It suddenly occurred to me that the Russian word кролик ‘rabbit’ looked sort of like a diminutive of король ‘king’; I chuckled at my homemade folk etymology, and then wondered what the actual history was. Lo and behold, it turns out my jokey guess was substantially correct; Vasmer:
(Л. Толстой, Блок и др.), укр. крíлик. Заимств. из польск. królik – то же, которое является калькой (“маленький король”: król; см. коро́ль) с нов.-в.-нем. диал. Künigl, Königshase, ср.-в.-н. küniklîn из лат. cunīculus; см. Мi. ЕW 131; Бернекер 1, 572; Унбегаун, RЕS 12, 20; Брюкнер 269; Карлович 261. Лит. kralìkis происходит из польск.; см. Брюкнер, FW 96, 175.
In other words, the Russian word is borrowed from Polish królik, literally ‘little king,’ which is a calque of MHG küniklîn, which is borrowed from Latin cuniculus ‘rabbit’ but adapted to look like a German diminutive of künik ‘king.’ Fun with etymology! (Oh, and the Latin word is the source of English con(e)y, as in Coney Island.)
Welsh cwningen “rabbit” is from Middle English, according to GPC.
Makes sense, as UK rabbits seem to be the fault of the Normans. (Apparently the Romans brought rabbits to Britain, but they don’t seem to have escaped into the wild at that point.)
“Rabbit” itself seems to be an etymological mystery, though it seems clear that it originally only referred to baby rabbits. A bit like “bird” versus “fowl.”
[Mooré luiila and Farefare niila “bird” must also have begun life as diminutive forms: the -la is a “diminutive class” suffix, moribund in Western Oti-Volta, but alive and well elsewhere. The expected non-diminutive form turns up in e.g. Kusaal niiŋ, Dagbani nooŋa.]
Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary has over four dense pages on rabbit. He thinks it’s likely to be a Germanic root plus a French suffix. There’s also Walloon robett ‘rabbit’.
Or “pig” versus “hog” and “swine”.
Etymonline quotes from Mencken (BTW U.S. ‘Jackrabbit’ = U.K. ‘Hare’)
wikip confirms the bit about the Belgian non-hare. And “Hares are generally larger than rabbits, with ears that are more elongated, and with hind legs that are larger and longer. ” — which is how I distinguish them. I guess if you’ve never seen a genuine rabbit you wouldn’t know the difference. (The biological difference has to do with whether at birth the young are relatively mature.)
Then does U.S. not have any genuine rabbits in the wild? (Other than the Belgian non-hare.)
I wonder if this bit of trivia somehow inspired the Bun Xkcd? Indeed, someone already pointed to it on the Explain Xkcd wiki entry.
Br’er Rabbit is presumably really Br’er Hare. (His West African forebear certainly is.)
Plenty of American bunny rabbits (Sylvilagus sp.) New world hares (Lepus sp.) are called hares in the Arctic, jackrabbits in the United States.
AntC: There are lots of true rabbits in North America. The cottontail species are a clade of true rabbits, and since European colonization, the eastern cottontail had become quite cosmopolitan in North America, including the Caribbean. The smallest, highest ranking species is a threatened pygmy variety native to the Pacific Northwest. They often live in substantial numbers in the green spaces of regional zoos, fed but allowed to run free.
Wordorigins has covered rabbit and coney / Coney Island; it’s unclear whether Coney Island was named after rabbits.
Latin cuniculus is itself of unknown origin.
the rabbits were a Mediterranean species until the French introduced them further North (and, later on, the Brits helped them spread down under). I had to learn this when making sense of genetic papers about the actual origins of Australian rabbits (there have been two separate successful introductions, but the second one accounts for less than 1% of the rabbit land in Australia)
there have been two separate successful introductions,
Speaking from NZ, the only “successful” approach to rabbits would have been to not introduce them at all.
There’s been occasional talk of introducing some further species to predate the rabbits; and there were illicit attempts in 1997 to introduce hemorrhagic disease. So NZ’ers don’t see anything cute about rabbits. Easter Bunny notwithstanding.
The Romans said rabbits (cuniculi) were native to Spain, while hares (lepores) were found all over. Latin dictionaries therefore assume ‘cuniculus’ is a Spanish word – Celtiberian? Basque? there may be other possibilities. It also means ‘burrows’ and ‘mines’ and editors are not sure whether Catullus calls Spain ‘cuniculosus’ in poem 37 because it’s full of rabbits or full of mines.
