Ricardo Soca's weekly piece on Spanish etymology gave me stuff to mull over. This week's topic was esquivel (someone who works during a strike, a scab) from Catalan esquivel, squirrel. At some point he states that Spanish doesn't line up with other Romance languages insofar as the word for squirrel, ardilla, doesn't come from the same root as Portuguese esquilo, English squirrel, French écureuil and German Eichhörnchen.
Eichhörnchen never struck me as a Latinate word, I'd always associated it with Eiche (oak) + Hörnchen (little horns, from Horn, horn), but even that didn't make sense, so I went to my always dependable Wahrig for illumination. This is what it says: Eichhörnchen < ahd. eihhurno < germ. *aikwernan = *aik "Eiche" (oak) + idg. stem meaning ferret (for example in Latin viverra). What was my surprise to see veverra, ferret, mentioned there! It immediately took me to Polish wiewiórka and Czech veverka, both meaning... squirrel! Its sense has then apparently migrated from ferret to squirrel, something that isn't impossible to imagine, given both animals' "rodentness". The Russian word белка (belka) doesn't look anywhere close to wiewiórka or veverka but it bears a striking resemblance to French belette. The Russians probably took this word from French and Russified it by adding a genuine suffix -ka, feminine in meaning, to it. I'd like to have this assumption corroborated by some palpable proof, which I haven't been able to produce yet. French belette reminds me of Portuguese belota, Spanish bellota, acorn, which again reminds me of Eichhorn and Eichhörnchen.
I hope I'm not going nuts.
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2 comments:
Ferrets are not rodents. So that is one less thing they have in common. But they are both cute.
Thank you, Squirrelman.
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