Wedgwood 1 (and only here) compared cub and OI kobbi ‘young seal.’ His comparison recurs

in R.G. Latham. Icelanders understand kobbi as a pet name of kópr with the same meaning. See CV and later dictionaries, including IsEW and ÁBM, though Jóhannesson (1932:6-7, 8, at kobbi; further discussion at kjabbi and kubbi) admits the possibil-ity that kobbi is related to kubbi. According to AEW, kobbi is usually derived from kubbi ‘block of wood’ because of the animal’s round head, which is also the etymon of E cub and cob. However, the picture is more complicated because a borrowed word for ‘block’ or even ‘young seal’ would hardly have acquired the meaning ‘young fox’ and ‘young bear.’

In some form the idea that cub is related to E cob and to OI kobbi ‘seal’ ~ kubbi ‘block of wood’

appealed to Chambers, Johansson (1900:375), Skeat⁴, Persson (1912:76 and 102-03), Weekley, EW, L. Bloomfield (1925: 100), WP I:395-96 (IEW, 561 does not mention cub), Schröer, CEDEL, W², and RHD. Mueller¹, Mackay (1877), Stormonth,

Par-Cub Cub

tridge (1958), and Barnhart mention that etymol-ogy as worthy of consideration. Weekley (follow-ing FT, kobbe and kubbe), SEO (kobbe and kubb), and others, reconstruct the original meaning of cub as

‘lump, shapeless object.’ Since borrowing does not explain the way from ‘block’ to ‘whelp,’ a Ger-manic root meaning ‘lump’ should rather be pos-ited. OI kobbi is probably a word with this root and coined independently of kópr. Kobbi, which existed as a pet name of Kolbeinn and Kolbrandr (later also of Jakob), must have been connected with kópr through folk etymology or as a deliberate joke. In words of such phonetic structure, it is difficult to separate a common name from a hypocoristic proper name; consider, for example, E cuddy ‘don-key,’ allegedly from Cuthbert, and see Strandberg (1993). Swabian ko¤b ‘old nag’ can be an aphetic form of Jakob, unless it was borrowed from Slavic (Rosenfeld [1947:74-75]). Russ and Pol koby¬^a

‘mare’ (stress on the second syllable), its posited etymon, is also an etymological crux.

Germanic languages have a great number of monosyllabic roots like kub ~ kob, supposedly meaning ‘lump, round object, soft object, etc.’

They are found in all kinds of animal names, most of which were attested late. Such names tend to have expressive geminates, variable vocalism (sec-ondary, or false ablaut), and alternations of the bb ~ pp (voiced ~ voiceless). See Björkman (1908;

1912:262-63, on cub) and Persson (1904:60, on Gmc kubb- ~ kobb- ‘block of wood’ and several animal names). Their referents are usually ‘young ones.’

Kub ~ kob words coexist with synonyms having the shape mokk, as in G reg mocke ‘calf’ and ‘little pig’

(Liberman [1988b:104-08]; some of the conclusions of that study should be modified), lobb ~ lopp and rib ~ rabb ~ robb (see further at RABBIT and ROBIN).

NEO (at hûn ‘bear cub’ = OI húnn ‘small piece of wood, young animal, boy, etc’) mentions E cub, possibly as a case of analogous semantic develop-ment. Cub is one of many mots populaires (see the discussion of their phonetics and etymology in Seebold [1997]), and projecting it to Proto-Indo-European, where it was allegedly a borrowing (thus Beekes [1996:225, 227]), is not necessary.

2. The main problem for English is the rela-tionship between cub and cob. E cob is the name of a male swan, several fishes, a short-legged, stout variety of horse, a gull, and a spider (but the latter is the same word as ættor-cobbe, probably ‘poison head,’ with the first element left out; see COB). Cob

‘male swan’ is especially hard to explain: it may be a shorter form of cobswan ‘head swan’ (as ex-plained in Nares, at cobloaf, and in Toone), rather

than containing the root cob- ‘animal name.’ Cob

‘stout horse’ is also obscure. No traces lead from it to L caballus ‘pack horse,’ the words derived from caballus, or E hobby (as Cockayne [1861:sec 305]

suggested). Cub can also mean ‘young whale,’

‘young fox’ (‘bear, lion, tiger’), and ‘small sea gull’

(‘gull’ is a common occurrence in Scandinavian;

the same in the Orkney dialect: EDD).