The Latin word for ‘hare’ (lepus, lepŏris) is almost identical to the word for ‘charm, pleasantness’ (lepōs, ōris), and both are masculine. There seems to have been a folk belief that eating hare would make you handsome. Martial makes a cruel joke out of it (5.29):
Si quando leporem mittis mihi, Gellia, dicis:
“Formosus septem, Marce, diebus eris.”
Si non derides, si uerum, lux mea, narras,
edisti numquam, Gellia, tu leporem.
“If you ever send me a hare, Gellia, you say
‘You will be handsome, Marcus, in seven days.’
If you are not mocking me, if, my light, you are telling the truth,
you never ate a hare, Gellia.”
Why would he think she’s mocking him? I suppose he thinks she’s implying he really needs to eat a hare.
Successful from the rabbit’s viewpoint and in comparison with the numerous failures.
The British loved their rabbits (it took them only ~500 years to develop this affection after the introduction to England from France in 1300s), and brought them over to Australia over and over again. The popular myth says that the 1788 First Fleet was the start of rabbit rule, but in actuality, neither 1788 nor several more attempts in the following decades suceeded.
Almost all of Australian rabbits come from the stock of Thomas Austin’s hunting estate in Barwon Park, dating back only to 1859. It took them over 60 years to cover the entire continent, The other extant introduction is in Kattai NP.
I wouldn’t have guessed it, but that makes кролик cognate with Algerian Arabic ڨُنينة gʷnina. IIRC the Latin term is difficult to trace further back, and has been suggested as a “Mediterranean” substratum word.
“The conies* are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks”
Proverbs 30:26 KJV
* Rock Hyrax
Mixing up hares and rabbits is also frequent among German speakers; lots of people call rabbits Hase instead of Kaninchen, especially if they encounter them in the wild.
Another name for the Rock Hyrax is Dassie (from Dutch ‘das’ – badger).
Armed with my confirmation bias I now see that the biblical Coney does indeed look like a rabbit/badger hybrid.
It also means ‘burrows’ and ‘mines’ and editors are not sure whether Catullus calls Spain ‘cuniculosus’ in poem 37 because it’s full of rabbits or full of mines.
Presumably “cunicolusus” is also a pun on “cunnus” given Catullus’ typical subject matter, no?
I’d probably read that line “sons of little hairy cunty Celtiberians”.
What’s going on with Kaninchen, anyway? It doesn’t look to have any kingly remodeling. Were there other MHG forms along with küniklîn? Is that one dialectical?
Dwds has
Kaninchen n. hasenartiges Nagetier. Mnd. kanīn(e)ken, Deminutivum zu mnd. kanīn…entlehnt aus afrz. (besonders nordfrz.) con(n)in, das (mit Suffixwechsel) neben afrz. con(n)il steht, hervorgegangen aus lat. cunīculus ‘Kaninchen’, übertragen (im Hinblick auf den Kaninchenbau) ‘unterirdischer Gang’. Auf afrz. con(n)il beruht ahd. cǒnol (Hs. 12. Jh.)….
So Kaninchen ex Middle Dutch kanīn ex Old French con(n)in/con(n)il where the last-named has an Old High German reflex and both old French terms are derived from the Latin (I suppose there is some reasoning or evidence that the OHG has to be ex OFr and the OFr has to be ex Latin, e.g , the OHG has to be a borrowing from somewhere and the OFr term is traceable to VL).
The Romans said rabbits (cuniculi) were native to Spain
Previously at lh
Spain, Land of Rabbits?
Corominas, on cuniculus, under conejo:
I omitted footnotes on the -iculus suffix and on other interpretations of the Mozarabic word.
I tend to trust Corominas, but I am scratching my head. How would ‘rabbit’ and ‘ferret’ ever overlap? (Except the former, reluctantly, within the latter.)
@MMcM, PP: Grimm states that there is a wide range of dialectical forms. Under that lemma, it discusses the forms with Ka(r)n-, forms with Kön-/Kün- are discussed under Königlein, literally “little king”. There is also a lemma Könighase “king hare = rabbit” which is marked as Bavarian and Austrian; interesting whether DM knows that designation?
Königlein looks like an interesting folk etymological calque of cuniculus. I’d think that other forms with König have the same origin, maybe as second degree nativizations.
@Trond: yes, that’s exactly what they are, as also noted in the OP 🙂
I lost track. Well, it’s never to late to have a revelation!
How would ‘rabbit’ and ‘ferret’ ever overlap?
