Victor Mair at the Log posts about Turkish (and other) words for ‘cat’; he shares a long and interesting communication from Mehmet Olmez, who says:
There was not a Turkic word for ‘cat’, there were some words for ‘wild cat’. Detailed description about the cat we can find in Divanu Lugati’t-Turk (from 11th century, 1072-1074). Turkish kedi ‘cat’ must be related to European CAT and KATZE. But it cannot be a direct borrowing as mentioned from Europe. According to A. Tietze and R. Dankoff, it can be related with Armenian kadu or Ar. qiṭṭ. In Siberian languages there is just ‘wild cat’ (similar Mongolian malur and other forms): manu. […] I can share here Clauson’s explanation:
?F çetük ‘(female) cat’. The various Turkish words for ‘cat’ are collected in Shcherbak, p. 129. Some of them, e.g. maçı:, VU mö:ş, and mışkıç, are demonstrably l.-w.s, and it is likely that the rest, including this one, which has no obvious etymology, are also l.-w.s. The Turks prob. did not meet cats early enough to have their own word for them. (Xak.?) xıv Muh. al-sinnūr ‘cat’ çetük Mel. 72, 6; çe:tük Rif. 174: Oğuz xı çetük al-hirra ‘female cat’; (VU) küwük (unvocalized) çetük al-ḍaywan ‘tom cat’ Kaş. I 388; a.o. III 127 (mö:ş): Xwar. xıv çetük ‘(female) cat’ Qutb 42: Kıp. xııı al-qiṭṭ ‘tom cat’ (ma:çı:, also called) çe:tük Hou. ıı, ıı: xıv çetük (c-c) al-qiṭṭ İd. 42; Bul. 10, 10: xv al-qitt setük (sic) Kav. 62, 3; sinnūr (maçı and) çetük Tuh. 19a. 11: Osm. xıv ff. çetük, occasionally çetik, ‘cat’; common till xvı, occasionally later TTS I 155; II 222; III 147; IV 165: xvııı çetik (spelt) in Rūmī, gurba ‘cat’, in Ar. hirra and sinnūr San. 205r. 14. [Clauson 402b:]
Juha Janhunen talks about Mongolian and Finnic languages and says “Words for ‘cat’ are often recent, descriptive / onomatopoetic, or borrowed”; Mair says:
All of this leaves me with two burning questions:
1. Why are words for the domestic cat, an animal now so widespread and much adored (think of Hello Kitty, the zillions of cat videos, etc.), relatively late in many languages?
2. Why is the evidence for cats so relatively scant in the archeological record? — except for ancient Egypt, where there were millions of mummified cats, so many that in the 1800s they were sold for fertilizer in Europe.
Good questions, and I will add: what the hell is Clauson’s “l.-w.s”? I hate opaque abbreviations, especially when the book is unavailable by online preview. (Also, Olmez’s “Turkish kedi ‘cat’ must be related to European CAT and KATZE” is of course overstated; why do people always ignore the prevalence of coincidence?)
maçı:, VU mö:ş, and mışkıç, are demonstrably l.-w.s,
No clue, but the Tatar word is very similar, and wiktionary doesn’t give etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BC%D3%99%D1%87%D0%B5
Ah, I’ll bet it’s “loan words.” What a stupid abbreviation; why not just say “loans”?
Except it’s hard to reconcile “loanwords” with the wiki statement that the word is pan-Turkic? Indeed, all the way to Uyghur. And Hungarian macska. Some Mari and Udmirt dialects too, while others have a word similar too (and used pretty much like) Russian брысь – so I wonder if the Russian cat-chasing word is a Finnic borrowing of sorts? (Of course it’s easy to understand as onomatopoeic )
Kusaal for “cat” is amus, which is pretty clearly from Hausa mussa, but I’ve no idea where that comes from.
There’s no single word reconstructable for Proto-Western-Oti-Volta. However, another way of saying “cat” in Kusaal is dɔɔg biig “hut child”, which has equivalents in Farefare deebia and Mampruli dubiiya. Quite why a cat would be called a “hut child” I’ve no idea. Mampruli has also an even more mysterious naamaama, which looks like it should mean “chief’s girlfriend.”
Despite there being no widespread word for it, the wild Felis lybica seems to be indigenous to the area, but I don’t know how far back keeping cats as pets goes.
Ah, maybe a Slavic borrowing? Onomatopoeic too, “the meow’er”? Supposedly Greek Greek μάτσιου is there too, and maybe German Matz, so whoever reinvented and whoever borrowed from whom?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/ma%C4%8D%D1%8Cka
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/maca
The reference is to Trubachev’s Etymological dictionary of Slavic languages, 1990
I find it hard to believe in widespread borrowing by the Turkic, and some Finno-Ugric, peoples of the “Russian sphere” of a word which may have existed in Proto-Slavic is so completely unknown in Russian
About the recency of the feline, note that the Bible is inhabited by lots of dogs but no cats at all (or at least no animals whose names were translated by King James’s servants as “cat”).
About opaque abbreviations, consider the psycholinguistics of thinking of words visually or, on the other hand, orally. Visual would be those military types who in the interest of speed and concision say “Doubleyou Doubleyou Two.” And in the days of typewriters without “1” keys I had an ordinal-minded colleague who would write “lst” with the s and t underlined — that is, if you count the two backspaces, just as many keystrokes as “first.”
But it did economize on the palimpsest.
Huehnergaard’s Qiṭṭa: Arabic cats (here) is full of etymological goodness.
I found a scan of Clauson’s An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish online and checked the list of abbreviations:
@Y:
Thanks. It answers my question about the origin of Hausa mussa too (Berber, natch. Everything I don’t recognise turns out to be Berber in the end.)
I notice that in passing, Huehnergard talks about “taboo deformation” of animal names, but he doesn’t expound further. It caught my eye because “hut child” looks rather like some sort of avoidance formula, although I’m not aware that West African pet cats actually are in any way not-to-be-spoken-of.
Anybody know anything to the point? How uncanny are cats?
Huehnergaard’s Qiṭṭa: Arabic cats (here) is full of etymological goodness.
Thanks, that’s great stuff.
Kusaal for “cat” is amus
I looked to see if Kusaal for “mouse” is acat, but it’s kuu.
Kuug. Unless you speak Toende Kusaal. Which you can, if you like. It’s all good.
Incidentally, the equivalent to “when the cat’s away, the mice will play” is
Baas kae ka nwaamis di’e pɔɔg. “There are no dogs and the monkeys have got the farm.”
Correction: “l s backspace underline t backspace underline” = seven keystrokes (plus I suppose something extra for the shift key) as opposed to five for mere “first.” An oral equivalent might be something like “londjeray” for “underwear.”
And I’ve never seen Cummings’s “l(a” printed in a typewriter font, not even in its first book appearance in 95 Poems, and now that typescript is a thing of the past I wonder how much longer it’ll be before the poem requires an explanatory footnote to spell out the visual wit.
@Jonathan Morse
I wonder if the biblical aversion to cats is part of a more general anti-Egyptian leaning.
