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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?
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