![]() But “otter” and especially “horse” look strange. In my series on the fox (“Vulpes, vulpes”), I observed that the same word is often used for the fox and the wolf (compare Old Norse tík, above) the dog should be added to those two. Its source could have been Middle Low (= northern) German tike (disyllabic, of course the same meaning) or Old Norse tík “vixen.” Although tyke usually means “dog” and especially “cur mongrel” (let alone “child toddler” and “an unpleasant, coarse man”-those are figurative senses), it occasionally denotes “horse” (so also in rather old texts) and “otter” (rarely). One more circumstance should be considered: the generic word for “dog” sometimes develops from the sense “female dog, bitch” or “whelp, cur.” To realize the odds facing the etymologist, we may follow the history of the noun tyke. The real bête noire of English etymology. The idea of the affinity between hound and the Gothic verb meaning “catch” ( hinþan þ = th) was given up long ago, even though this approach is rather attractive and originated with no less a figure than Jacob Grimm. The origin of the Latin noun is also obscure despite numerous conjectures on its origin. Hound may be akin to Latin canis “dog,” but the vowels match badly and final -d has never been explained. The words for “dog” and its breeds sometimes go back to epithets like “fierce,” “tame,” “swift,” “loud,” and even “musical” (the latter two describe the animal’s bark) or the predominant color ( collie is not the only example). Collie, we are told, is related to coal because the earliest breed was black. Talbot apparently derives from the personal name Talbot: the figure of a greyhound was borne in the coat of arms of the Talbot family. Poodle, from German, seems to designate a creature fond of splashing in puddles. ![]() Some easily give away their Romance roots: terrier is such ( terra “earth”) others, like beagle and mastiff, are considerably less transparent. Before formulating even a preliminary hypothesis of where dog came from, it will pay off to study the larger picture, that is, to inquire about some other known names for “dog” and also for various dog breeds.Ī few such names are self-explanatory: for instance, spaniel and Bolognese (Spain, Bologna). Without obvious cognates anywhere (the languages that have dog are said to have borrowed it from English), it had a shadowy life in Old English but managed to hound from its respectable position the ancient name of man’s best friend, the name it has retained in the rest of Germanic. The word dog is the bête noire of English etymology.
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