BlankRick. I don't think it's reasonable to state with certainty "The
animal was named after the vegetable". I can concede the possibility that
animals were named after vegetables, but then all things are possible. Not
all are plausible, though, and it seems more likely (to me, this is) that
the name for a fox and the name for a radish are not cognates but homonyms.
As to the derivation of any animal's name from an IE name: I make no claim
one way or another. I think it was Piotr who once wrote that IE as a single
posited language without dialects can have had only a momentary existence,
and I agree with that line. There is too much danger of over-shooting and
under-shooting for anyone to be sure of any IE word.
I will say no more than that the words at issue are compatible - perfectly
compatible - with variants of English "wolf' - and the Latin word for "fox",
too. My general line of enquiry with words is: what cognates are
recognisable in the dialects of England, and how might they have become
differentiated through the interaction of speakers of the dialects?
"Lupus" and "vulpus" are clearly dialectal variants, so the origin might not
have been all that far back from their currency.
Gordon
>The animal was named after the vegetable --both the vegetable and the
animal were (supposedly) named because of their prominent tail
(metaphorically in the case of radishes and other members of that family).
Perhaps raposa is a taboo form. I can vaguely see your derivation from the
IE root of wolf, but could you elaborate a bit more on how you derived it?
Rick McCallister
>>But ruvas, raev, etc are perfectly compatible with dialectal variants of
English wo(l)f, pronounced woof. With respect, the idea of calling an animal
after a vegetable because of its tail is not plausible. So I suggest any
relationship with radishes is unlikely.
Gordon Barlow