[Lexicog] Re: bat

Emrah Özcan ozcanemrah at GMAIL.COM
Thu May 11 06:24:25 UTC 2006


Engin wrote that bat means baykuş, but he made a little mistake that bat
means yarasa like in batman-yarasa adam, baykus is owl (baykuş - s with a
dot)...

Emrah


On 5/10/06, gunduz_engin <gunduz_engin at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, Simon Wickham-Smith
> <wickhamsmith at ...> wrote:
> >
> > hi - so I looked up the Tibetan word for bat.  I found pha wang,
> > which didn't really help very much until it dawned on me that it
> > might be an alternative or dialectical pronunciation of 'phur wa, ie
> > a flying fox.  I haven't come across any mythology which could help
> > in this etymological search, maybe someone out there can help.  I
> > would definitely connect pha with 'phur, which would emphasise the
> > flying thing.
> >
> > In Mongolian it's sarisan bagvaaxai, in which saris means a membrane
> > or else leather (here in the appositive genitive) and bagvaaxai is
> > another word for a simple commonorgarden bat.  I can't work out the
> > etymology of bagvaaxai (any takers?) but interestingly the word for a
> > dandelion is bagvaaxai tsetseg, a bat-flower.  (Note that these terms
> > are grammatically different:  the leathery bat is noun+gen+noun, but
> > the dandelion is noun+noun.)
> >
> > I also found a Uyghur dictionary and scanned that.  There are three
> > words (or more likely three spelling variants) - şäpäräk,
> > şäpiräñ and şipäräk.  Şäpä means a sound, signal or
> > indication, which clearly has something to do with the bat's
> > tweepytweep signalling.  On the other hand, şäpiräk means emaciated
> > or lean...don't quite get that.  I have no idea whether this is of
> > any use, but the ending -räk (or -raq in fronted vowel words) is a
> > comparative marker for adjectives.
> >
> > What's the Turkish word?
> >
>
> You asked this question a long time ago, but as I could not
> find the answer in the replies (perhaps I missed it), here
> we go:
>
> baykuş is the word for bat in Turkish. Tietze's Etymological
> Dictionary for Turkish says it comes from "bay" (meaning 'rich',
> but this word no longer has that meaning) and "kuş" (meaning
> 'bird').  If the last letter of the word is not legible in your
> mail reader: It is an 's' with a cedilla underneath.
>
> Now, why a bat would be considered 'rich', I have no idea.
> The etymology did not really make sense to me.
>
> -engin
>
>
> > Interesting that the Hungarian bat is a leather(y) mouse.  A bit like
> > an effless Fledermaus, perhaps?
> >
> > What about the adjective batty?  I suspect that there is no
> > connection between the Jamaican argot use for queer (which reminds me
> > of the quasi-euphemistic phrase "batting for the other side", clearly
> > pejorative and clearly from the playing fields of English public
> > schools, where I tell you from experience that battiness is not
> > uncommon;  but also there's a left-hander I think too, another
> > historically pejorative phrase, meaning a queer man) and the British
> > meaning of crazy (a Fledermaus short of an f perhaps?).  Maybe it's
> > because they do things the "wrong" way round - hanging upside down
> > and sleeping during the day...?
> >
> > Si
> > ---
> > Körnerstraße 1, 01407 Leipzig, Germany
> > cell: 0049 (0)1627 325868
> > http://www.qamutiik.net
> > skype: wickhamsmith
> >
>
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-- 
E.Ö.
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