Bat Etymology: Convergent Evolution or Multiple Discovery?
So, we were talking about bats the other day, and knowing a little bit of French, it struck me as quite odd that the word for bat is ‘bat’ in English.
You see, the word for bat is ‘chauve-souris'[1], to which I say, yeah, so it’s probably a Germanic root, that’s why it’s so short. At that point, I remember the word ‘fledermaus’, or ‘flying mouse’, which is the German word for bat. At this point, I realized that ‘Germanic’ does not necessarily mean ‘German’.
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English, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, and Yiddish are the living languages that are part of the Germanic family.
This family is divided into North Germanic (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish) and West Germanic (English, Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Yiddish). The now defunct East Germanic branch consisted of Gothic, which is extinct.
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As Calvert Watkins writes in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, one of the dialects of Indo-European “became prehistoric Common Germanic, which subdivided into dialects of which one was West Germanic.”
This in turn, Watkins says, “broke up into further dialects, one of which emerged into documentary attestation as Old English. From Old English we can follow the development of the language directly, in texts, down to the present day.”
But while English is Germanic, it has acquired much of its vocabulary from other sources, notably Latin and French.
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The actual etymology of bat is much more complex, coming through Middle English ‘bakke’, likely from Old Norse ‘leðrblaka’ or ‘leather flapper’. I love all these different ways people tried to describe the sounds that bats make. Source for the above and more here:
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bat (n.2)
flying mammal (order Chiroptera), 1570s, a dialectal alteration of Middle English bakke (early 14c.), which is probably related to Old Swedish natbakka, Old Danish nathbakkæ “night bat,” and Old Norse leðrblaka “leather flapper” (for connections outside Germanic, see flagellum). If so, the original sense of the animal name likely was “flapper.” The shift from -k- to -t- may have come through confusion of bakke with Latin blatta “moth, nocturnal insect.”
Old English word for the animal was hreremus, from hreran “to shake” (see rare (adj.2)), and rattle-mouse is attested from late 16c., an old dialectal word for “bat.” Flitter-mouse (1540s) is occasionally used in English (variants flinder-mouse, flicker-mouse) in imitation of German fledermaus “bat,” from Old High German fledaron “to flutter.”
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[1]Literally ‘bald mouse’, but that is from Greek by way of Latin, as NakedTranslations explains:
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Chauve-souris comes from Latin calva sorix (bald mouse), which is an alteration of Greek cawa sorix (owl mouse).
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