Re: [cybalist] Re: Hamp and his dog

----- Original Message -----
From: "." <h5@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2000 9:06 AM
Subject: SV: [cybalist] Re: Hamp and his dog


A good point. Besides, the dog is called canis in Latin, šuô
in Lithuanian, sobaka in Russian, perro in Spanish, pies in
Polish, hund in German, skilos in Modern Greek, kutya in
Hungarian, koira in Finnish, etc. If one claims that all or
most of these names fit the character of the animal, it must
be a multifaceted character indeed.

Piotr


Hakan wrote:

Michel Defayes writes: "All animals are named after one of
their characters, or sometimes their function. The main
characteristic of a
dog is that it is noisy and most names, dialectal or other,
refer to this
character. "

Is this really the one and only main characteristic of dogs?
I can think of several other "main characteristics" - they
always follow their master, they've got four legs, they wag
their tails, they can be used to find people or animals
because their sense of smell is better than ours, they keep
flocks of cattle together, they don't like postmen...

Actually, a good, well trained dog is not noisy.

To explain how an animal got its name just by picking one
more or less characteristic trait and then try to make the
names of that animal in several languages fit into this
theory seems to be a weird way of doing etymology.

Hakan