Cats are mentioned once in Baruch 6:21 (not included in Jewish or most Protestant bibles) where they, along with bats and birds, sit on the (false) gods of Babylon.
I wonder if the biblical aversion to cats is part of a more general anti-Egyptian leaning.
Huh, I never thought of that. It would make sense.
The anti-snake attitude of the Bible has also been attributed to anti-Egyptian attitudes, although I am not sure how seriously to take that idea. Snakes were definitely prominent in Egyptian iconography, and the Nile Valley was the home of the deadly crocodile. Crocodiles were often conflated with snakes by chroniclers who where not familar with them first hand; and even the Egyptians themselves did not always distinguish that strongly between snakes and crocodiles. (Apep could be represented as either one.) During the rule of Hezekiah in Judah, the iconoclastic reforms included the destruction of a snake idol,* which has been interpreted as an Egyptian-influenced cult object, making the destruction (along with the elimination of the Asherah poles and wilderness altars) part of an effort to consolidate religious control over the state, including by purging it of foreign sectarian influences.
* The snake idol is usually known as the “Nehushtan”—but that was likely a derisive (possibly punning) name given to it by Hezekiah’s faction. Its destruction was almost certainly a historical event, but the earlier story, in Numbers, chronicling how Moses constructed it, was presumably also devised relatively late in the object’s history, in an attempt to justify its inclusion as part of the increasingly monotheistic Hebrew religion.
Anti-snake attitudes don’t seem to me to cry out for explanation at all, really. Pro-snake attitudes are the interesting thing.
Baas kae ka nwaamis di’e pɔɔg. “There are no dogs and the monkeys have got the farm.”
I expect I can can find the pronunciation, but is there a phrase book for expressions like this?
Except it’s hard to reconcile “loanwords” with the wiki statement that the word is pan-Turkic
Not so much. Almost all the Latin loanwords in English that landed before the revival of learning were actually borrowed into Proto-Germanic and have perfectly normal cognates in other Germanic languages: anchor, butter, camp, cheese, chest, cook, copper, devil, dish < discus, fork, gem, inch, mile, mill, mint (for coins), noon, pillow, pound, sack (ult. < Akkadian), wall, street, wine. In a few cases they were probably reshaped within Old English: thus ancor ‘anchor’ lacks Anglo-Frisian brightening but is cognate (I think) with German Anker.
@AJP:
[ba:s kʰa̰j ka w̃ã:mɪs dḭɪ̰ pʰɔ:g], tones respectively M H L MM M M (by syllable)
There’s no phrase book AFAIK. A desideratum …
There’s quite a nice selection of proverbs in the back of Kusaal Solima ne Siilima “Kusaal Stories and Proverbs”, Samuel Akon and Joseph Anaba, Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation, 1981. Unfortunately I probably have the only copy in Europe. Tony Naden’s dictionary of Agolle Kusaal has quite a lot, though:
https://lostmarbles31.wixsite.com/aardvarks-lexico
Sadly, it only gives the literal meanings, which very often doesn’t give you much idea what they actually mean.
but it’s kuu
A Scots coo (moo) or a Gaelic cu (woof)?
Cats would definitely sit on gods, false or not.
According to Edinburgh zoo, the dogs of the bible are painted hunting dogs – but all I’m actually aware of them doing in the bible is eating all of Jezebel except the palms of her hands, and I only really know that because of Agatha Christie.
@Jen:
/ku:/ is clearly Proto-World for “mammal.”
Thanks for the reference to Baruch, David. But David and Brett, it’s one thing to be ritually opposed to serpents and swine and golden calves but another thing never (or almost never) to write the word “cat.” I can think of three possible explanations:
1. Historical recency. Beside the Egyptians, who else in the ancient world domesticated cats, and when did they start doing so?
2. Something in the culture. I’m always struck by the way people exclaim phatically out of the blue, as if they were mentioning the weather, “I hate cats.” Cf. the title chapter of Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. But is Western Civ so seamlessly continuous from Biblical times to the present?
3. Or most plausibly, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Cat in vain.”
https://jonathanmorse.blog/2020/07/19/like-a-kipling-hero-he-lives-for-his-ordnance/
During his last days in power, Moammar Gaddafi called the rebels against him “rats and cats” in one if not more speeches. I found it striking at the time. I can see how some people might disrespect street cats, but lumping them with rats is going too far.
Huehnergard unfortunately doesn’t answer the question I’d had since I was a kid: is Hebrew חָתוּל ħātūl related to English cat? He resorts (p. 410) to “may have been influenced by medieval Latin cat(t)ulus” which is awfully mush-mouthed. The multiple mutually contradicting potential etymologies for Arabic ḫayṭal and Hebrew ḥātûl / Aramaic ḥtûlā are unsatisfying as well.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Cat in vain
This would be in accordance with the idea that it is forbidden to speak the True Name of the Hut Child/King’s Paramour.
Bible references have probably all been altered to “ostrich.”
Almost all the Latin loanwords in English that landed before the revival of learning were actually borrowed into Proto-Germanic and have perfectly normal cognates in other Germanic languages
Exactly, that’s what I meant, that the cradle of Turkic languages is way East in Mongolia, so a similarly early borrowing from one of Balkan Slavic languages into Proto-Turkic seems impossible owing to a vast geographic separation.
/ku:/ is clearly Proto-World for “mammal.”
Proto-Universe! Haven’t you seen Kin-dza-dza!?
Huehnergard unfortunately doesn’t answer the question I’d had since I was a kid: is Hebrew חָתוּל ħātūl related to English cat?
See this LH comment (quoting Renee’s Glosses blog).
Haven’t you seen Kin-dza-dza!?
I have indeed seen it, and I have never been quite the same since.
@Y: I also have wondered about חָתוּל for a long time, and there just does not seem to be a clearcut understanding of where we got that word in its modern form. I personally suspect that there was indeed some influence from the Indo-European, which might make the word a chimera. However, as you suggest, even if that is correct, the whole situation is a mess.
Thanks, Hat. Unfortunately, more procrustean etymologies, in both sound and meaning.
who else in the ancient world domesticated cats
I think it was just a very long time before F. lybica (what was Georg Forster thinking, not to write F. libyca?) escaped from Egypt. In Alexander’s time, cats were still almost unknown in Greece, where the characteristic rodent-eating human symbionts were snakes. Note that the Berber and Maghrebi Arabic form qattus has to come from (African) Latin cattus (nom.) or more likely cattos (acc.), not over the desert from Egypt, per Etienne.
Pro-snake attitudes are the interesting thing.
Humans are in favor of anything that stops their grain from being devoured.
One of the clues in a Kusaal book of quizzes about animals and birds that I have in front of me goes
Dine kɛ ka m a saalbiis zua la anɛ mam pu sa’amidi ba la’ad ka mɛ pu diti ba ki la.
“What makes me the friend of human beings is that I don’t damage their property or eat their millet.”
evidently indeed a highly salient matter for subsistence farmers. (It’s a swallow.) I doubt whether a book aimed at UK children would simply assume that they would know what swallows (don’t) eat.
