DOG in European Languages

21 comments
  1. Basque txakur and Sardinian ghjacaru seem oddly similar but perhaps just a coincidence.

    For once that there’s something looking like Basque, it must be highlighted!

    I know there are some other vocabulary having some similarities + some phonology patterns such as the vowel prothesis, basically before an initial r you add à vowel , similar to Basque and Gascon: rēx > (g)urrèi/re ‘king’ (Basque errege); rota > arroda ‘wheel’ (Gascon arròda, Basque errota); rīvus > Sardinian and Gascon arríu ‘river’.

  2. Huh, this is one of the “x in european languages” maps that has surprised me. Are we really the only Slavic country that uses that word? Curious to see the only other country to use something similar are our steppe bros the Hungarians.

  3. The ethymology for spanish is unknown

    We know is not pre-roman as it appeared around 12th century but other than that there are only theories

  4. French linguists have two hypotheseis for occitan *gos*, and I would be curious to know if Catalans share similar ones.

    The first one is that it’s purely onomatopoeic, that is, it comes from the noise you make when imitating a dog. *Gos* used to be a word in oil languages as well (it’s attested in medieval Picard and Wallon), and that’s also why there’s a second hypothesis that it may instead have an older, unidentified origin (maybe gallic?).

  5. Dog is a weird one turn the clock back 700 years and ‘hound’ was the word that was used, with ‘dog’ being a subgroup of ‘hounds’. Now it has been totally reversed and hound is a subgroup of dogs. No one appears to know why and where it came from.

  6. I was confused how *chien* and *hund* have the same etymology, and it turns out they don’t. Then I spent 5 more minutes on Google and found that the etymology for a lot of these words—for example *perro*, *pies*, and even the English *dog*—have unknown origin. So the etymology coloring scheme is suspect at best.

  7. In the ancient vocabulary it was κύων. May someone with better understanding of ancient Greek phonetics explain how this was pronounced?

  8. Would be interesting to see similar map for the “cat”. I bet there would be less groups in total and the majority would end up in the same group.

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