What does the second half of untxarta mean?
Ferrets have been used for centuries to drive out rabbits (ferreting), right?
I got confused. untxi is ‘rabbit’. I don’t know what the -arta is.
It has been suggested (plausibly, to my mind) that “cuniculus” is borrowed from a Celtiberian word meaning “little dog”, (Celtic */kun/), a descriptive term which one could easily imagine applied to rabbits.
In which case…Welsh “ci” and the first syllable of “cwningen” (cf. David Eddyshaw’s comment, the first of this thread) are long-sundered doublets!
It looks even better with the plurals cŵn “dogs” and cwning “rabbits.”
(Cwning is, unfortunately, obsolete. The Young People of Today say cwningod. I blame TikTok.)
Benjamín García Hernández, “El origen de cuniculus (> conejo) y su difícil, pero legítima, relación con cunnus (> coño)”, here. The English abstract:
This gives a whole new slant to the term “bunny girl.”
I have no doubt that that fine classical scholar Hugh Heffner had this in mind.
So Catullus presumably knew this.
So contrarian was I in my youth that I did weird things like study Ancient Greek rather than go with the flow and learn Spanish the way the majority of Americans of my generation who took any foreign language in school did. So I was unaware of the apparently quite wide-ranging semantic scope (with considerable regional variation within the Hispanosphere) of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/co%C3%B1o#Spanish and related terms/phrases.
Yes, I once noted here that when WIktionary explains Irish coinín “rabbit, vagina” as a calque of English cunny, and cunny as “cunty”, that is utterly weird because French connin means both things.
I wonder where the -in in French forms comes from.
“Algerian Arabic ڨُنينة gʷnina.”
Wiktionary gives Moroccan Arabic: قنية (qniyya), قلينة (qlayna), the latter is strange.
In my browser italicised Arabic is much larger and more readable (though leaning to the right).
@drasvi
In the absence of Étienne, maybe
https://fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/-in#fr
e.g., connil was parsed as cunnellus and not as cuniglus, and then ellus replaced by inus?
Well, all right. That would be straighforward.
After all cunuculus and Russian krolik are technically diminutives (krol in the sense “male rabbit”, possibly “giant male rabbit” is something a child can form).
Wiktionary also cites:
Emilian: cunili, cunij, cunej, cunì ⇒ cunin, cunen
Piedmontese: cunij, cunì ⇒ conin
Friulian: cunin
And English forms:
Middle English: coni, konyng, conynge, cunning, conig, cony, conyne, konyn
English: cony, coney, cunny, connie
Scots: kinnen, kyunnen, connie
It explains cunny as “obsolete form of cony … ”, “(…diminutive…) cunt …”, treating these two as unrelated.
“conynge”
speaking of konungs…
Benjamín García Hernández, “El origen de cuniculus (> conejo) y su difícil, pero legítima, relación con cunnus (> coño)”
Thank you for bringing this study to our attention here, Y!
Under coney, the first edition of the AHD (1969) gave the ultimate origin of the word as something like “probably of Iberian origin”, the usual line. But by the third edition (1992), this had been changed to “possibly from cunnus, female pudenda”. I have been unable to discover the immediate source for this particular etymology in the AHD3. (Most of the paper editorial records and files of the AHD since its inception were discarded when Houghton Mifflin moved its lexicographical department to smaller offices during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The rest of the files must have been discarded when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt closed the lexicographical department permanently in 2019 and sold the AHD off to HarperCollins.) But an early instantiation of an etymological association of cuniculus and cunnus etymology is here (1861), for example. The AHD editors, for better or worse, later changed the etymology back to the party line (the Iberian etymology).
Aelian on κόνικλος from Περὶ ζῴων ἰδιότητος (On the characteristics of animals):
To interpret this, it is interesting to note that Περὶ ζῴων ἰδιότητος generally avoids the mention of Roman authors and anything overtly Latin. Aelian often prefaces his accounts with expressions like ‘a certain hunter told me…’, ‘a fisherman told me…’, but he also notes his own doubt and incredulity about the truth of some of the things he has heard. But I wonder if Aelian is just recycling Pliny and other authors here. (Philostratus, Vitae sophistarum ii. 31, says that Aelian claimed to have never travelled outside Italy.)
The AHD editors, for better or worse, later changed the etymology back to the party line (the Iberian etymology).
That must have been one of the last etymology changes they ever made: the 2016 printing of the fifth edition still had “possibly akin to cunnus, cunus, female pudenda”. (Blizzard was also one of the last.)
