Cats and caterpillars

After a long period of inactivity, Richard Arrowsmith of Black Dog Star has recently started posting again. Last night I checked to see if he had posted anything new. He hadn't, but while I was there I clicked on a link in his most recent (May 18) post to his old 2009 post "Keeping Track of the Cat." One of the things he mentions in that post is the connection between cat and caterpillar -- in, for example, the two forms of the logo of Caterpillar Inc.

That was last night. This morning, my wife was feeding the cats some sort of treats, and all the cats were gathered around her. She said (in Chinese), "What a lot of caterpillars! I call them caterpillars, you know." The Chinese for "caterpillar" is 毛毛蟲 (máomaochóng, "furry bug"), which is unrelated to  貓 (māo, "cat").

Not until I wrote the above did I notice that, in Roman transliteration, "cat" (māo) is the first syllable of "caterpillar" (máomaochóng) in Chinese just as it is in English. It only appears that way in transliteration, though; in fact, the tone is different, and therefore the two syllables sound entirely different to Chinese ears; it would never occur to a Chinese speaker to connect the two words. Puns on otherwise similar words which have different tones are quite uncommon in Chinese. There's the well-known superstitious connection between 四 (sì, "four") and 死 (sǐ, "death"),  but otherwise, tone-deaf puns are pretty much limited to jokes about tone-deaf foreigners, like the one about the American who got slapped by the dumpling shop owner when he tried to say, "How much for a bowl of dumplings?" but got the tones wrong and said, "How much to sleep with you for the night?" It's like s/th puns in English, which are also largely limited to jokes about foreign accents -- like when an American sea captain radioed the German coast guard and said, "We are sinking! We are sinking!" only to receive the reply, "Vat are you sinking about?"

Writing the above paragraph -- in which I mentioned puns, the number four, and the words cat and sink -- made me think of the story my mother taught me when I was very young and learning to count in French: "There once was a cat called Undeutrois Cat. One day Undeutrois Cat saw some fish swimming, and he wanted to swim, too. But when Undeutrois Cat jumped into the water, Undeutrois Cat sank!" (un deux trois quatre cinq).

(Googling this, I find it is more often presented as a joke in which a French cat named Un Deux Trois loses a swimming race with an English cat named One Two Three. I learned it as a mnemonic story, not a joke.)

The story involves a pun on cat and quatre, "four." Last October, with no thought of Undeutrois Cat, I made a pun on caterpillars and quatre piliers, "four pillars" (the pun being that pavilion is similar to papillon, "butterfly").

Looking up caterpillar in an etymology dictionary, I find that the similarity to cat is not a coincidence.

"larva of a butterfly or moth," mid-15c., catyrpel, probably altered (by association with Middle English piller "plunderer;" see pillage (n.)) from Old North French caterpilose "caterpillar" (Old French chatepelose), literally "shaggy cat" (probably in reference to the "wooly-bear" variety), from Late Latin catta pilosa, from catta "cat" (see cat (n.)) + pilosus "hairy, shaggy, covered with hair," from pilus "hair" (see pile (n.3)).

So the pillar element in caterpillar ultimately derives from the Latin for "hair." This is a link back to my November 2020 post "Hair and pillars, and pills."