human: what [BIG BLACK VOID] are you?
Mau
Mrrrp
I’ve seen this guy. Goes by the name of “Chief”. Works as a bouncer at a bar near the airport.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what was redacted
the fuck
The Japanese word for cat, “neko”, apparently etymologically translates as “quadruped that goes ‘nyan’” (which is the Japanese equivalent of “meow”). The Mandarin word for cat, IIRC, is “mao”.
The cat’s penis (Mao Zedong)
Also, small birds are “tori” in Japanese, likely after the sing-song sound they make (tri-tri-triii)
Ducks are named after a quacking sound in English… And Indonesian&Malaysian; “bebek”!
I could go on for a while but in general it’s not very uncommon for animals to be named like a Pokémon!
In thaï and lao it’s meo also.
I read somewhere that there’s another story of origin (maybe folk etymology though) that “Neko” means something like “star-child” (nagareboshi no ko)
I misread it and thought they were saying that cats made the sound “cat”
Old English catt (c. 700) “domestic cat,” from West Germanic (c. 400-450), from Proto-Germanic *kattuz (source also of Old Frisian katte, Old Norse köttr, Dutch kat, Old High German kazza, German Katze), from Late Latin cattus.
The near-universal European word now, it appeared in Europe as Latin catta (Martial, c. 75 C.E.), Byzantine Greek katta (c. 350) and was in general use on the continent by c. 700, replacing Latin feles. It is probably ultimately Afro-Asiatic (compare Nubian kadis, Berber kadiska, both meaning “cat”). Arabic qitt “tomcat” may be from the same source. Cats were domestic in Egypt from c. 2000 B.C.E. but not a familiar household animal to classical Greeks and Romans.
The Late Latin word also is the source of Old Irish and Gaelic cat, Welsh kath, Breton kaz, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, French chat (12c.). Independent, but ultimately from the same source are words in the Slavic group: Old Church Slavonic kotuka, kotel’a, Bulgarian kotka, Russian koška, Polish kot, along with Lithuanian katė and (non-Indo-European) Finnish katti, which is via Lithuanian.
So… our word for cat is derived from a 2000 year old latin word that itself probably derived from an earlier word from somewhere in Northern Africa and/or the Levant. I guess the people then didn’t pick the name by the sound it makes.
