WotD: shrew

[muckefuck]

1. die Spitzmaus
2. de spitsmuis
3. la musaraña
4. la musaranya
5. la musaraigne
6. an dallóg fhraoigh
7. y llyg
8. ryjówka
9. 뒤쥐, 첨서 (尖鼠)
10. 尖鼠 jiānshǔ, 鼩鼱 qújīng
11. 尖鼠 (トガリネズミ)

Etymologies: 1, 2. "pointy mouse". 3, 4, 5. "spider mouse" [< Lat. mus aranea]. 6. "little-blind-one of-heather" (cf. dallóg fhéir "dormouse" ["little-blind-one of-grass"]). 7. [< Proto-Cetlic *lukīs (cf. llygod "mouse")]. 8. "little-snouty-one" [< ryj "snout"]. 9. "back?-mouse" 10. "sharp mouse", "shrew". 11. "sharp mouse".

Notes: Giving the striking similarity in composition, I wonder if 尖鼠 isn't a calque of the Dutch or German from a time when these were a major source of scientific vocabulary for Japanese and Chinese. (Although I can't find individual entries for 鼩 or 鼱, I suspect this is a typical yoking together of two very specific terms which are ambiguous on their own. Alternatively, it could represent a truly bisyllabic morpheme like 蝴蝶.)

The Romance forms are interesting to me for two reasons. The first is the retention of the nominative case form. (Most Romance nouns derive from the Vulgar Latin accusative, which in this case would be murem.) The second is that we see a switcheroo in French, with the modern word for "mouse" deriving from the Latin for "shrew", sorex.