One of my New Year's resolutions last year was to minimize the number of posts devoted to politics. Looking through my archive on the right, I see I first broke that resolution on Inauguration Day, January 20. In fact, the first three posts last year were about politics. It seems I just can't help it, the current political situation in this country and the rest of the world these days is simply a subject too ripe with ideas for new posts. To put it mildly.
With that in mind, you may think given the title of this post, what follows is yet another screed against the current administration, but I assure you it is not. The rat in the title is not metaphorical but quite literal. Yes dear reader, this post is about rats and their rodent cousins.
But wait, before you stop reading, that's not all, it's also about other animals and their relationship to us, that is we animals of the species Homo sapiens.
And what brings it all together is my favorite topic to write about these days, after baseball anyway, that is to say language, with a little stuff about AI thrown in.
Let's see if I can tie it all together.
To paraphrase Bette Davis from the classic 1950 film All About Eve:
Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
OK here goes.
The inspiration for this post is the German word for one of the aforementioned cousins of the species Rattus norvegicus, see if you can guess which one, and extra points if you can pronounce the word.
Eichhörnchen
The German language gets a lot of grief. Someone I know recently declared that German just sounds angry to her. Of course, that's true if the only person you've ever heard speaking it is Hitler.
If you unfortunately are of that opinion, for a real eye opener please check this out, the opening scene from one of my favorite movies of all time *(1) featuring a poem by Peter Handke.
Or this, in my opinion hands down the most beautiful Christmas carol ever set to music. *(2)
Merry Christmas by the way!
German is also known for its ridiculously long words like this one:
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften.
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften isn't the longest German word. But you won't find words like this in a dictionary, as they are combinations of words that describe a single entity. Where English describing the same thing would separate the words, in this case "insurance companies that provide legal protection", German eliminates the spaces between the words, which when you think of it, kind of makes sense as the term insurance companies that provide legal protection, does indeed constitute a single entity. On the other hand for me at least, it's easier to read the words separated by spaces instead of this: insurancecompaniesthatprovidelegalprotection,
But even German words that you do find in a dictionary can be impressive for their length. Consider the German word for speed limit: Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung.
OK that's really two words, but the German for those two words, Geschwindigkeit (speed) and begrenzung (limit) are by themselves formidable.
Like Geschwindigkeitbegrenzung, Eichhörnchen is a compound word. "Eich" on its own means oak, as in the tree. Without the umlaut, "Hörn" means the same thing in English, and "Chen" at the end of a word indicates a diminutive. So together they mean. "little oak horn".
Figured it out yet?
When all is said and done, Eichhörnchen is a silly word for a very common thing, even German people would concur as the multitude of YouTube videos made by Germans on the subject would attest.
But German isn't the only language with a silly, hard to pronounce word for this particular animal.
The French word for Eichhörnchen is Ècureuil, which in my book is even harder to pronounce than Eichhörnchen, as are most French words.
But perhaps there is no sillier, harder-to-pronounce word describing this cousin of the rat than the English version.
That word?
Squirrel.
If your immediate response to that last statement is "what's so hard to pronounce about squirrel?", then English must be your mother tongue, and you've been saying the word all your life.
For people learning English as a second language on the other hand, the word squirrel is a minefield filled with foreign consonant clusters, unfamiliar vowels and excessive articulations all packed within two mere syllables, sometimes only one, (like the American version that rhymes with girl), which makes the successful pronunciation of squirrel, a feat of vocal gymnastics.
It turns out that words across the spectrum for cute, furry tree dwelling rodents with bushy tails are fairly divergent from language to language, complex when compared to words describing other animals, and are often difficult to pronounce.
Why is that?
That's what I wondered the other day when I turned to the genie inside my pocket, ChatGPT, and asked the app why this particular animal inspires such strange words in different languages. Rather then telling me to "get a life" as some of my human acquaintances would, ChatGPT, in one of its typical obsequious responses began with: "Ahh--excellent question."
I always fall for that.
Then it gave me a list of reasons, some of which made sense, while some were a little dubious when digging a little deeper, But the first was particularly enlightening:
Squirrels weren't major cultural animals, therefore their names drifted freely.
ChatGPT goes on:
Animals that are culturally important get short, stable old words:
- English: cow, pig, dog, deer
- German: Kuh, Schwein, Hund, Reh
- French: vache, porc, chien, cerf
But squirrels?
They were never domesticated, hunted much, used for transport or mythologically central. This means their names were:
- less stable
- more susceptible to sound changes
- more likely to drift, lengthen, or become cutesy/diminutive
Languages don't "protect" them from becoming phonetic messes.
We humans love to classify things. One of the most brilliant classification systems ever devised was the one invented by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, the modern system of classifying all living organisms.
Linneaus' system classifies organisms biologically, based on shared characteristics and evolutionary relationships. The system is divided into categories ranging from broad, Kingdom (plants, animals, fungi, etc), to general, Class (mammal, bird, reptile, etc) to specific, Species (Sugar Maple, Shitake Mushroom, Human Being, etc.),
Until this week however, I had never thought of a system that classified organisms based upon their "cultural importance." You learn something new every day.