For UK children it should be “If I am alone, I can’t make a spring”
“from Hausa mussa’
Sounds like a Croatian word for calling out to cats.
A lot of these “cat” words seem to be attributed to sounds used for calling to cats. The conclusion is, of course, that cats are training humanity to refer to them as they, the cats, prefer. The avoidance forms (like “hut child” ) reflect humanity’s attempt to escape from the mind control. They have survived best where cats have only domesticated humans relatively recently and hope has not yet died.
Hmm. What is the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in Kusasi country?
DE: I doubt whether a book aimed at UK children would simply assume that they would know what swallows (don’t) eat.
I’m sure that’s usually true, but swallows eat mosquitos and therefore fly low when it’s going to rain and high when it isn’t, something to do with air pressure – as a former UK child who was told that, I’ve noticed it happening in my own garden.
Thank you for the refs.
Sadly, it only gives the literal meanings
A drawback. I found a great Swiss name there, an agronomist called Urs Niggli.
JinE: A Scots coo (moo)
Ku is a Norwegian cow as you know and kue is to be cowed, but kü is also Friesian for viper according to this Wiktionary entry. No wonder the Americans call Friesian cows Holsteins, you don’t want to milk the wrong beast.
To me they do; I’ve always found them a weird feature of Western culture – especially given how rare and comparatively harmless Europe’s venomous snakes are.
Not ferrets?
In German, y is treated as a duplicate not of i, but of ü, whenever possible. “Possible” pretty much means “in the stressed syllable”, the only place where native /yː/ and /ʏ/ occur. That makes the spellings Libyen /ˈliːbɪɛn/, with -yen seemingly for -ien, libysch, with -ysch for -isch, and indeed libyca, with -yca seemingly for -ica, so weird that there’s a strong urge to do something about them. I bet more than half of German-speakers pronounce Libyen with /yː/ in the first syllable and spontaneously spell it accordingly; “lybien” brings up a long list of Google suggestions (including some that presuppose some expert knowledge, like lybien haftar) and no less than 5,010,000 hits, rather substantial compared to 30,600,000 for “libyen”.
(Unrelated is the widespread pronunciation of Mikro- with /ʏ/, caused by the fact that the name of the letter μ is always rendered as my /myː/, never mu [see above for the cows].)
Urs Niggli
It’s a different Urs Niggli, I think. Switzerland is probably full of them.
What is the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in Kusasi country?
Low. You see much more of it in the south of the country.
Beside the Egyptians, who else in the ancient world domesticated cats, and when did they start doing so?
According to this article
There’s lots of history-of-cat info there. Unfortunately there’s very little available on the writer.
I have a vague recollection that Muhammad was pro-cat and anti-dog. Is there a resulting pro-cat attitude in Islam?
From my limited experience of living in (culturally) Muslim countries I noticed that there is indeed an aversion against keeping dogs in the house, as they are seen as unclean. This doesn’t seem to extend to cats.
the Tatar word is very similar
Another Tatar word:
песи
Песи is a nice-cat word in Tatar, as well a call to attract a kitty, akin to Russian киса which the wiktionary entry actually uses as a translation
Why is “hut child” necessarily an avoidance form? Cf. “fur baby.”
From that article:
The prophet Muhammed was also very fond of cats. According to legend, the `M’ design on the forehead of the tabby cat was made when the prophet blessed his favourite cat by placing his hand on its head. This cat, Meuzza, or Muʿizza, Arabic: معزة also features in another famous story in which Muhammad, called to prayer, found the cat asleep on his arm. Rather than disturb the cat, Muhammad cut the sleeve from his robe and left Meuzza to sleep.
Мультфильм “Шаян песи” (“Кошка – озорница”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1zEvolRYYY
nekoma
*⟨ni1a-ko1ma⟩ → ⟨ne1ko1ma⟩ → /nekoma/
From Old Japanese. Originally a compound of にゃ (nya, “onomatopoeia for the sound a cat makes (compare English mew, meow)”) + こま (koma, “four-legged animal”).
Obsolete; replaced by shorter form neko in modern Japanese.
猫
mirri
Finnish:
1) pussy-cat (affectionate term for a cat)
2) (colloquial) bowtie
3) (slang) pussy, vagina
Darkinjung: dog
Gamilaraay: wild dog, dingo
Ngiyambaa: dog
Yagara: dingo or wild dog
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mirri
Why is “hut child” necessarily an avoidance form?
Because I thought it was funny. Kusaal doesn’t really seem to do avoidance forms as such, though proverbs are often pretty obscure on the surface, which perhaps represents a kindred phenomenon. Still, “chief’s girlfriend”? What’s up with that?
There don’t seem to be any similar kennings for other domesticated mammals. Only cats. There’s nothing like “man’s best friend” for dogs AFAIK. Perhaps that’s not surprising in view of their typical associations: dogs are kept principally as guard dogs; cows are familiar locally, but are usually the concern of Fulɓe or Mossi, not Kusaasi; horses are very strongly associated with chieftainship; goats are goats; pigs are pigs; and who would bother with a standing epithet for sheep? It really only leaves donkeys, which have their usual reputation as devious, tough and stubborn.
(It does occur to me that the word for every single one of these animals except horses can be reconstructed at least as far back as Proto-Oti-Volta; maybe it’s simply that there just wasn’t a word for “domestic cat” when they moved in.)
(Excogitating yet further, I think it’s true to say that cats are the only domesticated animal the Kusaasi usually allow indoors with them, which might be significant.)
Are donkeys really thought to be devious? I’ve always found them perfectly straightforward, but I googled and found a company with that name in Northern Ireland.
Actually, although the word for “warthog” (dɛɛg) goes back to Proto-Oti-Volta, and the etymon is also used for “pig” in many languages, the Kusaal word for “tame pig” (kʋrkʋr or kʋkʋr) is phonologically odd and looks like a loanword; similar forms seem to be confined to Western Oti-Volta alone. I’ve no idea how old pig farming is in West Africa.
Interestingly, there seems to be some genetic evidence that West African tame pigs (as opposed to East African) are the result of the European invasions:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257506057_Domestic_Pigs_in_Africa
The Twi word for “pig” is prako, which is transparently a loanword from Portuguese. It’s not out of the question that a form *pʋrkʋ(r) might get remodelled to kʋ(r)kʋr; “tomatoes” has ended up as Kusaal kamantɔɔsi (I suspect by contamination from Ghanaian Hausa kaman “like.”)
In the ANE there seems to have been a ritual(ized) distinction between clean and unclean dogs, where the first are hunting dogs and sheep-herding dogs, and the second are town dogs. This probably reflects the actual degree of cleanliness to some extent.
The Persians, however, favored dogs, for they did not lie, one of the great Persian virtues (as Herodotus puts it, to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth were the marks of Persian nobility).
