From: Rick McCallister
Message: 49198
Date: 2007-06-30
>____________________________________________________________________________________
> > It is an interesting question why cats weren't
> common enough in
> > the ancient Indo-European world to have a general
> I.E. name.
>
> It seems to be older that the IE invasions.
>
> Trask: The History of Basque, p. 265
> "
> Sex-marking is not common in Basque, except by
> lexical means, as in
> gizon 'man' and emakume 'woman', behi 'cow' and
> zezen 'bull'. The
> adjectives eme 'female' (a loan from Gascon) and or
> 'male' are
> sometimes attached to animal names when the
> distinction is thought
> necessary: katar 'tomcat', kateme 'female cat' {katu
> 'cat'), oilo
> 'hen', oilar 'cock, rooster'.
> "
>
> Besides katu Basque also has kathu and gatu; Trask
> assumes (as always)
> a loan from Latin. For some reason Italian (gatto)
> and several Romance
> dialects seems to have sporadically the same
> lenition which is typical
> of Basque (but which katar/katu seeme to have
> escaped).
> German Kater, Du. kater "tomcat"
> German Katze, Du. kat "cat"
> That suffix -er "male" is very rare in German and
> Dutch.
> Perhaps = -er in Engl. gander?
>
> Schrijver: Lost Languages in Northern Europe, in
> Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European
> "
> In view of this relatively wide range of possible
> scenarios, one could
> maintain that there is as yet no compelling evidence
> for direct
> contact between Uralic and the language of
> geminates. Yet some such
> evidence can be produced.
> Proto-Finno-Ugric *urå 'man, male' (Sammallahti
> 1988: 542; UEW, p.
> 545) is represented by Hungarian úr 'lord, sir',
> Finnish uros genitive
> singular ur(h)oon 'hero', uros genitive singular
> uroksen 'male (of
> animals)', urho 'hero, fighter', Proto-Lappish
> *ore:s 'male'
> (Lehtiranta 1989, no. 811). The Hungarian form has
> received various
> alternative explanations, which render the
> Finno-Ugric etymology
> somewhat less secure. Semantically, the application
> of Finnish uros to
> male animals is matched by various Lappish forms,
> such as Southern
> Lappish orra (Meraker) 'male reindeer', hurrä 'one
> year old male
> reindeer', and Western Lappish hurrie 'grouse'
> (Lagercrantz 1939:
> 1511-1513, 4516, 8356; orthography simplified; note,
> however, that the
> latter has been explained as a loan from the
> Scandinavian word for
> 'grouse', on which see below).
> This application of *urå to fauna offers a possible
> clue to the
> understanding of an element *u:r-, *urr- in Germanic
> words for
> 'aurochs' and 'capercaillie, black grouse', in other
> words, two of the
> biggest and most majestic animals of Northern
> Europe: Old High German
> u:ro 'aurochs' < *u:ro:n, Old High German u:r-ochso,
> Old English u:r,
> Old Icelandic urr 'id.' < *u:raz, Old High German
> u:r-hano 'male
> capercaillie'; Old High German orre-huon 'female
> capercaillie', Old
> Icelandic orri 'black grouse', Modern Norwegian,
> Modern Swedish orre
> 'id.' < *urr-.
> Proto-Germanic *urr- is usually explained on the
> basis of
> Proto-Indo-European *wr.s- or *h1r.s- 'male', but
> the former would
> have yielded **wurr-(cf. *wlkwos 'wolf > Gothic
> wulfs), while *h1r.s-
> would account for *urr- but not for *u:r-. It seems
> more likely that
> *u:r- and *urr-, showing as they do an alternation
> of single and
> double r and a concomitant alternation of long and
> short *u, were
> borrowed by Germanic from the language of geminates.
> The language of
> geminates would then have borrowed the item from
> Finno-Ugric if
> Hungarian ur is cognate; if not, Lappish and Finnish
> may have borrowed
> the word from the language of geminates. It is
> possible to bypass the
> language of geminates, however, by assuming that
> Germanic borrowed the
> etymon directly from Proto-Lappish, including the
> consonant gradation
> r - rr. Either way, it is more likely that
> Finno-Ugric was the donor
> language than that Germanic was.
> "
>
> The first idea that comes to mind is that *or "male"
> would belong to
> Vennemann's putative Vasconic substratum in all(?)
> of Europe, and that
> it was added to the "cat" word to form kater etc.
> Anyone have a better idea?
>
>
> Torsten
>
>
>
>