From the historical perspective, cob ‘animal name’ is indistinguishable from cub. Consider the following variants of cub ~ cob by false ablaut.

Wedgwood^2~4 cites Du kabbe, kebbe, kabbelen ‘little pig,’ and kabbelen ‘produce young.’ Kabbe and kab-belen also appear in WNT. Kilianus gives kabbe and kabbeken ‘porcellus’; kibbe ‘pig’ is widespread in Dutch dialects (NEW, big). Wedgwood’s kebbe (which does not turn up in the dictionaries con-sulted) must be the same word as E keb(b) ~ kebbe

‘ewe that has lost her lamb or whose lamb is still-born,’ known from written records since the end of the 15^th century. DW compares G kippe ~ kibbe

‘ewe’ with Sc keb, E kebber (‘refuse sheep taken out of the flock,’ cited by Halliwell from a 1585 source), Dan kippe ‘small calf,’ Sw reg kibb, kubbe, and the like ‘calf’ (Rietz; Møller [1943-45:12-13] offers nu-merous such forms for ‘calf’ in Scandinavian dia-lects), and the Dutch words in Kilianus.

Almost identical words appear in earlier and later recordings. Among them are kebbe ‘old use-less cow or sheep’ (similar to ME kibber ‘block of wood tied to an animal to prevent it from straying,’

kible ‘block of wood,’ cubbel = kibber) (MED) and keb

‘sheep, any creature small of its kind; esp. an in-fant’ (EDD). See more examples in von Friesen (1897:52-53), Kruppa-Kusch, and Wortmann (1964:38-42: the names of sheep in northern Ger-man dialects). Davies (1855:234) cites Lanc kibble hound ‘beagle.’

Unless the are ‘primitive creations’ lacking tie with the rest of Germanic vocabulary, G kibbe ~ kippe, Sw reg kibb, and others lead from kab- ~ kob- / keb- ~ kib- to E chip ‘small thin piece of wood’ (< OE cipp, cyp ‘beam’; OS kip ‘post,’ kipa ‘stave’; OI keppr

‘stick, staff,’ and so on), within the framework of the syncretism ‘child, little creature’ / ‘block of wood, stick’ (see more at PIMP), and suggest their relationship with chip ~ chap ~ chop. Torp (1909) indicated that relationship in Fick⁴(III:43, kîp), and it turns up in AEW at kjabbi ‘fat person,’ but it es-caped English etymological dictionaries. Nor do they mention the kab forms at cub. Likewise, al-though the proximity of cub and cob has become commonplace, OED and ODEE ignored it. OED calls English keb a word of uncertain etymology;

Cub Cub

however, it is safely ensconced in a group of simi-lar-sounding animal names all over the Germanic-speaking world.

3. Sound complexes designating small animals, useless animals, and whelps need not be ancient, and it is doubtful that the Germanic root kab- ~ kob- with all its variants has Indo-European cognates in the true sense of this term. Regardless of whether OI keipr ‘rowlock’ is akin to L gibbus ‘hump’ (Wood [1926:88/11.13]; Holthausen [1942a:272]; AEW), those words seem to be unrelated to kab- ~ kob-.

Wortmann (1964) offered the most detailed discus-sion of the kub- ~ kab- ~ keb- ~ kib- group, but he mentioned too many words allegedly derived from the same hypothetical root with the help of various consonantal enlargements for their unity to de-serve credence. He could not decide whether all of them go back to a root meaning ‘split, sprout, put out shoots’ (as in Go keinan and G keimen) or to a root with the basic meaning ‘lumpy object,’ and the difference is indeed far from obvious. See more on this root at CHIDE and KEY.

4. Some lexicographers do not side with any existing derivation of cub. Junius, Johnson (-Todd), Barclay, and ID² venture no hypotheses. The latest dictionaries almost unanimously call the etymol-ogy of cub uncertain or unknown (W³, Chambers [1983], ODEE, SOD, FW [1971], Hoad, and all edi-tions of Longman). Klein’s statement to the effect that cub is related to ML cuppa ‘bowl, vessel, cup’ is unfortunate (CEDEL). Some connection between cob and cup exists, but it is hard to disentangle the skein of twenty odd migratory words designating

‘head,’ ‘cap,’ and ‘cup’; see also COB. (Liberman [1994a:11-14] and [1997:97-108]).