I notice that Tony Naden’s Dagbani dictionary states outright that the corresponding Dagbani “pig” word, kuruchu, is “ultimately” from Portuguese porco. His etymologies are not always very solid; he attributes the Western Oti-Volta “soap” etymon (Kusaal ki’ib) to Portuguese sabão, for example, which is frankly impossible. Still, in this case Portuguese looks plausible.
Are donkeys really thought to be devious?
Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky with the donkeys I’ve met. Or maybe they just take one look at me and see an easy mark.
“Chief’s girlfriend” is strolling in like she owns the place, sitting on chief’s lap, sleeping on chief’s bed, and sitting beside the chief all smug when he’s holding meetings.
Onomatopoeia for grunting?
Wild cats are now known to have lived among the people of Mesopotamia over 100,000 years ago and to have been domesticated there approximately 12,000 BCE at about the same time as dogs, sheep, and goats.
Interesting. Domestic cats weren’t really a thing in Sumero-Akkadian culture. Domestic dogs show up pretty early with a distinction between “ur-gir” or “native dogs” and “ur-bara” or “foreign/wild dogs.” “Ur” can, when used in its most general sense, refer to any mid-size carnivorous animal (dog/cat/hyena), but AFAIK none of the attestations of “domestic ur” are particularly cat-like. I wonder what the Hurrians thought about cats…
Foxes, on the other hand, had a very important cultural role, but the proverbs they appear in are so opaque that no one’s quite sure what exactly that role was.
Onomatopoeia for grunting?
That was what I originally wondered myself. The word-internal rk cluster is not possible in Kusaal words constructed according to orthodox principles, but occurs in ideophones (which can do anything) and loans. There’s no problem for Kusaasi in actually pronouncing such clusters, but they normally only occur across word division – but that includes word division within the compound words the language creates so freely.
The corresponding words in the other Western Oti-Volta languages are instructive:
Kusaal 1976 New Testament: kʋrkʋr
Kusaal 2016 Bible: kʋkʋr (brought into conformity with normal noun structure, as if kʋ were a reduplication-prefix, a common sort of formant in WOV languages.)
Toende Kusaal: kukut (t as regularly for original final r; vowel quality differs from Agolle)
Dagbani: kuruchu (which would reflect an older form *kʋdkiigʋ if it were actually from Proto-WOV)
Mampruli: kurikuu (which would reflect *kʋdkuugʋ)
Farefare: kurkuri (like Kusaal, but again with different vowel quality from Agolle Kusaal)
Mooré: kukuri or kurkuri
These words are obviously all connected, which seems to make it improbable that the forms are independently created by onomatopoeia. It would work if they could all be traced to an onomatopoeic Proto-WOV form; but they can’t: the vowels don’t correspond properly, and neither does the consonant after the first vowel. The Agolle Kusaal and Mooré forms would require Proto-WOV *r; but that would have given Dagbani *kuluchu, not kuruchu.
This seems to suggest borrowing from one language to the next as the explanation for the resemblances. The r of the more northerly languages, Kusaal, Farefare and Mooré, is plausibly to be accounted for by resegmentation of a form with the noun class sg suffix rɩ (both Mooré and Agolle Kusaal have gone the whole hog (sorry) and now pluralise the word with the regular corresponding pl class suffix: kʋrkʋya “pigs” etc.)
So the southern forms *kʋrkɩ/kʋrkʋ are probably closer to the source (note that these languages have historically both merged ʋ into u.)
Velars before rounded vowels are labialised in all these languages, and do not contrast with kp gb in this position.
So an assimilation *pʋrkʋ -> *kʋrkʋ is not as far-fetched phonetically as one might think.
On the question of Portuguese loans in general, here’s the late Prof Kropp Dakubu:
https://www.ajol.info/index.php/gjl/article/download/86778/76574/0
Kusaal has at least daka “box” (ultimately from arca) and saafi “lock” (chave), via Hausa and Twi respectively. Basically, Portuguese is not a far-fetched source for a donor of old loans to Ghanaian languages.
I did, however, forget to mention the edition of Cats, the musical, discovered in the original Sumerian:
???????????????????????????? ???? ???????????????????? ????????????
si-ki-im-bil₂-šeŋ₆-ka-sa kaskal zabar-ra-ka ur-tur-be₂
???????? ???????? ????????????
{ŋeš}gigir izi-ka ur-tur-be₂
That’s surely TS Enlilot’s version.
to have lived among the people of Mesopotamia over 100,000 years ago
There were people in Mesopotamia 100,000 years ago?
Is the name of Mohammed’s cat Muezza, who was lying on his sleeve during the call to prayer, related etymologically to the muezzin, the person who sings the call to prayer? Is it a joking re-naming to suit the role of the cat in the story?
I looked at a couple links, and the similarity isn’t even mentioned. Are the two forms not similar in Arabic? Wiki says the word we know as muezzin transliterates more closely to mu adh dhin. My sense is that would be true of Muezza too, a difference of the etymological relationship of Arabic and Roman letters vs. modern pronunciation, but I don’t really know nor know how to look that up.
If I understand, mu- is a prefix that workers similarly to the suffix -er/-tor in English. Does mu- have any resonance with the sound cats are thought to make?
Are the two forms not similar in Arabic?
Right; the cat’s name, معزة, has z, not dh.
Assuming that the form AJP cites is correct, the forms are definitely quite unrelated. The muezzin word is from the root √ʔðn, as in ʔaða:n, the Muslim call to prayer (and ʔuðn “ear.”) The cat name seems to come from √ʕzz “be mighty/dear” (as in the name [Abdu-l] Aziz.) I didn’t know the story about the cat, though, so I may be wrong about that.
The m– formant turns up in all sorts of participle forms (e.g. “Muslim.”) It isn’t really parallel to -er, except by coincidence. Arabic works by messing around with internal vowel structure along (sometimes) with prefixes and suffixes: it doesn’t much derive words just by suffixing or prefixing.
Desultory Google searching suggests that, disappointingly, the cat story may originally have been about the twelfth-century Sufi sheikh Ahmad Ar-Rifāʽī, and that it only got reattributed to Muhammad in the twentieth century.
https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/6mf5ix/muhammad_had_a_cat_muezza/
It all looks rather dubious.
Sigh. But I’m not about to try to emend the article; I’m done with the Wikiwars.
Not ferrets?
Львы и тигры
Приручаются.
Это редко,
Но случается.
Но никто ещё
Пока
Приручить не смог
Хорька.
Слава богу,
Что хорёк
Очень маленький
Зверёк!
[For the benefit of non-Russian-speakers in the audience:
“Lions and tigers
Can be tamed.
It’s rare,
But it happens.
But nobody yet
So far
Had managed to tame
A ferret.
Thank god
That a ferret
Is a very small
Animal!”]
– Boris Zakhoder, Мохнатая азбука (“Fuzzy Alphabet”).
(I was sure I’ve shared this ditty on LH before, but Google doesn’t find it here; maybe that was some other chat or forum I participate in. It’s one of my favorites, for its sheer incongruity, and I like to quote it at anyone I know who happens to have a pet ferret.)
