Words for 'cat'

Frédéric Dichtel wrote me to ask about my research on words for 'cat', so I thought I would devote this week's blog entry to a summary of what I've done. I got interested specifically in words for 'cat' while researching neologisms in American languages (which I was researching in order to publicly support my private opinion that American languages more often create new words for new things rather than borrowing a word from another language). I noticed that, contra most other types of words, animal words were usually borrowed, often from English, but also other European languages. The word for 'cat' is a prime example of this, and displays probably more similarity cross-linguistically than any other word I looked at. My paperon the topic makes the claim that these similarities are due to a small set of widely diffused borrowings, rather than many separate instances of borrowing.

Similar words in different languages can be similar for four primary reasons: (i) the similarity is due to chance, (ii) the languages are genetically related, (iii) the form is borrowed, either from one language to the other or both from the same external source, or (iv) the words are similar due to some language universal. If languages are unrelated and in contact, the most likely scenario is usually (iii). Some examples are included below.

Language	Family	Word for 'cat'	Source
Mohawk	Iroquoian	takóós	Mithun (1999)
Munsee Delaware	Algonquian	póóšiiš	Swiggers (1985)
Mahican	Algonquian	póschees	Mithun (1999)
Blackfoot	Algonquian	póós	Frantz & Russell (1995)
Kootenai	isolate	pus	KCC (1999)
Chinook Jargon	Chinookan	pús(h)	James Crippen (p.c.)
Hanis	Coosan	puus	Grant (1997)
Klamath	isolate	p'oos	Barker (1963)
Umatilla Sahaptin	Sahaptian	p'uus	Thomas Morningowl (p.c.)
Walla Walla Sahaptin	Sahaptian	p'uus, pišpiš	Thomas Morningowl (p.c.)
Nez Perce	Sahaptian	pic	Aoki (1994)
Cayuse	isolate	picpic	Thomas Morningowl (p.c.)
Tlingit	Na-Dene	dóosh	James Crippen (p.c.)
Haida	isolate	dúus	Enrico (2004)
Coast Tsimshian	Tsimshianic	dúus	Dunn (1979)

Most likely these forms are from a combination of diffused borrowings from Dutch poes, the vocative form for 'cat' (i.e., how Dutch people address(ed) cats), English 'puss' and the English vocative 'psspss' used to call a cat. This would explain the prevalence of three types of forms: those that approximate poos, those that approximate pus (including almost all of the Salishan language, which I haven't included above), and those that approximate pispis. One piece of evidence that these are diffused borrowings rather than individual ones is that while Tlingit lacks labials, and thus has a form beginning with /d/ instead of /p/, Tsimshian and Haida have /p/, and thus must have borrowed the form from Tlingit rather than English or Dutch. James Crippen notes that the Tlingit form in turn is a borrowing from Chinook Jargon.

It's not clear what's so special about the word 'cat', but many northern languages have almost identical forms for this word, while other animal names are quite different. For example, the word for 'chicken' in the same languages displays remarkable variation, ranging from English borrowings to French borrowings to onomatopoetic terms to descriptive neologisms. Besides the northern languages, southeastern and southwestern languages also have very similar terms for 'cat', though they are from different borrowings (often old Spanish mozo or English 'kitty').