Nick Nicholas over at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (it's in English, honest!) has a post on a great piece of detective work he did to track down the meaning of λαγόγηρως, a Greek word used in Suda and in a gloss to Lucian; it literally means 'old man hare' and apparently refers to some kind of rodent, but Nick, using the mighty powers of the internet, finds not only the word, still in use, but a photo of the creature itself, taken near Edessa in Greek Macedonia. Furthermore, it turns out that the Bulgarian word for it is лалугер (laluɡer), which looks like it's borrowed from Greek but (as gbaloglou points out in the comment thread) could be the source of the Greek word, which would then be a hypercorrection based on folk etymology. Fascinating stuff!
Posted by languagehat at August 18, 2009 08:07 PMBy the pose in the photo it looks to me like a kind of gopher, a burrowing creature, rather than a mouse of any kind. The gopher stands by its burrow and dives back in when it sees danger, and hawks are its main predator. (A "gopher" is apparently just a ground squirrel in most but not all cases. But around here we call them all gophers.)
The European ground squirrel, found in Greece, is also called a souslik, from the Russian.
Posted by: John Emerson at August 18, 2009 08:58 PMFor the sake of precision; hares (and rabbits) are not actually rodents. They are lagomorphs, a different taxonomic order.
However ‘old man hare’, if it is a Ground Squirrel, is a rodent.
Right, I didn't say it "apparently refers to some kind of rodent" because of the name but because of how it's glossed in the sources.
Posted by: language hat at August 19, 2009 08:30 AMI wouldn't call all ground squirrels gophers. The chipmunk is a species of ground squirrel. I think only the larger, less colorful species of ground squirrel are gophers.
Posted by: Dr. Weevil at August 19, 2009 08:53 AMIf it's in Europe, it's not a gopher. Very easy. :-)
Rodentia and Lagomorpha (or rather the groups that contain them and their fossil relatives: Simplicidentata and Duplicidentata) have turned out to be sister-groups after all, so taking the lagomorphs out of Rodentia wasn't actually necessary... but tradition has got a hold in all those decades... "Order" is not defined.
Posted by: David Marjanović at September 1, 2009 11:05 AMJust tried to leave a comment, but that doesn't work. So:
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What if it comes from a third language that hasn't left enough traces for a testable hypothesis? Thracian, Dacian...?
What is the animal called in Albanian?
such cross-linguistic calques do happen (e.g. German Handy for "mobile phone")
That's from the Handie Talkie, a competition product to the Walkie Talkie.
Posted by: David Marjanović at September 1, 2009 03:39 PMMy parents use the word "lagougeros" and their origin is from Eastern Thrace. We use the word refering to our babies, as a funny nick-name.
Posted by: GeorgiaGiannitsopoulou at September 3, 2009 05:53 PM