The sentiment is reminiscent of that reflected in the ancient lyric (in my free translation from the original Middle Welsh):
Little birdie, flying high
Birdie flying in the sky:
“Ah,” says the farmer, wiping his eye.
“Dang good thing my cows can’t fly.”
I guess this explains Maçka park in the center of Istanbul. Though the wiki article doesn’t mention where the name came from. I think there are cats there but there must be cats in every park in Istanbul. I thought the name came from Hungary somehow. I think I saw this word in Serbia as well. Is it widespread in the Balkans?
Apparently not:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%A7ka
(the Turkish version of the Wikipedia article about the Istanbul district says that it was named for the place in Trebizond.)
The sentiment is reminiscent of that reflected in the ancient lyric (in my free translation from the original Middle Welsh)
«Hav tak, O Gud, at ikke i det Høje,
som Svalen, Koen ogsaa flyve kan!»
(There is further discussion in that thread.)
The trope is evidently from the Indo-European epic tradition, like dragon-slaying.
“Is it widespread in the Balkans?”
It’s not a Balkan feature.
Macska / mačka for cat is used in Hungarian, Slovak, Ruthenian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Macedonian. Albanian has Macja. Other languages of SE Europe have different words.
The trope is evidently from the Indo-European epic tradition, like dragon-slaying.
Well, that would imply that there’s no similar Kusaasi joke. Is there?
You don’t joke about cows with Fulɓe around.
Quite so. Cows are Serious Business.
^_^
That reminds me of all the rat-sized dogs who believe they’re full-grown wolves…
While I’m not aware of any fossils (the surface of the whole area was after all carried in by the Euphrates and the Tigris quite recently), I’d say “yes”; there were modern humans at the other end of the Fertile Crescent at that time.
“Cows are Serious Business.”
Big Business is the bull in Cold Comfort Farm.
@AJP:
is there a phrase book for expressions like this?
(Kusaal proverbs, that is.)
I’ve just discovered that there are actually two Android applications of them (Agolle and Toende Kusaal, but pretty much the same proverbs.) They give not only the literal meanings, but also what they mean in practice, which is often far from obvious. Good stuff (only thing wrong with them is there aren’t more proverbs.)
Just search on “Kusaal” in the “Play Store” (yuck) if you’ve got an Android thing.
Thank you, DE! That’s very kind of you to remember my question and yes, I do have an Android thing, so I’ll do that now.
You’re welcome …
There are also some proverbs in my Kusaal grammar, both in the “Texts” section at the end, and scattered throughout as examples (findable by searching the PDF for “proverb”, or “KSS”, Kusaal Solima ne Siilima, the text I got many of them from.)
https://zenodo.org/record/3969037
(It’s worth every penny.)
Thanks for that too; it has as well a very good introduction for the likes of me, not knowing anything. Your Kusaal grammar needs MUCH more publicity, starting with the Wikipedia Kusasi Language article Refs link 7, which is there without any description of what it’s linked to. And there’s for instance no mention of Kusaal or even of Gur languages under African languages on the SOAS website, and that seems a shame when more than half-a-million people speak it and SAOS claims to have unrivalled expertise in the languages of Africa. I suppose half a million may not be many but, like Latin & Greek, we’re talking quality of writing and scholarship as well as quantity of speakers.
Agreed on all points. The world must know about Kusaal!
To be fair to the SOAS website, they’re only listing languages which they have major undergraduate teaching commitments to, and the ones that they mention have many millions of speakers. SOAS has supported huge amounts of research into other African languages over the years.
The Gur language that comes closest to this is Mooré, but even this has “only” about 5 million speakers. And unfortunately, even now, there is nothing like an adequate reference grammar of it (even); the one usually referenced, Gaston Canu’s, is very poorly organised and desperately unreliable. (I’m still annoyed that in a widely cited article about “verb extensions” in Niger-Congo, all the Gur data cited were from Canu’s Mooré grammar; I myself checked all the forms Canu cites as having derivational -d-, and none of them actually exists.) There is a good Mooré-French-English dictionary courtesy of Urs Niggli, though; well above average.
Overall, Kusaal itself is probably the best-documented of all the Western Oti-Volta languages at present, with two decent reference grammars (Anthony Agoswin Musah’s is very different from mine, but that’s all to the good) and one-and-a-half good dictionaries.
WRT publicity for Kusaal, I’m all for it (as Hatters may have noticed, from time to time.) But the speakers already know about it, and very few others are much interested, alas.
(Apropos-ish, I just today managed to get hold of the indefatigable André Prost’s Les langues de l’Atakora, which has a quite lengthy grammatical sketch of Boulba, easily the most aberrant Western Oti-Volta language and evidently the first to branch off. It’s already raised a lot of fascinating questions about the subgrouping within Western Oti-Volta, and incidentally given me a lightbulb moment regarding the origin of some Kusaal forms …)
I just want to tip my hat again to Urs Niggli, bearer of one of the greatest names in linguistics.
Just keep in mind he’s not the agronomist Urs Niggli.
very few others are much interested, alas
Only because we don’t know about it. Once we know, there are plenty of reasons to be interested.
I’m not down on the SOAS, I admire its work, but I am surprised that the range of languages that are taught and or researched is so limited. I assume the motivation is just in wanting to reach the greatest number of people.
Apparently a recent paper in Science (I haven’t seen it, just a news article) claims that Felis lybica domestication happened only 2000 years ago, and that earlier felid skeletons found with human remains were in fact commensal wild cats. Since F. catus and F. lybica are skeletally indistinguishable, only aDNA evidence was satisfactory. If this is true, it explains why words for ‘domestic cat’ are so recent.
Here’s the news story: https://www.iflscience.com/we-finally-know-where-pet-cats-come-from-and-its-not-where-we-thought-81714
“Editor’s summary”, very informative “structured abstract” with a picture, and “abstract” here, rest paywalled.
(And yes, F. lybica with the wrong order of y and i.)
So it looks like modern domesticated cats spread with the Roman armies, whose grain stores they were defending against mice.
@hans
Why Roman and not Carthaginian (or first Carthaginian, then Roman)? Do the error bars on 2000 BP exclude this?
Domestic cats also got to West Africa somehow (unlike any Roman armies.)
The Kusaal word, amus “domestic cat”, is pretty clearly a loan from Hausa, which may have in turn got the word from Berber. Moba múdĝ evidently got borrowed early enough to pick up a noun-class suffix and to undergo the regular shift of non-initial s > d. (Not that that necessarily implies great antiquity: cf Moba kɔ̄líɛ́d̀ “collège.”)
“Domestic cat” is not reconstructable for proto-Western Oti-Volta, even, let alone anything at a greater time depth. Even quite closely related languages use unrelated words.
The kenning “hut child” for “cat” (Kusaal dɔɔg biig) is found all over Western Oti-Volta, though, and even in Buli. In Farefare, the equivalent, deebia, seems to be just the ordinary word for “cat.”
