I recently ran across the Dutch term kater ‘hangover’ and was curious enough to look it up; Wiktionary told a story interesting enough to pass on:
From German Kater (“tomcat; hangover”), a humorous alteration of Katarrh (“catarrh, mucosal inflammation”, loosely also “malaise”) based on somewhat older German Katzenjammer (“hangover”, literally “caterwaul”). An influence by a brand of beer called Kater is also often cited, though this is doubtful.
Doubtful indeed, but I like the “humorous alteration of Katarrh” origin. Hangover terms must include a wide range of odd etymologies.
Interesting! In Slovenian it’s “maček” which is literally a translation of the German one, though with the more broad meaning of “cat”. Here’s what their etymological dictionary says ( https://fran.si/193/marko-snoj-slovenski-etimoloski-slovar/4288522/macek?View=1&Query=ma%c4%8dek ),
>”Dobesedni prevod nem. Kater, kar pomeni ‛žival maček’ in ‛slabo počutje po prepiti noči’. To sta izvorno dve različni besedi. Nem. Kater v pomenu ‛slabo počutje po prepiti noči’ je nastalo v 19. stol. med leipziškimi študenti iz narečne različice besede, ki ustreza knjiž. nem. Katarrh ‛hud prehlad’ (Kl, 361). Beseda, ki je le enakozvočnica nem. Kater ‛žival maček’ (to je sorodno z angl. cat, rus. kót ‛žival maček’) in ki je z njo povezana le ljudskoetimološko, je bila v sloven. prevedena, kot da bi bilo nem. Kater ena beseda z dvema pomenoma.”
It clarifies the German “Kater” as having “originated in the 19th century among Leipzig students, derived from a dialect version of the word corresponding to the standard German Katarrh meaning “severe cold”.
Seems somewhat oddly specific with the mention of Leipzig students…
It does indeed! Thanks for that.
Not much else is mentioned here at a glance, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t link it: https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/kater2
Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (9th ed., 1992) is somewhat dubious about the derivation from Katarrh (and none of the dictionaries I own mentions what the Leipzig pronunciation of Katarrh actually was – and my question is: why would students in Leipzig, coming from all over Germany, use a local Leipzig pronunciation?)
Kater would be a logical way of mispronouncing such a foreign word for the majority of Dutch and German speakers, wouldn’t it? That is, KA-ter instead of ka-TAR. Anything that would make it specific to Leipzig (different a-sounds? different r-sounds?) doesn’t seem relevant to that point.
That’s where “humorous alteration” comes in. The students were perfectly competent Latinists, they were just having fun.
Katzenjammer was still used, memorably, in 1865.
I like “Haarweh”, too.
As far as German is concerned, I do not find this to be a “logical way of mispronouncing a foreign word”. Catarrh was commonly used in German since the 16th century (basically the equivalent of modern Schnupfen). And Kater apparently was originally part of the slang of Leipzig or Jena students in the mid 19th century — i.e. highly educated men (they were all men) who knew Latin and Greek and were proud of that. The editors of Paul’s dictionary prefer the derivation from Katzenjammer, and I think I agree. Catarrh is not needed to explain Kater. We should apply Occam’s razor and discard the Catarrh hypothesis.
Occasionally, you still find people using Katzenjammer. It’s rarer than the ubiquitous Kater, but it hasn’t died out.