CUSHAT (700)

OE cusceote is a compound, but neither the length of u nor the morphemic cut in it is immediately obvious. Hence several conflicting etymologies of the word. Most probably, u was long. The division cu¤sc-eote presupposes an incompre-hensible element -eote; also, cu¤sc- ‘chaste’ as the first compo-nent is an unexpected epithet for a bird, even for one whose fidelity to its mate has become proverbial. Cu¤-sceote yields approximately ‘cow darter’ (if cu¤- is ‘cow’), and this is no less puzzling. Identification of cu- with ModE coo is suspect because coo surfaced in English late, and the resulting whole

‘coo darter’ or ‘coo caller’ (if -sceote is related to shout rather than shoot) would have no parallels. However, two possibili-ties to connect pigeons and cows exist. Birds regularly follow cattle and feed on insects flying over the herds and are there-fore often jokingly called cow guards. More importantly, doves and pigeons are the only lactating birds in nature. Cu-sceote may have been an adaptation of the Celtic name of the

wood pigeon. Then the connection between pigeons and cows led to the folk etymological reshaping of the word. Cu¤sceote was probably understood by the speakers of Anglo-Saxon as

‘cow darter,’ that is, ‘cow-like darter’ or ‘swift-flying bird following cows (cattle).’ The first interpretation is more spe-cific and perhaps more preferable.

Section 1 is devoted to the existing etymologies of cushat, and section 2 treats the connection between pigeons and cows.

1. Cushat ‘wood pigeon’ has been recorded in multiple forms: cuscute, cuscote, cusceote (in early 8^th- and early 11^th-century glosses), then after a long interval (1000-1483) cowscott, cowschote, cow-shut, and so on. In Modern English, cushat is a North Country word, but Robert Burns and Walter Scott popularized it in their poetry. The length of u in OE cusceote is impossible to reconstruct with certainty, for the spelling may be due to folk ety-mology (Flasdieck [1958:389-90, sec 6.33]; see also a brief discussion of this vowel in Schlutter [1908b:433] and Skeat [1909]). It is usually be-lieved that cu¤¤- had a long vowel because cu°°^sceote is opaque. But cu¤sceote makes little sense even if cu¤- is understood as OE cu¤ ‘cow.’ Hence many at-tempts to separate reference to the cow from the bird name.

Todd in (Johnson-Todd) divided the Old En-glish word into cusc- and -ote and identified cusc- with OE cu¤sc ‘chaste’ “because of the conjugal fi-delity of the bird.” His etymology recurs in Cockayne (1861:148/599) and Smythe Palmer (1883:79-80, cow-shot; Smythe Palmer corrects Bos-worth’s cu¤s-sceote to cusc-eote). Skeat (1886a), who missed Palmer’s predecessors, pointed out that the division cu¤sc-ote involves an unknown suffix *-ote;

“moreover, cúsc is not clearly an Anglo-Saxon word, being probably a borrowing from Old Saxon at a later date than the occurrence of cúscote.” The element *-ote, unless it is a variant of -ha¤d, is indeed meaningless, and the suffix of an abstract noun would be inappropriate in such a word (Koch [1873:143]). Skeat was also right in his assessment of the Old English bookish word cu¤sc ‘virtuous, chaste, modest.’

In German, in which OHG kûski has continued via MHG kiusch(e) into the present (keusch), it first meant ‘proper in one’s behavior, moral,’ then

‘showing restraint in eating,’ and only later ‘chaste, abstinent in sexual matters’ (Frings and Müller [1951]). The etymon of the German word is be-lieved to be L conscius ‘sharing one’s knowledge, conscious (of),’ though at least one other hypothe-sis exists; see Kaspers (1945:151). Conjugal fidelity is not synonymous with chastity, and the concept

Cub Cushat

of a chaste (restrained, moral) bird is incongruous.

