All rabbits are baby rabbits.

[wwidsith]

English and French both lost their early words for ‘rabbit’ because they sounded rude, and replaced them with words for ‘baby rabbit’.

The source of the problem, in both cases, was the Old French word coniz, which became French connin and also, thanks to the Norman invasion, English coney.1

Now coney (or cony) is usually pronounced to rhyme with ‘

Comments

[hobnobofjoy]

I've heard before that no-one knows where 'rabbit' comes from really. I tried to find out without any success. I didn't know all of this though.

Did you know in Portland they don't say rabbit out of superstition because burrowing rabbits cause landslides, so when Wallace and Gromit's The Curse of the Were-Rabbbit was released the posters all said 'Something Bunny's Going On' instead?

[wwidsith]

That, if true, is my favourite fact of the day!

It's so funny, the only reason I started thinking about this is that I spent all morning translating a French newsfilm about some stupid rabbit computer game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQhulpyHSJM

[hobnobofjoy]

Would I ever lie to you?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/4318710.stm

That looks like the kind of game I'd play. Well, that I'd poke around on for a bit. Although the rabbits' smiles scare me...

[muckefuck]

Give that the naughty usage of coney is attested before cunny I'm not at all convinced that (as the OED suggests) cunny really represents a pre-existing diminutive of cunt rather than a simple respelling of coney. (Cf. cum for come for the spelling change issue, the metaphorical extension of pussy for the semantic development, and the replacement of cock with rooster for another instance where bawdy metaphorical extension of a term has led to its replacement in its original sense.)

The -eau bit means ‘baby’,

Well, in a manner of speaking. -eau here represents a common Romance diminutive ending (cf. Sp. -illo, also from Latin -ellus; lapereau would be cognate with the Italian name Leporello) and one widespread use of diminutives is to derive nouns referring to the young of living creatures.

[wwidsith]

Well, as for cunny I believe you might well be right.....which makes it even more interesting in a way, since the same word then meant different things depending on its pronunciation. Be interesting to see what happens when the OED revise C, in about 2 years or something. As for -eau, I understand the source, it's just that in French it has a particular association with diminutives of animals

[muckefuck]

You mean as in rameau, carreau, naseau, tasseau, ormeau, poisseau, pointeau, fourreau, fardeau, barreau, gâteau, etc. etc.?

[wwidsith]

I don't know what you're trying to prove, yes it's a diminutive suffix, but the fact remains that in this sense it means ‘baby animal’, it's a very specific use of the suffix in French. See here, sense I.A.1: http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/-eau. More to the point, that's the sense where it's still most productive, whereas most of the words above were formed in the 12th century or are even inherited whole from Latin (like tasseau)

[ruakh]

Is this the same reason chicken came to mean "chicken" instead of "baby chicken"?

[wwidsith]

I do hope so.

[herself_nyc]

:)

[herself_nyc]

By the way, since you've been such an enthusiastic reader of my snippets, I want to invite you to adele_novel, where I'm posting parts of the novel-in-progress more frequently than I do in my regular LJ. If you're interested. Feel free not to be ....

[herself_nyc]

D'oh! I invited you already. Never mind. Brain=swiss cheese.

[wwidsith]

Ha, yeah I'm there already! I guess I should comment more often!