ASB puza

[Rory M Larson]

I find this very interesting too, and I think it may say
a lot about the mechanics of borrowing.  Was this really
straight-up borrowing from standard English, or was "puss"
actually the standard "Indian" term for "cat" in a jargon
used by frontiersmen and traders to communicate with the
Indians wherever they met them?

Can we be sure that "puss" is even any more native to
English than it is to the various Indian languages that
evidently borrowed the term?  I've just been looking for
what I could find about this word in some etymological
dictionaries.  These seem to agree that the origin of the
word is obscure.  It exists notably in English, Dutch (poes),
Low German, Norwegian, Danish, dialectal Swedish, Irish,
Gaelic (all puus or pus) and Lithuanian (with 'zh' in place
of 's').  It is not the standard word for "cat" in any of
these languages, but is used for calling or naming cats.
(Romanian, however, seems to have taken the word and added a
diminutive to get their standard word for "cat", pisica.)
Except for Romanian, these are all languages of the Baltic
and North Sea area.

In English, Norwegian and Danish, at least, the word can
also mean "hare" or "rabbit", though "cat" seems to be the
predominant meaning.

In English, at least, it doesn't seem to be attested from
the pre-modern period.  I couldn't find it in dictionaries
of Old English, Middle English, or Old Icelandic.  The
earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is
from 1530, with someone mentioning "puss, my cat".  (The
term "puss" precedes the diminutive term "pussy", which
apparently doesn't show up until the 1700's.)

I'm wondering if the term couldn't be explained as follows:
First, we have the Proto-Algonquian term *pes^iwa for "feline".
This word evolves to something like *poos in some east coast
Algonquian dialects.  Somewhere around 1500, North Atlantic
sailors of the English/Teutonic sphere begin to reach the
northeast coast of North America.  Intercourse is established,
and the sailors find that the Indian term for their ship-board
cat is something like "puss".  They pick up this term, and use
it humerously on cats from there on.  This usage becomes common
with sailors of this region, and the word finds its way back
into their home countries.  Later, as English/Teutonic peoples
begin to settle and trade in North America, they always revert
hopefully to the Indian term "puss" when they want to refer to
a cat in "Indian".  The various Indian peoples, for their part,
pick up on the term used by the whites, and adopt it from the
trade jargon into their own languages.

A couple of questions here: Could we get an expansion of the
acronyms BF and PC for those of us who are Algonquian-challenged?
Also, without presuppositions about which way borrowing is
supposed to have gone, are BF poos, PC poosii- and Penobscot
p at so (@ = schwa) reasonable reflexes of Proto-Algonquian?

Thanks to everyone for this discussion.  It's been very
interesting!

Rory





                      "David Costa"
                      <pankihtamwa at earthli        To:       siouan at lists.colorado.edu
                      nk.net>                     cc:
                      Sent by:                    Subject:  Re: ASB puza
                      owner-siouan at lists.c
                      olorado.edu


                      08/13/2003 05:48 PM
                      Please respond to
                      siouan






One thing that I find interesting about all these European 'cat' words
being
borrowed into Native languages is that they're ALL from p-initial forms,
like 'puss' or 'poes'. Oddly, NO language that's been mentioned here so far
borrowed plain old English 'cat', unless that's what's behind Ojibwe
/gaazhagens/ 'cat'.


> [RLR: ]  I don't have a lot to add to the voluminous correspondence on
ASB
> 'cat' except to mention that the way you *call* your cat in a whole
string of
> European colonial (and other) languages is "pis, pis, pis" or "pus, pus,
pus".
> This may or may not have anything to do with the ASB word, but I'm
inclined to
> agree with David that English is the probable source.