@PP: I would see the first option as less likely, because the Carthaginian empire never spread that far. The Romans most probably were involved; I read somewhere about them bringing along cats on their military expeditions to guard their grain stores. They also started ruling Egypt, a land where cats famously were kept for that purpose, around the time the paper says cats started being spread around Europe. Your second scenario looks possible; it’s also possible that they spread their own variety of cats – the Corsican and Sardinian wild cats that, according to the paper, stem from a separate inflow from North Africa, may be a remnant of a spread of cats traveling with the Punic armies, while the Carthaginian cats were otherwise replaced with Roman cats… all this is purely my speculation, anyway.
Domestic cats also got to West Africa somehow (unlike any Roman armies.)
What, you’re telling us the eminent Africanist scholar Edgar Wallace was wrong???
From the late republic onward, the Romans needed foreign grain — primarily from Sicily and Egypt — to keep up the annona-System (the panis of panem et circenses) and avoid politically dangerous food riots. It wasn’t so much the Roman soldiers themselves as the supply of food for the poor in Rome itself that was important. I wonder if this would have worked if the grain stores in the city of Rome were not protected by cats. OTOH, Carthaginian soldiers stationed in their Sicilian colonies wouldn’t need grain imports from Africa because Sicily was a grain exporter itself.
Domestic cats are not mentioned in the Old Testament. In the Mishna, as I recall, there is a discussion on whether to kill a cat that killed other domestic animals, like chickens. That suggests to me that those cats weren’t quite the domesticates of our acquaintance.
While cats help with rodents, they are not a perfect solution. I presume that granaries in Rome and elsewhere were designed to keep rodents away, for example by keeping them well off the ground, as California Indians did for winter stores of acorns and other seeds.
Supposedly the Aesculapian snake was kept around Roman homes to keep down the rodent population.
When the rebellion that brought down Gadhafi was under way, I read that he called the rebels “rats and cats”, which I thought was funny. It’s not a classification familiar to us Westerners.
That suggests to me that those cats weren’t quite the domesticates of our acquaintance.
I don’t know what cats you’ve been acquainted with, but I’m quite sure there are still cats who are happy to kill chickens (et al.) if and when they get the chance. I don’t think of cats as domesticates like dogs but as, shall we say, fellow travelers.
Perhaps they are fiercer around your parts. The more murderous cats of my acquaintance never got anything larger than a pigeon or a rat.
I’m quite sure there are still cats who are happy to kill chickens (et al.) if and when they get the chance.
Yeah, we had a cat from the SPCA that had been ‘rescued’ from a feral litter. It frequently brought in ‘gifts’ of assorted wildlife. Most of them were long-dead, but you could never trust the cat’s air of insouciance.
Once a rat-catcher, always a rat-catcher, I guess.
A popular science overview about cats in the Roman world, also mentioning cats as camp followers. Not the source I remember reading, but the first overview I found that wasn’t a breathless “Ohmygod! The Romans had cats! How cuuute!”
It was the Roman postal system. Any new means of communication will immediately be flooded with kittens.
Inreresting study, but do we know that this is the first domesticated cats rather than a new (and maybe more manageable) lineage that would eventually replace the older one as ratcatcher of choice? Maybe the European wildcat came from Anatolia with the first farmers and replaced the smaller indigenous wild species in Europe?
@TE: It’s a pity that the cat pictures Cicero attached to his letters didn’t survive 😉
On your other point: From the overview I linked to it seems that the Romans originally used ferrets to combat vermin, so at least for them, your older-lineage-replaced-by-newer-lineage scenario doesn’t seem to work.
Additionally, while the classical sources use feles for ferrets, polecats, and cats, in Romance the word was replaced by cattus, which spread to most European languages. That makes more sense (at least to me) if this was a new animal that people wanted to distinguish from ferrets and polecats than if it was just a new breed.
Domestic cats are cold blooded killers that can devastate local bird populations. According to a 2013 study “ We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually”.*
I have heard similar numbers from other wildlife specialists (and bird watchers).It is apparently irresponsible to let your house pet roam at will.
* https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
a new animal that people wanted to distinguish from ferrets and polecats
Yes, that’s pretty striking. Persian is a rare example of a language transferring a word for wild cat to the domestic cat, according to a comment by Martin Schwartz on the Language Log post: “Persian gurba/gorbe, Middle Perisan gurbag ‘cat’ is ultmiately cognate with Latin vulpes ‘fox’; there is a Lithuanian cognate which means ‘wild cat’.” This is also argued by the paper discussed here in 2021 under Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’: “we reconstruct PIE *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’ based on Latin, Lithuanian, Persian, and Albanian evidence.”
Cats are mentioned once in Baruch 6:21 (not included in Jewish or most Protestant bibles) where they, along with bats and birds, sit on the (false) gods of Babylon.
That’s αἴλουροι in the Septuagint, but some doubt has been thrown over whether it was some sort of scribal error. There’s a parenthetical note in the OED’s etymology for cat (revised 2021):
That interpretation probably comes from a 1931 paper Latin catta ‘Kind of Bird’, which also points out that the KJV’s “sit upon” is a mistranslation of the Greek ἐφίπτανται (Vulgate volant), and should rather be “fly over” or “fly to”, adding “both bats and swallows are notoriously in perpetual flight and rarely sit—and never in the company of cats.”
Except, of course, in paradise, where the lambs lie with the lions and the cats hang with the bats.
Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?
“Cat” is obviously derived from the Gulimancema word káto “spoon”, which is where the association with “eating” comes in.
“Bat” here derives from the Dyula word bàtá “frog.” Cats do not, in fact, eat bats, which would simply fly away if they tried, and (as Phelps astutely points out) rarely spend time on the ground where they would be vulnerable to stealth attacks.
In the Mishna, as I recall, there is a discussion on whether to kill a cat that killed other domestic animals, like chickens. That suggests to me that those cats weren’t quite the domesticates of our acquaintance.
Or that those chickens weren’t the monstrosities of our acquaintance.
The Douay-Rheims has “Bats and swallows, and other birds fly upon their bodies, and upon their heads, and cats in like manner.” Flying cats solve your problem quite elegantly. A more recent translation uses “alight on their bodies” etc., and “alight” nicely straddles the difference between flying and sitting.
Note by the way that “Baruch 6” reflects questionable editorial judgment by the compilers of the Vulgate. In the LXX, Baruch only has 5 chapters and the so-called 6th is treated as a separate text called the ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΗ ΙΕΡΕΜΙΟΥ* – in English the Epistle or Letter of Jeremiah or Jeremy or Ieremias etc.
Although this text came down to us only in Greek (plus translations from the Greek), some scholars are convinced that it is indeed a translation of a lost Hebrew original not least because “a number of [its] Greek readings seem to stem from misreadings of a Hebrew parent text.” (What I’m quoting gives three examples, none involving cats.)
*Sorry for the all caps – I’m lazily cutting and pasting.
I’ve known a cat that killed a bat that had gotten itself trapped indoors.
The macropredatory bats aren’t large enough for that; prey sizes for spectral and ghost bats top out at 150 g.
