20 Comments
Well this isn't remotely irritating - kaniner not being canines? Ridiculous!
Thin ice there :P do you happen to know the origin of the word kanin? I'd be interested to know whether it was something originating from the Latin canis / dog that got mistranslated, or whether it's just a coincidence.
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I looked it up, seems to be a long chain via German and French, going back to latin cunīculus and greek κύνικλος (kýniklos), both those also mean 'rabbit'. So it's just a coincidence then.
I've just seen that it's also related to the English word coney, which is a fairly archaic word for rabbit.
"Kanin" is a cognate of the Spanish "conejo", "rabbit". However, I almost fell writing "dogs" or "canines".
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French has an old word: conin/conil, from "cuniculus", wich also had a sexual meaning. You find it with this double meaning in some Renaissance songs. Modern French "lapin" is said to come from an Iberian word which also gave the portuguese "laparo".
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Interesting. I suppose that French is the origin of the 'cunning' puns and related profanity.
Arnauti, what website do you use to look up Swedish etymology? Do you just use Wikipedia, or is there a better one you prefer?
- 898
The best resources are the Academy dictionary http://www.saob.se/ and Hellquists's Etymological dictionary: http://runeberg.org/svetym/
There is the German word Kaninchen, which is a sub type or smaller version of a rabbit (Hase). However, Kaninchen seems to be rather vaguely defined and the distinction is not as clear cut as monkey and ape (at least to me).
"Hase" is a hare, not a rabbit. Different species. Not sure what the Swedish would be.
The Irish for rabbit is 'coinín' and pronounced quite similarly to kanin. It would have been a false friend otherwise!
that's the only reason I was able to guess this without assuming it was canine
heh heh. Is this a reference to the rabbits in that park in central Stockholm?
In German there is a distinction between "Kaninchen" and "Hase". Is there any such thing in Swedish as well?
Yup, the latter is called a hare, just like in English (but with very different pronunciations).