What dawned on me, is that the difference between these two systems of classification define our naming systems for living things: the common names which vary from culture to culture, and the scientific names which are rigorously consistent as well as universally accepted.
So the words:
- cow,
- pig,
- dog,
- deer,
- and of course squirrel,
the English common names for a handful of mammals, speak at least as much about our relationship with these animals as the animals themselves. Consequently the names we give them vary from language to language.
Very messy.
While their scientific counterparts:
- Bos taurus,
- Sus scrofra domesticus,
- Canus lupis familiaris,
- Odocoileus virginianus.
- and Sciurus carolinensis, *(3)
the naming convention invented by Carl Linneaus, (always italicized, Genus first, capitalized, followed by species in lower case, followed if necessary by a subspecies) point to specific animals in relationship to other animals, with little regard to our feelings for them.
Most important, there is a unique scientific name for each species.
Just the facts ma'am.
Much as biologists classify living organisms. linguists classify languages using similar hierarchies of categories, including the category Family. Linguists assume that members of the same family of languages are all descended from a single prototype language. The family to which English belongs is the Indo-European Family, which as the name implies, includes most of the languages of India as well as Europe, but not all. And the prototype language that these languages are likely descendants of has the tasty acronym PIE, for Prototype Indo European, which linguists think existed around 6,000 years ago.
Just like the leftovers from this past Thanksgiving's dinner, there are no extant remnants of this PIE, as it existed about one millennium before the invention of writing. We know it through the comparison and reconstruction of roots of common words in the extant Indo European language family. Linguists believe that PIE evolved into Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin, which in turn evolved over time into the current language members of the IE family, diverging into various branches including the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Germanic, Slavic, Hellenic, and Romance languages, among others.
It turns out that the English word squirrel has ancient roots. According to the sources I found, it goes back at least to the ancient Greek word σκίουρος" (skiouros), which like Eichhörnchen, is a compound noun. Skiouros (for convenience sake I'll stick here to the Latin spelling) consists of the roots skia (tail) and ouros (shadow), describing the animal's most conspicuous feature. Then Latin borrowed the word turning it into Scurius, the word Linnaeus used to define the genus to which the nearly 300 different species of squirrels belong.
The part of the linguistic family tree on which English sits is the Germanic branch. In reality however, about sixty percent of all English words come from French, which itself sits on the Romance branch. If you're not familiar with your British history, this is a result of the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. As the Francophone conquerors took over much of the country, so did their language and today if you're an English speaker without a trace of knowledge of French and German, you're likely to be able to recognize more words from a French text than from the same text in German.
The German that does remain in English mostly consists of words for basic things like body parts such as Hand, Arm and Finger which are the same in both languages, although pronounced differently and capitalized as all nouns are in German. Some German body part words that come close enough to English to be understood are Fuß (pronounced foos), Schulter and Knie.
There are also German animal names you'd recognize despite the difference in spelling like Maus, Fisch, Elefant and Kamel. Probably close enough are Bär, Fuchs and Kuh, while Löwe (lion) may be a bit of a stretch, but is still related. English doesn't typically use Schwein and Hund for pig and dog respectively but their equivalent words do come up from time to time so we can probably figure out what they mean.
But we don't use Eichhörnchen.
While it may not be immediately apparent, the English word Squirrel is related to that silly French word we learned a little while ago, Ècureuil, The relation is more apparent when you consider that Ècureuil itself evolved over the ages having dropped the "s" in Escurueil. Adapted into the Anglo-French language that would become the basis for Modern English, the word became Esquirel, before eventually dropping the first vowel.
It may occur to you as it did me that since the French language didn't come to Britain until the 11th century, there must have been esquirels in Britain before then, there were, so they had to have had a name for them, which they did. That name was Acweorna. You may wonder why the Brits substituted esquirel for acweorna. I'll have to get back to you on that one.
According to ChatGPT, the words for squirrel in the languages of Europe (this post is already too long so I'll limit this discussion to Europe), mostly come from four different origins, each with its own description of the animal.
We've already seen "little oak horn" which is found in many of the Germanic languages, English being an exception. Incidentally, the horn part describes the ears of European squirrels, (see the photo below).
In addition to Eichhörnchen in German:
- In Dutch it's Eekhoorn.
- In Swedish it's Ekorre.
- In Norwegian it's Ekorn.
- In Danish it's Egern
In addition to Ècureuil in French:
- In Italian it's Scoiattolo.
- In Catalan it's Esquirol.
- And of course in English it's Squirrel.
Interestingly enough, in Modern Greek, the word σκίουρος still exists unchanged, exactly as it did in the ancient language, unusual for names of animals.
The three other major Romance languages go in different directions:
In Spanish, the word for squirrel is the relatively humble Ardilla, which comes not from Greek through Latin but from a word dating back to the pre-Roman conquest of Iberia. Portuguese follows suit with Ardiha.
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| A Transylvanian Veveriţă Photo by Laura Vălean |
- In Czech it's Veverka.
- In Slovak it's Veverička
- In Polish it's Wiewiórka.
