This again! This time we’re doing large wild animals (except
bear, which I did a long time ago).
Deer
Deer comes from the Old English deor, which meant animal or beast.
Further back, it’s the Proto Germanic deuzam (again, it just means animal)
and earlier, the Proto Indo European dheusom, a creature that breathes.
Seriously. The word dheu means cloud
or breath. It’s actually not that different from the word animal,
which comes from the Latin
anima, breath or spirit.
The only difference is that deer went from referring to animals in general to
one specific type.
Moose
The word moose first showed up in the early seventeenth century,
and unlike most words in the English language, it’s not of European extraction.
Moose is a Native American word, definitely Algonquian,
and taken from either the Narragansett moos or the Abenaki moz. Can you believe it? A purely
American word!
Wolf
Wolf comes from the Old English wulf, and before
that, the Proto Germanic wulfaz and
Proto Indo European wlkwo. Don’t ask
me how to pronounce it, but it means wolf, meaning the word was attached to the
animal sometime at the beginning of known languages. I guess when something’s
trying to kill you, it’s best to have a specific, universal word for it.
Cougar/bobcat/jaguar/ocelot/lynx/puma
Boy, there are a lot of words for big cats. Lynx is the
oldest cat words, showing up in the mid fourteenth century.
It comes from the classical Latin lynx
(yes, it means lynx), which was
taken from the Greek lyngz. Cougar is
fairly recent, coming from the French (as in, modern French) couguar, which just means cougar,
and probably brought over to Europe from Brazil. Bobcat, which is another word
for lynx, showed up in 1873 (pretty recent, huh?), and it’s just a mix of bob (for the short tail) and cat. Ocelot showed up in the late eighteenth century,
another word coming from French, in this case ocelot, which shockingly enough means ocelot.
It’s believed to come from the Aztec word ocelotl, which means jaguar,
a word of Portuguese origin. Puma is also a late eighteenth century word,
coming from the Spanish puma (do you even have to ask?), taken from the
Peruvian…puma. Basically, except for
lynx, all big cat words are of American origin, and they really haven’t changed much.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
