I was reading Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which is a perfectly normal thing to do, and he quoted a line from Ennius, to make some point he thought needed making:
egregie cordatus homo, catus Aelius Sextus
“Why is he calling Aelius Sextus a cat?” I wondered.
I’m not sure if he wrote the accompanying doggerel.
It turns out he’s not; catus is also an adjective in Latin meaning “sharp, shrill” and by extension “acute, intelligent, sly”, probably the intended meaning here.
So the catlike Aelius disappears in a fuzzy puff of philologic and we’re left with something like this:
“the outstandingly wise (literally: hearted) man, wily Aelius Sextus”
Since the slyness of cats is proverbial, and because they can make shrill noises, I was left wondering if the Latin noun catus (“cat”) was derived from the adjective catus (“sharp, shrill, sly”).
The answer, frustratingly, is not clear. A word for cat that looks like catus is widespread in Germanic and Romance languages, and even migrates into Byzantine Greek, but its ultimate origins are unclear. (So says the tyrant OED and the democratical AHD.) The Latin word catus (sometimes cattus) is post-classical, first appearing in the commentaries of Servius (approx 400 C.E.) and Palladius (maybe 300s, maybe 400s C.E.). (So says Forcellini.) That’s late enough that it could be a loanword from a Germanic language.
Still, catulus/catula (“puppy; the young of several species”) is quite ancient, going back to Plautus, which is about as far as surviving Latin literature goes. Michiel de Vaan notes some cognates for catulus in other Indo-European languages, but doubts that the word can be put back to an Indo-European origin. But maybe the noun was derived from the adjective, because of the shriller, whinier sounds that little critters make.
It seems to me that catus (“cat”) may have been Vulgar Latin, submerged in the classical period but emerging in later Latin, as many a common word did. Or catus (“cat”) may have been a back-formation in later Latin to fill a lexical gap. The -ulus in catulus is a diminutive; it’s logical to assume that catus would be the word for the adult animal. Language doesn’t have to be logical, as we know, but this is a kind of process that adds words to languages (e.g. orientate from orientation—even though orient is just standing there, waiting to be used).
Either way, I suspect later Latin was patient zero, transmitting catus in various forms to various languages who had contact with it, which was a lot of languages.
The music below has been running through my mind as I typed all this, so I see no reason why it shouldn’t also run through yours.
