[Lexicog] bat

[Andrew Shimunek]

To throw in my three cents to the discussion... (perhaps I may find some more spare change in my pocket later... :-) )
 
   I don't know the Turkish word, but Kazak(h) has жарғанат [zharRanat] (where [zh] indicates a voiced post-alveolar or palato-alveolar fricative, [R] is a voiced uvular fricative and [r] is an alveolar trill).
   Manchu has ashangga singgeri lit. 'winged mouse'.
   Also, what is often transcribed as a <v> in Mongolian (based on the Cyrillic orthography) is in fact a bilabial approximant [w], and is usually connected diachronically with an older /b/ phoneme.
 
-Andrew

Simon Wickham-Smith <wickhamsmith at gmx.net> 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?


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
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