cat < ?

[Kreso Megyeral]

David White wrote:

>A truly minor point ... Mongooses (-geese?) are viverrids, not mustelids, and
>only one type of viverrid, the genet (not mongoose) of Iberia (spreading
>recently to France and even western Germany), occurs in Europe.

>  For the Romans to call a mongoose a cat would have been more or less as for
>us to call skunks 'polecats' or a kind of racoon 'ringtail cats'.

>Not that that stops us. Speaking of deplorable, or understandable, vagueness
>in terms for animal, it is within the realm of possibility the word for 'fox'
>and 'wolf' were not originally distinguished, which would explain a few
>things.

Another good example occurs in Hungarian, where the word for turtle actually
means "frog in shield", showing that even two different classes of
vertebrates can merge. But mongooses are more similar to martens then to
cats, and the marten is also quite usual species in Europe.