Well, if that was so, how do we explain French "boyau de chat"? (is
it a translation from English?). Why does the Burwell text refer to
"sheepes and cat's gut", if sheep is included in cattle (true the
origin is "capital" so all "heads" of stock are included). Perhaps,
the writer already believes the myth of it actually being "cat's" gut.
Modern French for cattle is "cheptel", there is another form which
was "chattel", but there is no obvious way to obtain "boyau de chat"
from the words "boyau de chattel". We certainly see no expression
"boyau de cheptel".
Alexander is arguing that cat gut is derived from caterpillar gut (or
possibly catkin gut, ie silk strings). Charles Besnainou argues it is
"cat(apult) gut".
I don't think there is a conclusive etymology as yet. Certainly,
catlines, may have nothing directly to do with cat-gut.
Regards
Anthony
Le 1 avr. 09 à 19:52, Martin Shepherd a écrit :
Dear Anthony and All,
I thought this was solved some time ago by the suggestion that
"cat" = "cattle", and since "cattle" included sheep in those days,
there is no great mystery after all.
Correct me if I'm wrong...
Martin
Anthony Hind wrote:
Dear Alexander and all
As I have not quite had time to write up a description of
Charles Besnainou's "Spiramid" strings (I should be able to do so
soon). I would just like to return briefly to the etymology
question, and explain what I mean by safer or unsafe etymology:
I must insist that I was not saying that the 'caterpillar-gut"
etymology was necessarily any worse than any of the others that
have been cited recently. However, there are many chance
similarities between words that are not in fact related in any
way, and sometimes they just happe to have some meaning in common,
without in fact being related. Such cases, cannot be used as
evidence in favour of a string hypothesis, they must be considered
anecdotal (although again that in no way disproves the hypothesis).
A famous case of ideological etymology was the imagined relation
between the name Brutus and the name Britain and British.
"Brute of Troy is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero
Aeneas, was known in medieval British legend as the eponymous
founder and first king of Britain."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_of_Troy
If one simply relies on a similarity between words, there is a
risk of circularity: you find what you look for. As to "catgut"
and "catline", there are at least three hypotheses that are not
soundly based on linguistic arguments: "caterpillar-gut", "cattle-
gut", "catapult-gut", alongside simple "cat-gut" (I will suggest
another one later). Both caterpillar-gut and catapult-gut are an
attempt to support a theory of an original string type. Can we be
sure that either is safer than the "Brute" = "British" hypothesis.
(note that the cat in caterpillar (= feline), the cat in cattle
(derived from capital) and the cat in catapult (Greek Kata
'against') are all of different origin, and have a chance first
syllable in common. This shows exactly how careful you need to be).
It is notoriously difficult to prove or disprove such analyses,
unless you can find some intermediary from, or an interesting
variant in some dialect.
For example, "cater" is in fact a "tom-cat", if we found an
intermediary form that was "cater-gut" the theory would be home
and dry. In French there is another form for caterpillar which is
chenille (or little dog), now if in some dialect of French we
found the expression, "boyau de chenille", again we could be
pretty happy for that hypothesis. Don't forget that the French
expression is "boyau de chat".
In English, the word for caterpillar could also have been
"catkin" (that is quite plausible, as a "catkin" is very much like
a hairy caterpillar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Ament_inflorescence.jpg
Now it would be easy to derive the English "cat-gut" from "cat-kin
gut", as in English very generally the unstressed element of such
forms can drop, so we might lose the intermediary "kin".
Nevertheless, if we could find just one example of "cat-kin gut"
the analysis would be safer.
Furthermore, how do we get the French form "boyau de chat".? Let
us suppose that in French, we also had the from "chaton" (small
cat), for caterpillar, so we would have "boyau de chaton". There
is no obvious reason why the last syllable would be lost, unless
of course, the caterpillar origin was forgotten, and French people
just couldn't believe that the gut came from a small cat, and so
they just called it "boyau de chat" (but we would prefer it to
have been a typical French phonetic process, loss of the final
unstressed syllable. That is common in English, but not quite so
in French, although we do have "chef" derived from "caput" so it
remains a possibility).
I agree with Alexander that "cattle-gut" is no safer (remember
that cattle comes from "capital"). It is easy to obtain "cat-gut"
by the loss of the weak syllable in English, but it is a pity we
have no example of the full item, "cattle-gut".
Now how do we get "boyau de chat" from this. In Modern French the
equivalent word is "cheptel", but through English we know that
there was also an old form "chattel" (which we still have with a
slightly different meaning in English"). So now how do we get
"boyau de chat" from ""boyau de chattel"?, Why don't we have a
variant that is "boyau de cheptel"?
One might just as well suppose that "catgut" and "boyau de chat"
were ironical remarks about the way most musicians played on the
things, "catawailing". I don't actually, think this is so.
Now I am not saying that any of the above etymologies are
mistaken, they are just not sound. Perhaps, new discoveries may
make them sound.
Just to mention two safer etymologies, relating to strings:
"Minikin" is now believed to mean from Munich. This is not just
because Mace mentions Minikin alongside Venice and Pistoy, and
that "minikin" vaguely resembles Munchen. There are two other
almost identical forms in English but of completely diferent orin,
one from Latin Mini+kin, and one from Dutch. This is the more
interesting :
mini·kin noun, 1. Obsolete a darling, 2. Rare anything very
small and delicate Etymology: MDu minneken, dim. of minne, love:
see minnesinger
Of course, one could easily suppose a minikin string meant
"something small and delicate" and so from the Dutch origin.
However, fortunately, Dowland's use of the from "monikin" , allows
us to see how this form could have been derived from
"monachen" (the origin of Munchen, meaning monastery, and related
to the word monachus, "monk"). It is due to the "o" vowel that
the analysis is fairly safe.
Note that we do have an old process in English of umlaut:
monastery, is the origin of Minster.
However, it may be that the two words "sort of merged" and that by
the time of Mace the string could have been from Munchen, but also
"small and delicate". Yet Mace himself says this was not so. They
are so strong they cut into your hand, so we can be fairly sure of
the munchen origin.
Nevertheless, we should beware even here about taking the
etymology too literally. The origin is form Munich, but does that
mean the string was actually from Munich. It could be that all
samll strings were called Munichs, just as at one time all vacuum
cleaners were called hoovers.
Just notice what Americans call a robbin. The origin is clearly
the word we find in UK English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Turdus-migratorius-002.jpg
So we must not read too much even into a "safe etymology".
While talking about strings and rope, for a layman deriving
English "Hemp" and French "chanvre" from a Greek form for
Cannabis, must seem much more exotic than the caterpilar-gut
hypothesis, but not so for a linguist. This is considered a very
safe etymology, just because of the number of phonetic processes
involved, all backed up by similar changes in other words: For the
English, Kanabis > hemp, we see the regular "First Germanic
consonant shift" : kanabis > hanapis (just like Kardia > heart),
hanapis > henep through Anglo-saxo i/j-umlaut (just like manniz
gives men), henep: giving "henep", and unstressed vowel dropping
gives "hemp" (just like OE emmet gave ant). French in the south
of France we have the older form Canebière which gives central
French "Chanvre " by regular palatalization of K before /a/ (just
as in chateau, etc.)
An excellent text book relating to this, is Historical Linguistics
and Language Change by Roger Lass, CUP.
Regards
Anthony
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