The division cu-sceote presupposes the second component sceot ‘quick.’ Koch (1873:143) cited OE sceota ‘trout’ (=‘a quick fish’) and OI -skjóti (which occurs only in the compounds fararskjóti and reiskjóti ‘means of transportation, horse, donkey’) and concluded that -sceote referred to the cushat’s ability to dart precipitously into the air. He identi-fied cu with cuc (= cwic) ‘living,’ presumably used for reinforcing the meaning ‘darter.’ He did not comment on the absence of the form *cucsceote or on the change of cuc- to cu¤-. Mueller included cushat only in the second edition of his dictionary and halfheartedly accepted Koch’s etymology. The same etymology (cushat from *cuc-scote ‘quick-shooting, swift-flying’) turns up as possible (“per-haps”) in CD and FW. Pigeons as ‘darters’ are credible; compare OE -sc(e)ote and the Scandina-vian regional words skuda (Bornholm) and skuta (Faroese, Swedish) ‘wood pigeon’ (Suolahti [1909:208]), and Ebbinghaus’s tracing of OHG

*attûba to *atar-tuba ‘fast (flying) dove ~ pigeon’

(1989:137), but the loss of -c- in *cucsceote (dissimi-lation?) has not been explained.

Leo (1877:573) offered an almost irrefutable derivation of cushat. He cited Wel ysguthan

‘wood pigeon, ring dove,’ from Wel coed ‘forest,’

and suggested that the form *cusguthan or

*cusguddan had become OE cusceote. Like the Welsh word, Corn cudon and Breton kudon mean

‘wood pigeon, ringdove,’ which, in all probability, excludes borrowing from English. Davies (1880a:16; independently of Leo?) came to the same conclusion. Skeat (1886a) admitted that cu¤^-sceote could be “an English adaptation of a British name.”

If Leo guessed the origin of cusceote, in Old English we are dealing with folk etymology. It would still be interesting to find out what made early Anglo-Saxons connect pigeons and cows, though folk etymology defies logic. Leo’s etymology has never been discussed except in a short note by Skeat, who preferred to think that cusceote was a native word. In his opinion, cu¤- has the same meaning as ModE coo, and he glossed the whole as ‘coo-darter’

(likewise in Skeat⁴), an unattractive compound.

OED expressed no enthusiasm for Skeat’s ety-mology, but it gained the support of ID², Suolahti (1909:208; he cites G Girr-Taube as an analogue of coo-darter), Weekley (1924; he believed that cushat as ‘darter’ has a parallel in dove ~ dive, but those words are, most likely, unrelated), UED, and WNWD^1-2. The verb coo was first recorded in 1670, and its age cannot be ascertained. It need not have existed a thousand years earlier. More often, and

not only in Germanic, cooing is rendered by the sound strings girr, kirr, garr, gurr, kurr, turr, and the like. EDD cites coo in a poem and coo-me-door ‘a term of endearment for a wood-pigeon.’

Among so-called natural sounds, one can find entire complexes like cushat imitating a bird’s voice (for instance, Sw kuish: Hellquist [1915:150]; simi-larly, Hortling [1944:163] explains the Swedish bird name kusk as onomatopoeia), but OE cusceote is hardly an onomatopoeic word. Lockwood (1984) glossed cusceote as shouter,’ that is, as ‘coo-caller.’ Shout surfaced in English only in the 14^th century. Its etymology is a matter of debate, and projecting this verb to the earliest Old English, along with coo, is a risky enterprise. Among other forms, Lockwood mentioned queece, a regional variant of cushat (a cross between some unknown word and *squeece < sceote rather than from cu-sceote?) and see quest and quist in Terry (1881).

Such variants of cushat beset us all the time. For example, coscirila, a 9^th-century German gloss, cop-ied from an OE gloss, is a (corrupted) form of cusc- with a diminutive suffix (Suolahti [1909:208]).

