cat < ?

[Jasmin Harvey]

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I forwarded parts of this discussion to a friend who forwarded it onward and
this response came back which may be of interest.

Jasmin Harvey
Germanic Linguistics C.Phil.
http://www.germanic.ucla.edu
jharvey at ucla.edu

-------------------------------------
The source for the Celtic Cat information ... was Alexei Kondratiev, via
Brenda Daverin.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fwd: Re: Of human cattage
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 23:18:18 -0800
From: "B. Daverin" <bdaverin at best.com>
To: "Birrell Walsh" <birrell at well.com>

Here is my source's response to the origins of the word "cat" taken back
to Indo-European through Old/Common Celtic. I know that it's possible
that someone else on that list has already pointed this out, but in case
not, here's more for the discussion.

Sla/n,
Brenda

---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------

The Celtic word for "cat" is perfectly reconstructible as _kattos_ (also
feminine _katta_). This gives _cat_ in both Irish and Scots Gaelic, _kayt_ in
Manx, _cath_ in Welsh, _kath_ in Cornish, and _kazh_ in Breton.  Many
etymological dictionaries say that it's a borrowing from Latin _cattus_, but it
seems completely obvious to me that the reverse is true, that _cattus_ in Latin
(which appears rather late) is in fact a borrowing from a Celtic or other
northern European source, displacing the original _felis_. That the word is
native there is confirmed by the Gaulish name _Cattos_ and the tribal name
_Chatti_ or _Chattes_ ("the Cats" -- ie, "the Wildcats") from the
Celtic-Germanic border country.
   The word is thought to come from an IE stem *_kat-_ or *_qat-_ meaning "to
cast down", in a specialised meaning of "what is cast down = offspring of an
animal". An independent derivation in Latin is _catulus_ "puppy". The Celtic
word evidently began with the sense of "baby animal", then specialised as
"kitten", and eventually came to mean the animal at any age.