Most of the paper editorial records and files of the AHD since its inception were discarded when Houghton Mifflin moved its lexicographical department to smaller offices during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The rest of the files must have been discarded when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt closed the lexicographical department permanently in 2019 and sold the AHD off to HarperCollins.
I can’t even begin to describe how angry this makes me. Couldn’t they have found someone to take that valuable material off their hands? It’s like the studios discarding movies that weren’t currently bringing in money. A pox on their houses!
Louis Bonaparte, as King of Holland, allegedly declared himself Konijn van ‘Olland ‘Rabbit of Holland’, probably pronouncing koning ‘king’ something like /koˈnin/ instead of /ˈkonɪŋ/.
That’s what the people do who, instead of Gesundheit!, say Schönheit! when someone sneezes.
In German, hares are the default lagomorphs; in English, rabbits are.
In short, someone at some point must have reinterpreted cuniculus as caniculus “little doggie”. Then presumably someone swapped out the entire compound diminutive suffix by MHG or perhaps rather MLG -în, and someone else later added -chen, giving the modern Kaninchen (with stressed long i).
I don’t. However, elegant variation for Austria’s public-owned broadcaster is the hill in Vienna on which it stands, and that is called Küniglberg.
Or maybe it’s Celtic, not originally Latin: “q[uasi-]PIE *k̑əsnih₂- or *k̑asnih₂- ‘female grey one’ > *kasnī- > *kannī- → W ceinach ‘hare’. This etymon may also underly the OIr. personal name Cainnech, possibly from *kannīko-“.
That would be a root cognate of hare and German Hase, then, just feminine. German does not support long consonants at the ends of unstressed syllables (Satellit is stressed on the last syllable and therefore pronounced as if spelled satelitt; this does not change if the unstressed plural ending -en is added); this does seem to require that the word was present in German no earlier than MHG, but apparently there’s no evidence to the contrary.
The paper, BTW, came out this year and seems to be the first comprehensive treatment of long consonants in Celtic.
FWIW, I don’t think I was ever in doubt of what was a hare (two syllables) and what a kanin. But my family was moderately outdoorsy when I was growing up, so I saw both. (And rabbits don’t survive in the wild here, too many foxes and feral cats I think). It’s probably more likely to hear people calling a hare kanin, but I don’t recall an instance — would probably be something overheard during a walk in the forest, but I don’t take walks to gather linguistic data.
(Satellit is stressed on the last syllable and therefore pronounced as if spelled satelitt; this does not change if the unstressed plural ending -en is added)
That’s not the pronunciation I normally hear and use, which has [i:] in both singular and plural. Duden also has the pronunciation with long “i” as basic and the one with short “i” as variant. I have occasionally encountered the pronunciation with short “i”, but had always considered it a personal idiosyncracy of the speaker. (And now I’m curious – how do you pronounce Dynamit, Meteorit?)
…All of them short. IIRC, there are -it words with a long vowel, but I can’t remember any right now.
The advantage is that the chemical distinction between -it and -id ends up triple-marked: vowel length, consonant length, consonant “strength”. I was aware there are lamentable accents that make them homophones.
A similar case is parallel. It’s stressed on the last syllable, so the temptation to spell it paralell is so strong that some people have consciously taken up a pronunciation with -/e:l/. (I don’t know if they’re the same people who make a point of pronouncing Interesse as two words because pronouncing the r creates the temptation to spell it twice.)
A similar case is parallel. It’s stressed on the last syllable, so the temptation to spell it paralell is so strong that some people have consciously taken up a pronunciation with -/e:l/.
You will not be surprised that Duden pronounces that with a long /e:/, and in this case they don’t even note a pronunciation with short “e” as a variant, not even for Austrian. And FWIW, I can’t remember ever having encountered that pronunciation with short “e”. Are you sure about this?
Yes. I’ve been told by a reliable source that Austrian variants are now “usually” in the Duden as well, so the vanity project that was (TIL: still is) the Österreichisches Wörterbuch is no longer necessary, but here seems to be an exception.
