Re: badgers

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski gpiotr@ wrote:
>
> I think Joshua Katz's badger article (1998, "Hittite tas^ku- and the
> Indo-European Word for 'Badger'", _Historische Sprachforschung_ 111,
> 61–82, based on his UCLA conference paper) is still the
> last word on the subject. At any rate, Katz's analysis militates against the
> traditionally postulated connection between PGmc. *þaxsu- etc.
> and *tetk^- 'build'. Not the builder of setts, but rather the owner of
> smelly glands.
>
> > These two hypothesis are quoted by Delamarre in his "Dictionnaire
> > étymologique de la langue gauloise". Of course, the traditional one
> > is a mere "lookalike" and thus rejectable. I think Katz's proposal is
> > very interesting, although it actually points to a different animal, the
> > skunk <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk> or polecat. But as in the
> > case of other carnivores such as 'weasel', 'marten', etc., this kind of
> > semantic shifts are rather common.
>

Weasels, martens, otters and badgers are all mustelids (Mustelidae family).

> Long range or short range, weasels are not bears and before Linnaeus it
> would not have occured to anyone to group them together. One could call
> it a Hamletic etymology:
>

But as bears aren't mustelids, the IE word for 'bear' must have undergone a semantic shift as a consequence of the adaptation of PIE speakers to a Boreal environment, which is the habitat of the Eurasian Brown Bear (Ursus arctos arctos). That is, when people migrate to a new environment and find an animal species previously unknown, they tend to name it after some familar species which has something in common. In recent times, this has happened when e.g. America was colonized by West Europeans.