Hat: Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?
Cats eat rats, and rats eat bats.
Therefore cats eat bats. Elementary logic.
I read someplace about the Had Gadya song, which concludes the Passover seder: “why didn’t God just kill the goat?”
that goats are impervious to divine attack is rarely acknowledged, but of great theological importance. why else is separating them from the sheep necessary? why else can they carry sins into the wilderness, unharmed?
And of course goats undermine some of the easy transitivity suggested above. Goats famously eat thistles, and humans in turn eat goats, yet humans do not eat thistles directly. We have goats to do that for us.
I eat artichokes. They are thistles.
How many chambers to your stomach(s)?
Does the artichoke (remains of) take up more space on your plate after you’ve (allegedly) eaten it?
With mayonnaise or vinaigrette?
I’ve never met a goat that preferred thistles over whatever snacks were in my backpack.
I see my post on the environmental devastation caused by the predation of North American house cats didn’t pass moderation. As a dog lover, I can‘t say I am surprised.
Thistles are consumed directly by humans in the form of soup, across many regions of the world. In Abruzzo thistle soup („zuppa di cardo“) is a traditional Christmas dish.
Thistle soup was also popular in the 1970s among the more ecologically minded spirits at the time.
I am curious why nettle soup is known in Ireland (also northern Europe) but not thistle soup. Maybe thistle soup exists, but is just not known to me.
I see my post on the environmental devastation caused by the predation of North American house cats didn’t pass moderation.
It wasn’t in moderation, it had been sent straight to spam, and Akismet doesn’t notify me when it does that, so I can only rescue it if you tell me about it. Good thing you did! (Others, take note: if a comment doesn’t get posted, let me know.)
And it is definitely irresponsible to let cats roam at will; people who claim that their little pals “need their freedom” or whatever just don’t give a shit about the general good.
In Abruzzo thistle soup („zuppa di cardo“) is a traditional Christmas dish.
I am curious why nettle soup is known in Ireland (also northern Europe) but not thistle soup.
In my experience, the cardi in zuppa di cardi are cardoons. In fact, cardoons and artichokes are just two different cultivated varieties of Cynara cardunculus.
Perhaps there’s a Darwinian irony that because the domestic cat is as a result of domestication smaller than its undomesticated cousins it is necessarily more focused on birds because they’re not too large to be infeasible as prey. Wikipedia tells me, for example, that the North American bobcat (Lynx rufus) prefers to hunt rabbits although it will settle for birds, with the smaller-than-bobcats European wildcat (F. silvestris) likewise interested in lagomorphs. In the even-larger direction, “In keeping with its larger size, the Eurasian lynx is the only lynx species to preferentially take ungulates.”
Is there a mad-scientist tweak of feline DNA available that would make housecats want to hunt rodents while eschewing birds?
From the study Vanya cited:
>Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.
We never let our cat out before he died, for the reasons cited. But it is worth considering that if we had, 99% of mortality would’ve been among the prolific house sparrows which are also invasive species here (in North America, which was the locus of the study.)
(I seem to have let my edits get eaten by the timer rather than pushing save. If this winds up duplicate, delete it.)
Also, the ranges of mortality in that study show that cats are taking roughly 6 times as many rodents already. I’m not sure how much more you could expect.
And it’s worth considering how dogs disrupt both ground nesting and ground feeding. Given their habit of ranging rapidly across a landscape, they are likely to banish most birds from a wider area. Even in our fairly small suburban yard, birds could continue feeding in many of the portions we’ve given over to prairie-scape even if a cat was let out to stealthily wander through. A dog let out would immediately run the whole yard, scaring everything away.
If you’re concerned about the effects of cats in residential neighborhoods, you might want to keep your dog inside too. And far too many people bring their dogs to hike in natural areas.
There is also a natural hierarchy of predators and mesopredators. Coyotes push out foxes and cats. Keeping your dog inside will allow coyotes a freer, more fearless run of the area, which will hold free-range cats in check.
All this runs counter to the odd prejudice for dogs over cats in this country, which I think is partly homeowner class consciousness – “we have a yard big enough for dogs”, even if the yard isn’t actually big enough. My sister has three, and an astroturf yard because the dogs tore the grass to mud. If she had three cats, her yard would support some wildlife.
The thistle Gundelia tournefortii is a very fine vegetable. A widespread name in Arabic for this vegetable in its range is عكوب ʿakkūb. Persian کنگر kangar is used to refer to G. tournefortii where it grows, but the word is also often used to refer to cardoons, too, in my experience. And in greater Kurdistan, G. tournefortii is called in Kurdish kereng (also kengir, etc.); Zazaki kenger ; Turkish kenger ; but Turoyo ʿarkūwo (doubtless < *ʿakkūbā) and Northeastern Neo-Aramaic ܠܲܓ݂ܢܵܐ laġna, etc. (Many speakers of Mardini colloquial Arabic have also offered me a form like ḥaršaf with ḥ; cf. the widespread Arabic خرشوف ḫaršūf, ḫuršūf ‘artichoke’, source of the English artichoke—this is a somewhat confused family of words.) In my mind I always call it kenger.
A nice video showing the gathering of kenger in Batman Province is here. After harvest, it takes some time to trim all the spines away and wash the dirt out of the layers of nested leaves, as you would from leeks—more time than most vegetables probably require. But it is well worth it. It has a mild flavor and somehow the texture and mouthfeel are just right for a vegetable. Another reason that kenger is not more well known is that it bruises easily and begins to wither and rot just a couple of days after harvest—it has to be prepared or cooked and preserved soon after harvesting, and I think it can’t be transported in a supermarket network or to a canning factory far away. I buy several kilos of kenger whenever I see a farmer selling it on the street while it in season, in spring, and my housemates get sick of having it every night. There is a simple recipe for fried kenger showing the steps of preparation here. I usually put it in fırın tava, stews cooked in the oven. The seeds are great snack, too.
The best pizzeria in Turkey is Kafro’s Pizzeria, located in the Syriac Christian village of Kafro (on Turkish maps, Elbeğendi) in Mardin Province. It serves a pizza with kenger (#15 on the menu seen briefly here) as long as their stock of the vegetable lasts.
Another thistle that I eat a lot of (in season) is Echinops spinosissimus, which grows in abundance on waste ground everywhere in southeast Turkey. The spherical flower heads of the local variety are an intense azure color. You pick off the flower head and crush it underfoot. You pick it up and the individual florets and the stem fall off the rounded central structure, which is what you pop in your mouth. It is light green and ranges in size from a pea to a small chickpea. It is crunchy and has a very mild, pleasant flavor. It would be tedious to gather enough to make a meal of these all at once, but it is a very nice continual nibble to have as you walk in the countryside in the evening as the hot season kicks in. A charming name of E. spinosissimus in Turkish is eşek köftesi, ‘the donkey’s meatball’.
Are you eating the kenger root, leaves or both? And does the farmer who sells it on the street remove the spines first, or do you have to do that?