- In Belarussian it's Вавёрка (vaviorka)
- In Ukrainian it's Білка (Bilka).
- ChatGPT claimed the Belarusian word for squirrel was Белка, the same as the Russian, but other sources I found say otherwise, see above. So I corrected ChatGPT and it admitted the error of its ways. For a geeky blast of fun, if you have the app, ask it what's the Belarusian word for squirrel. If it answers "Вавёрка", you can thank me.
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- French: Chat
- Italian: Gatto
- Potuguese: Gato
- Romanian: Pisică (what the hell?)
- Spanish: Gato
- Danish: Kat
- Dutch: Kat
- English: Cat
- German: Katze
- Swedish: Katt
- Belorusian: кошка (Kochka)
- Bulgarian: котка (Kotka)
- Czech: Kočka (Kochka)
- Polish: Kot
- Russian: кот (Kot)
Czech: Netopýr
Polish: Nietoperz
Russian: Летучая мышь, (Letuchaya mysh')
- Bats are often associated with darkness and the underworld in various cultures.
- In Chinese mythology, bats symbolize good fortune and happiness.
- Native American tribes view bats as symbols of transformation and rebirth.
- In European folklore, bats are linked to witchcraft and the supernatural.
- Some African myths depict bats as messengers between the living and the dead.
- In Mesoamerican cultures, bats are associated with fertility and the night.
through Old Italian vipistrello, with a possible influence from pipistrella (a small cape/overcoat), suggesting a "winged little creature" or "cloaked one" meaning.Here's my rather uneducated take: perhaps because of their uniqueness, intriguing mysterious nature and mythological significance, bats capture the human imagination more than most other animals, which is why they inspire such cool names, just as squirrels, by comparison rather playful and silly animals, inspire playful, silly names.
Czech: Krysa
Polish: Szczur
Russian: крыса (Krysa)
Rats generally wreak havoc on food supplies, destroying or contaminating crops and stored foods everywhere, Some estimates suggest that as much as one third of the world's food supply is destroyed by rats.
carry diseases that we know of and they may carry diseases that we do not know of-in just the past century, rats have been responsible for the death of more than ten million people...And that's just in the last century. In the Middle Ages, the Bubonic Plague pandemic (the Black Death), caused by the Yersenia pestus bacterium transmitted by fleas who hitched rides (also uninvited) aboard the backs of rats, took perhaps 100 million human lives, over one third of the population of Europe, during the course of two years.
The Black rat was eventually displaced in Europe by the larger Brown Rat, Rattus norwegicus,*(4) originally native to China, which first arrived in Europe in the 18th Century. Ironically, the displacement by the larger rats coincided with the end of the major plague waves leading some researchers to believe that the two events were related as the Brown rats' preference for the subterranean life led to less exposure to humans meaning fewer transmissions of the disease.
- Domesticated? yes.
- Hunted much? yes, in parts of Asia and Africa where eating the animal is not considered taboo.
- Used for transportation? well like bats, only for fleas so I'll have to give this one a no, at least for humans.
- Mythologically central? Absolutely. Just for starters, the first animal on the Chinese zodiac is the rat. *(6)
So take that, cats, who are nowhere to be found in the Chinese zodiac.
*(3) Cow, the female gender of Bos taurus is a word often used in contemporary English to describe Cattle of both genders. Why that is, is probably a worthwhile subject for an entire post.
Sus scofra domesticus and Canus lupis familiaris as their names imply, are the domesticated cousins of Sus scofra (the wild boar) and Canis lupis (the grey wolf) which have evolved enough to be considered separate sub species from their natural, i.e.: untouched by human hands cousins in the wild.
The common name "deer" is very broad, encompassing about fifteen genera. Odocoileus virginianus is the scientific name for the most common deer found in the Americas, the White-tailed deer.
Squirrel is an even broader term encompassing over 50 genera. The common English name for the species Sciurus carolinensis, Eastern grey squirrel, one without the big horny ears, is the most common squirrel in the United States.
*(4) The Brown rat, among other things, is often referred to as the Norwegian rat because it was originally assumed the species arrived in Great Britain aboard ships hauling lumber from Norway. The English naturalist John Berkenhout bought into this myth, thereby preserving it for ages as he's the one who christened the species with its scientific (binomial) name, Rattus norwegicus. So my assumption that scientific names have nothing to do with human feelings about living organisms, is itself a fallacy.
Ranking the first in the Chinese zodiac, rat represents wisdom. Personality traits for the people born in the year of the Rat are intelligent, charming, quick-witted, practical, ambitious, and good at economizing as well as social activities. The weaknesses are that the Rats are likely to be timid, stubborn, wordy, greedy, devious, too eager for power and love to gossip.
*(7) There's a killjoy in every room. This article claims to debunk the "myth" concerning bats and mosquitos. But the gist of the article is that mosquitos only account for a small amount a bat's diet, and that bats alone are not the "solution" to the mosquito problem. What the article does not deny is the number of mosquitos consumed by bats, and it also fails to mention that without bats, there would certainly be far more mosquitos.
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