One of the singular proofs of the foreign importation and perhaps of the late arrival in Europe of the cat, is found in its various names, says the London Daily News. It is said that none of them came from the old Aryan source, from which most of our language is derived. Most of them, like the familiar cat, are connected with the late Latin catus, which took the place of the earlier felis, when cats drove out the former foes of rats and mice.
It seems to follow that cats came into the west with the Romans, but whence did the Romans get the name and the animal? M. Pictet traces the name to the Syrian qato, and the Arabic qitt, out of which by an easy and natural process we make kitten. Qitt and qato, however, are not the primative native forms of the cat’s long-descended title, and we must go from Syria to Africa to find gada, kadiska and kaddiska. As for the ancient Egyptian “man,” that is merely the “mew cat” and the “pussy mew” of English nurseries. Here, then, in Egypt is a native onomatopoeic name of the cat, such as any human being might give it when he first heard the peevish, prolonged note of its voice.
The Indian names of the cat are not very old, and they are easily explained. The cat is “the house wolf,” the “rat eater” [though snakes are ratters of some districts,] and the foe of mice.” The most endearing title of the cat comes from the land whence the most pleasing specimens of the race are derived. The Persian cat, wild or tame, is “puschak,” which the Afghans pronounce “pischik” and the Lithuanians, as old an Aryan-speaking race as any in Europe, “puiji.” The English “puss” is clearly of the same family of words. If “puss” in the long run is derived from a Sanscrit word for a “tail,” there is a curious coincidence between the word used by Herodotus for the Egyptian cat, “the creature with waving tail,” and the term found in Persian, Lithuanian, and English.
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