2. Regardless of whether cusceote is native or adapted from a Celtic word, its first element, if it is cu¤ ‘cow,’ is not as incomprehensible as most sources call it, though even Kitson [1997:495] con-sidered it as lacking an etymology. Pictet (1859, I:402-03; 495-60; II:58) devoted an illuminating chapter to pigeons in his book and noted that all over the Indo-European world words for ‘pigeon’

begin with the syllable go- ~ ko- ~ gu- ~ ku- (L columba, E culver, Russ golub’, and so on). Birds, he went on to say, regularly follow cattle, feed on in-sects flying over the herds, and are often called ironically cow guards. (E cowbird shows that irony is not indispensable in such cases.) He cited G Kuhstelze (Stelze ‘wagtail’) and Ziegenmelker. The latter is called ‘goatsucker’ in English. Its etymon is L caprimulgus, a calque of Gk aágoqølaj (Suolahti [1909:XIV and 17]). Similar forms occur in Slavic (Russ kozodoi and its cognates). According to an ancient legend transmitted by Aristotle, goatsuck-ers visit goats at night and suck their uddgoatsuck-ers. The bird’s other German name is Nachtschwalbe (liter-ally ‘night swallow’), and its French name is tette-chèvre (literally ‘teat goat’). (Likewise, butterflies have the ill fame of milk thieves: two 17^th-century glosses on L pa¤pilio are G Molcken/dieb, -stehler:

Bierwirth [1891:389].) Pictet suggested that cu-sceote meant ‘cow darter,’ a bird flying toward a cow. In Old English, sce¤otan ‘shoot’ often occurs in religious contexts with the sense ‘injure.’ One ex-ample is ylfagescoten ‘elfshot,’ that is, ‘injured by

Cushat Cushat

elves; sick’ (see discussion in Ivanov [1999a:15, note 50] and at DWARF). Cusceote (if it was cu¤^sceote) may have meant ‘a quick bird following cattle (herds).’ But if the same idea underlay the names cu¤sceote and aágoqølaj, the implied meaning could be ‘cow injurer; milk thief.’ Situations in which an animal is depicted as a sky dweller (Majut [1963]

and Liberman [1988c]), that is, the opposite of the one discussed above (‘from a bird to an animal’), have no relevancy here.

Another possibility of connecting pigeons and cows is more specific: doves are lactating birds. Lithuanian has two words for ‘pigeon,’

namely balañdis and karve~lis; they are roughly par-allel to E dove and pigeon. Pictet did not miss Lith karve~lis and cited it among ‘cow words’ for ‘pi-geon.’ Lith karve˘ (f) means ‘cow,’ and karve~^lis, though it is a masculine, seems to mean ‘little cow.’

By a coincidence, balañdis means ‘wild dove’ and

‘hornless cattle.’

J. Levin (1992:87-88) says the following about pigeons and cows: “The pigeon is the only bird that feeds milk to its young... The cock pigeon (in all species of genus Columba) is the only male ver-tebrate which normally produces... milk for his young... The hen pigeon is the only female that lactates. This characteristic sets pigeons and doves apart from all other feathered bipeds... Contrary to one’s reasonable assumption, pigeon milk is not some regurgitated milky substance like milk. All pigeons and doves produce this creamy substance, with a make-up very similar to rabbit’s milk, in their crops... Thus it is milk... that establishes a connection between karve˘ ‘cow’ and balañdis ‘pi-geon’ that would support the metaphor, the paral-lelism, implied in the epithet karve~lis ‘little cow.’”

Since karve~lis also means ‘a plant bearing blue flowers,’ Karaliu¤nas (1993:110-11) seeks a color word behind karve~lis (balañdis has long since been explained as ‘a white bird’; see LEW and the refer-ences there). But karve˘ ‘cow’ cannot be separated from its Indo-European kin: Slav korova ‘cow,’ L cervus ‘deer,’ Gmc *_cerutaz ‘hart,’ and so on. Nor is it desirable to divorce karve~lis from karve˘^.

Thus, pigeons could be considered ‘cow injur-ers’ that steal milk to feed their young. If cu¤^{sceote is} a native word, some such idea probably gave rise to the name of cow-like darters. If, however, cu¤sceote is a Welsh word, a similar idea must have supported its folk etymological adaptation. Ekwall (1960, Shotley) suggests that Shotley goes back to

*Scotta le¤ah ‘the lea of the Scots’ or perhaps ‘pigeon wood,’ but OE *sc(e)ota ‘pigeon’ does not seem to have existed.

It is no wonder that cushat, a word without

It is no wonder that cushat, a word without