are peşte/pescu/peashti, which do not seem to be related to pisicǎ, although I suppose it's possible. The word "lynx" does not have any known cognates outside of Hellenic/Balto-Slavic/Germanic however. In Latin, it is either referred to as a "deer-wolf" (lupus cervulus/cervārius), or by the Greek word, or, once by Pliny as a chama, which definitely is some kind of a non-Indo-European loan, as it doesn't seem to be related to anything in Greek, and doesn't follow any of the rules of the Italic branch of Indo-European. It's probably an Etruscan word that fell out of use. But if you read what I was saying above, though we perceive lynxes and cats to be kinds of the same animal today, that does not appear to have always been the case, as they are referred to separately in almost every Indo-European language, even the ones where we have an older word for "cat", like Greek and Latin.


EDIT: I guess I could also use the PIE *bhōr, which has its descendants in Greek phṓr and Latin fūr, the latter being attested as a word for "cat" as well. That would come out in Germanic as *bōr, which I guess could make some good names, particularly if /ō/ changes to /au/ later in the timeline, yielding baur. Although, it is also possible that in the minds of Germanic-speakers of the time, lynxes and cats were the same thing, like martens and cats may have been to Italic and Celtic speakers.
 
Last edited:
The ancient Egyptian word was mau, which looks imitative of what the cat has to say for itself; the late Egyptian word was something like caute (the Wikipedia article on cats in Egypt shows an accent on the c).
 
Although, it is also possible that in the minds of Germanic-speakers of the time, lynxes and cats were the same thing, like martens and cats may have been to Italic and Celtic speakers.
That seems reasonable.

Have you considered there might also be some sort of taboo on saying the word considering cats are mostly silent night creatures?
Hmm, perhaps a derivative of PG *gaistaz (ghost) could be useful?
 
RE: mūriceps, mūrilegus
If I recall correctly (high school Latin) both terms derive from the mice-killing (mice: mus, muris) tendencies of cats. :)
 
Top