The reasons given in 1972 for its desirability (“necessity” was not an issue):
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Das Österreichische Wörterbuch ist ein Wörterbuch der guten, richtigen deutschen Gemeinsprache. Es ist jedoch in erster Linie für Österreicher bestimmt und wird vor allem von Österreichern benützt werden. Deshalb enthält es auch zahlreiche allgemein verwendete Wörter der österreichischen Umgangssprache und der österreichischen Mundarten, wenngleich keine Wörter in mundartlicher Schreibung. Solche Wörter sind ausdrücklich als der Umgangssprache oder der Mundart zugehörig gekennzeichnet. Durch die Aufnahme dieser Ausdrücke, die in der Sprache des Alltags immer wieder auftreten und etwa bei der Wiedergabe von Gesprächen geschrieben werden müssen, wurde auch ihre Schreibung festgelegt. Das Österreichische Wörterbuch ist noch in einem anderen Sinn als ein österreichisches anzusprechen. Wir Österreicher verwenden eine Reihe von Ausdrücken, die nicht weniger richtig, gut und schön sind als anderswo gebrauchte. Sie wurden naturgemäß im Wörterbuch bevorzugt, wogegen etwa nur in Norddeutschland übliche gar nicht berücksichtigt oder als bei uns fremd oder zumindest ungewohnt ausdrücklich gekennzeichnet wurden. Es ist aber auch Tatsache, daß wir in der besten Sprache der Gebildeten unseres Landes Wörter anders betonen, anders aussprechen, Hauptwörter mit einem anderen Artikel oder einer anderen Mehrzahlform, Zeitwörter mit einem anderen Hilfszeitwort verwenden u. v. a. m., als dies außerhalb Österreichs üblich ist. In solchen Fällen wurden die bei uns gebräuchlichen, allgemein als gut und richtig empfundenen Formen ins Wörterbuch aufgenommen. (Vorwort, 32. Auflage, 1972)
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Many gegenseitig surprising differences between Ö- and D-Deutsch have revealed themselves at this blog over the years. That differences existed, was perhaps not as surprising as the fact that the Austrians consider their variants to be richtig, gut und schön. Since they have an army and a navy just as the Germans do, surely esthetic arguments should be beneath them.
I’ve been told by a reliable source that Austrian variants are now “usually” in the Duden as well, so the vanity project that was (TIL: still is) the Österreichisches Wörterbuch is no longer necessary,
That’s a surprising attitude. Because US variants are now usually in the OED, is there no need for US-based dictionaries? Surely Austrian scholars can do a better job on their variety of the language than German ones, however well-intentioned.
American English is correct, good and nice !
Recommended-by-the-experts, law-abiding and gorgeous ??
@Stu: I would be very interested in knowing the minutiae of naval terminology in Austrian German. Coconut husbandry, too.
@Y: Hmm. I had quickly checked the WiPe and was astounded to find an article on the Österreichische Marine. Only now, on moving past the headline, do I see that it no longer exists …
That explains the appeal to esthetics. Coconut in Austria.
Seriously now, would an Austrian dictionary be comparable to, say, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary?
So Kaninchen ex Middle Dutch kanīn ex Old French con(n)in/con(n)il
someone at some point must have reinterpreted cuniculus as caniculus “little doggie”
Or maybe it’s Celtic, not originally Latin
The Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek on a beside o in MD conijn, canijn :
Similarly the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal :
So the crafty North-Brabanters turned conin into canijn by regular sound change, and everyone else followed. Why not, I suppose.
Whatever a “Danube flottilla” is. 🙂
Wikipedia doesn’t say what kind of dictionary exactly the COD is. Is it a descriptive historical dictionary like the OED?
Wikipedia doesn’t say what kind of dictionary exactly the COD is. Is it a descriptive historical dictionary like the OED?
Not even that. It’s a general purpose dictionary, lacking etymologies and examples, 99+% identical to any similar US or UK dictionary (modulo spelling conventions). US-specific words will be marked “US English”, just as the OAD will mark others as “Canadian English”. Presumably it contains a smattering of Canadianisms deemed too marginal for non-Canadian dictionaries. You can peruse it at archive.org.
The ÖW is similar, except with more hand-wringing about to what extent it wants to be prescriptive (just like the Duden!) and with an introduction that explains the very non-Canadian issue of dialect vs. standard (and takes a stab in the general direction of Viennese mesolect, but rather missed it last time I checked some 30 years ago or longer).
There is also a Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (see previously at Language Hat), which is quotation-based like the OED (its web edition is currently being rebuilt, and Firefox has a problem with the temporary server, but Edge was willing to show pages).
Wikipedia tells me that when OUP closed and outsourced its Canadian lexicography division, the Dictionary’s former editor Katherine Barber turned to selling ballet trips.
Barber did not stop writing and lecturing about lexicography after they eliminated her job; see Katherine Barber, RIP. She kept up her blog until just weeks before her death.