I was thinking of taller thistles like the Canada thistle that is invasive where I live, but that looks like a common low-profile prickly lawn weed here (mostly eradicated by people who poison their grass, but more common when I was a kid.) I wonder if this local thistle is edible.
It’s a lot like Belgian endive. You eat the tender overlapping leaves of the underground stem just as it pushes up to the surface of the ground. Once the stem reaches the surface, it expands into a green rosette that is too spiny to eat. Farmers can mound earth upon last year’s roots to the extend the length of the underground stem. The farmer cuts off most of the expanding top rosette, but not all of it. You have to remove the last remaining spines at home. The harvested plant bruises and discolors easily, so you can’t process it too much or clean it until you are ready to cook. For this reason, they are sold with a lot of dirt clinging to them. The very beginning of the second short I linked to shows a farmer selling them and the cook cleaning them.
Many parts of plants of the genus Cirsium are perfectly edible and not bad, in my experience, including Canada thistle (C. arvense)—once you get rid of the spiny bits and process them otherwise. I have generally found Cirsium a lot of work for little reward. But there is even a species named for its edibility, C. edule.
thistle, cardoon
Previously at Language Hat: cardoon and chard are both descended from Latin carduus ‘thistle, artichoke’, chard more circuitously. See there for discussion on how chard got that name and initial ch-.
@Xerîb: Thanks for the interesting vegetable posts. The edible part of Echinops spinosissimus sounds as if it corresponds to the artichoke heart.
There are those who wouldn’t consider Gundelia to be thistles because they’re in tribe Ciochorieae, not Cardueae.
Consider my earlier statement amended to “eat thistles, spiny parts and all” or something like that.
More generally, most ruminants have the feature of being able to subsist on foods that humans cannot subsist on (as in, could not successfully digest and derive nutritional value from even if ingestion were physically possible) and transform that input into meat that humans can and do eat. An excellent system.
“Vegetables are what food eats.”
Hmmm. Do goats and iron chariots have anything in common?
Öku-Þórr (“Thor the driver”).
Thor’s goats could be slaughtered and resurrected.
(I think the story of Thor and his goats as we know it has merged at least three different mythological explanations of thunder. Thor’s hammer makes both sparks and sound, and so do the wheels of a chariot. The names of the goats can be construed as “Toothflasher” and “Toothgnasher”, which indicates a third explanation. The fact that they are he-goats, whose main characteristic is their habit of clashing together, may be a fourth.)
I was wondering!
Positively Egyptian.
“It’s thundering” in Kusaal is saa tansidnɛ “the sky is shouting*” and “there was lightning” is saa iankya "the sky has jumped."
I've heard that there are nice "sky-father fertilises earth-mother with rain" myths around in Africa, but in Kusaal, saa just means “sky”, or in some contexts, “rain.” (It’s the go-to empty subject for weather verbs: saa niidnɛ “it’s raining.”) No myths. Who needs ’em? (Perhaps they gave them to the Norse.)
* “The sun is shining” is winnig tansidnɛ “the sun is shouting”: tans is only really “shout” if it’s a person doing it.
“The sun is shining” is winnig tansidnɛ “the sun is shouting”
Is such usage found in other languages of the region? I instantly thought of this planet in Rick and Morty and wondered if the scene might have been inspired by a writer’s knowledge of such an expression. I see that Mooré has yãrge ‘shout at someone’ beside yãge ‘shine’.
the story of Thor and his goats as we know it
Luke Giuntoli recently gave a fantastic talk about Thor and his goats, “Goats in Indo-European Myth and Ritual”, at UCLA. Here are the abstract and the handout.
Comment: “That sun scream is my alarm clock sound. Its terrifying to wake up to but it really works.”
Dramatic example of as such for “therefore”: “the god who grants abundance. As such, I will”…
Also worth noting: I think the myth can go back at most to Proto-Indo-Actually-European; the “goat” words all look like loans (lots of *a in them, and they don’t quite agree with each other) and haven’t been found in Tocharian or Anatolian, and I can’t remember archeological evidence that goats (unlike sheep!) where known to potential IE-speakers before they entered agricultural Europe.
Is such usage found in other languages of the region?
The “sky shout” = “thunder” idiom certainly is, but I can’t find any other instances of the sun shouting.
However, most of the dictionaries don’t do much more than list single words with glosses; they’re not much good for collocations or idioms. Not even the Toende Kusaal dictionary has that idiom, but given that Agolle and Toende Kusaal are mutually comprehensible, I’d be surprised if the dialect really didn’t have it.
Naden’s Agolle dictionary glosses this sense of tans “burst out”, but I think that’s really an attempt to defuse the metaphor and make it “make sense”: the verb is certainly used in the imperfective aspect in this sense, and in the sentences he gives with “burst out” and a human subject, “shout” seems to be the actual sense to me.
Mooré yãrge is a monactional derivative of yãre “shout at someone”; I can’t find any cognates, but it can’t be related to yãge “flash”, where the g is root-final, and not the monactional derivational suffix.
However, yãge is a very interesting verb. It does have cognates: notably Farefare yãkɛ “flash, make lightening”, which is the monactional derivative (*gg > k, as in Mooré and Kusaal.) The base verb appears in Niggli’s Farefare dictionary:
Saaga n yãgrɩ
“La pluie fait des éclairs”
Here, Kusaal uses iank “jump, fly” (see my comment above), which has a cognate in Farefare to ẽkɛ.
So I see what’s happened: the regular cognate of Farefare yãke in Kusaal would be yank. The initial i of the rising Kusaal diphthong ia does in fact contrast with y /j/: y is tenser and shorter in duration, but there is a minimal pair in e.g. ya “houses” versus ia “seek” (both mid tone.)
But the sounds are obviously very similar: and the expected *yank has evidently got merged into the unrelated verb iank “jump, fly.” I thought “the sky jumps” was a weird idiom for “there’s lightening” …
The merger wouldn’t happen in Toende Kusaal, which lacks the Agolle breaking of Common Kusaal *ɛ to ia before velars. And, lo and behold, it doesn’t: Niggli’s dictionary has yãk “étinceler, briller”, as in
Saa yi Arazãna ni li yãk.
“Un éclair est tombé du ciel et a brillé.”
versus ãk “s’envoler, quitter la terre, bonder, battre (cœur)” as in
Niiŋa ãke. Õ bʋ ãke.
“L’oiseau s’est envolé. Il ne s’est pas envolé.”
I’ve been so blind! Blind, I tell you!
It makes me wonder if tans might also be a chance merger of two originally distinct verbs. The “shout” sense has a cognate in Moba tand, but I can’t offhand think of any likely candidates for “shine.” Further research is needed …
“Un éclair est tombé du ciel et a brillé.”
Queens have died, young and fair.
“That sun scream is my alarm clock sound. Its terrifying to wake up to but it really works.”
Cf. “at the shriek (of dawn or day)”, in which I can’t help speculating on Polari influence. It seems to be much less common than I thought.
Never heard of it (although it will probably turn out it’s been mentioned here before and I’ve forgotten).