[Lexicog] bat

[Simon Wickham-Smith]

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?

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



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20050915/e0906518/attachment.htm>