Timeline for What is the origin of "rat"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 6, 2018 at 18:23 | comment | added | AmI | It's too bad this can't work as the origin of 'muskrat'. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 9:01 | comment | added | rogermue | Okay. I understand your problem. But at the moment I have no convincing examples that could explain my long-time theory that a lot of words have their origin in multipart paraphrases that in the course of time were shortened and finally became one word. Etymology can only look at earlier one-part forms. But I'm beginning to collect examples that could give an idea that basically paraphrases are a normal way for the creation of words. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:52 | comment | added | herisson | OK... that's true, and I'm sorry that I've been commenting from the position that this is an actual proposed etymology; if I understand right, it's more of an example of a possible way words can derive. In that case, I think it would be better if you just removed the part about "mus cretus" entirely and replaced it with an example of another word, one that is known to have derived from a two-word phrase. It doesn't have to be related to "rat." As it is, I find this answer possibly misleading (I'd worry about someone taking "mus cretus" seriously), and that's the main reason I downvoted. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:47 | comment | added | rogermue | I spoke of a vague idea to show that a two-part paraphrase might be to consider. I did not say that mus cretus is the origin of rat. A lot of other paraphrases might be possible. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:40 | comment | added | herisson | The astonishing part is more that you just threw this out there. To do serious etymology work, it would be necessary to look at the history: do we have any examples of the phrase "mus cretus" ever used in Latin to refer to rats? Is there evidence of any intermediate forms, like "muscretus" or "muscratus"? Are there any other words that show a parallel shift of "e" to "a" and "t" to "tt"? If you have no answer to any of these, why do you expect anyone to be convinced by your proposed etymology? | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:19 | comment | added | rogermue | Would it be so astonishing that a lot of one-part words have their origin in simple two-part paraphrases that in the course of time were melted into a one-part word? | |
| Sep 12, 2015 at 13:36 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| Sep 16, 2015 at 13:17 | |||||
| Aug 20, 2015 at 20:35 | comment | added | herisson | Huh? Are you proposing that "rattus" is derived from "mus cretus"? That seems completely random. | |
| Feb 27, 2015 at 15:43 | history | edited | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 2 characters in body
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| Feb 27, 2015 at 6:01 | history | answered | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |