[Lexicog] Re: bat

[gunduz_engin]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, Simon Wickham-Smith
<wickhamsmith at ...> 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?
> 

You asked this question a long time ago, but as I could not
find the answer in the replies (perhaps I missed it), here
we go:

baykuş is the word for bat in Turkish. Tietze's Etymological
Dictionary for Turkish says it comes from "bay" (meaning 'rich',
but this word no longer has that meaning) and "kuş" (meaning
'bird').  If the last letter of the word is not legible in your
mail reader: It is an 's' with a cedilla underneath.

Now, why a bat would be considered 'rich', I have no idea.
The etymology did not really make sense to me.

-engin


> 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
>










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