cat < ?

[David L. White]

> My problem is that the cat words all look too much alike.

        That is probably because they are all fairly recent loan-words.  I
seem to recall that (apart from /miu/), there are only two cat-words in
general use in European languages, which might be called the /k-/ word and
the /p-/word (both of these exist in English).  However, though Welsh has
/cath/, Irish has (as I recall, I have no decent dictionary here) some
version of the /p-/ word, so we cannot even reconstruct a Common Celtic word
for 'cat'.   The fact(?) that Irish has a /p-/ word for 'cat' of course
means that the word cannot be old there.

Dr. David L. White