more onomatopoetic and mysterious cats

[ROOD DAVID S]

For what it's worth, the Wichita (Caddoan) word for the domestic cat is
wi:yo:;  given that this language has no word-initial [m], that has to be
'meow', it always seemed to me.  The word I got for 'wild cat', whatever
animal that might mean, is wi:yo:sko:ks; -s- connects nouns to other
things in compounds; ko:ks is the adj. you use for naughty children,
especially rebellious teenagers, or relatives who misbehave in various
ways, or any kind of mildly unacceptable social behavior; it's usually
glossed 'crazy', but 'wild' isn't far off.

I have often wondered whether this is like the terms for 'shoe', 'house',
'chicken', etc., in that an older word has taken on a meaning for
something from European culture, and the original entity is then described
by a noun plus adjective combination (adj. usually being 'original'
'real', genuine' or, in this case 'wild').  Does the "meow" word lend
itself to application to the bigger animals?

Another hypothesis that I've entertained, though never collected any
concrete evidence for, is that they had some kind of name-taboo custom not
too long ago which meant you had to make up new words if the old word were
part of the name of someone who died.  If the original word for 'wildcat'
were in someone's name and that taboo applied, "wi:yo:sko:ks" might well
be a good euphemism to replace the newly forbidden term.  They have enough
other "descriptive" animal names to make me think this is a real
possibility.

Michael: they also have a word wate:ya:h, which no one can gloss precisely
-- I get, puma, panther, etc., but also a description that it lives in the
woods, near water, and can lure people toward it in the dark by sounding
like a crying child or a crying woman.  I've also had people tell me it
was sort of half-cat, half-dog, solid black, with bright yellow eyes.
One interpreter of it in a song text called it 'something powerful'.  I
have been suspecting that this is your "underwater cat", in the badly
impoverished "cultural memory" of this dying culture.  What do you think?


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, CRAIG KOPRIS wrote:
> > Before trying to assign a source language to cat
> > terms, it might be best to rule out onomatopeia first!
> > I've encountered the claim (I don't have the
> > reference handy anymore) that (domestic) cat terms
> > around the world are usually based on either: ...
>
> > 1. the sound a cat makes; e.g., English 'meow',
> > Chinese 'miao'
>
> ....
>
> > 3. another call to get a cat's attention (ktktktk);
> > e.g. English 'cat', 'kitten', Arabic 'q at Ta'
> >
> > I wouldn't be surprised if the ancient Egyptians, who
> > domesticated the cat in the first place, used one of
> > the onomatopeic "roots".
>
> Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar 3rd Ed., p. 459, gives miw, where the i has a
> left opening hook over it and is apparently supposed to represent a y,
> i.e., myw (missing the vowels, of course).  So, you're quite right.
>
> I hadn't realized that forms other than "meow" were considered
> onomatopoeic, and your Pashto form puts pVS forms further afield in IE as
> well.
>
> Webster's reports that kitten has evolved from a Old French diminutive
> form chaton.  I gather kit is a back formation.
>
> JEK
>