This morning I happened to be thinking about the word "bat", the one referring to the flying mammal. A short word is usually one that has a long history in the language, and it typically signifies a pretty common object or concept. So why is the word for bat so short and simple in English when in every other language I can think of it's a polysyllabic compound? Could it be that bats are central to the historic culture of English speaking areas but not elsewhere in Europe? That doesn't seem right.

The German word for bat is "Fledermaus", as I first learned from the famous Strauss operetta of that name. The French word for bat I first learned, rather less obviously, from Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges: Among the many characters is a "chauve-souris", which is what the French call a bat. In Italian, it's a "pipistrello", a lovely word which I first saw on a card from an Italian edition of Magic the Gathering ("Pipistrelli Vampiro"). In Spanish, it's the even more euphonious "murciélago".

The scientific order to which all bats belong is chiroptera. This term derives from Greek root words (though, as we shall soon learn, it isn't what classical Greeks actually called bats). Chiro- means hand, as in chiropractor, and -ptera is wing, as in pterodactyl or helicopter. (We instinctively want to divide the latter as heli-copter, but as a compound word it's really helico (= spiral, as in helix) + pter.) The scientific bat is thus "hand-wing". (And the extinct pterodactyl is "wing-finger".)

If, like me, you know only a little bit of German, you will readily recognize fledermaus as "flying bat". And then later you might stop and say, "Wait a minute. Flying is Fliegen ... and wings is Flügel" ... so what the heck is Fleder?" Fleder, it turns out, is synonymous with its English cognate, flutter, so the Fledermaus is a "flutter-mouse".

The Dutch word for bat, "vleermuis", is, in spite of the unfamiliar spelling, recognizably related to Fledermaus. I know that muis is mouse. I honestly couldn't tell you if vleer is flying, winged, or flutter. The Russian term, "letuchaya mysh", really does mean "flying mouse". Like John Cleese's character in A Fish Called Wanda, I love the sound of Russian, but I have to say, "letuchaya mysh" is possibly the ugliest Russian phrase I've ever heard.

From my least favorite, then, to my most favorite: The Spanish "murciélago" is a joy to pronounce. Murciélago, murciélago! It too is a mouse (mur), but not flying this time. If, like me, you know just a little bit of Spanish, you might remember cielo and think maybe it has something to do with the sky. "Ciélago" doesn't actually mean anything in Spanish, but it's related to ciego, which means blind. So the Spanish bat is a "blind-mouse". (The fact that this mouse has wings and can fly does not impress the Spaniards as much as its blindness, I guess.)

In his Dune novels, Frank Herbert adopts the second half of the compound. On the Dune planet, "cielago" is the name given to bats which have been somehow modified for the purpose of carrying messages. The Dune books also feature "ornithopters", which the characters call "'thopters" sort of like we call helicopters "'copters", but again the proper division is ornitho-pter (= bird-wing).

Most curious of all the mice is the French chauve-souris. If you know French, you know this means "bald-mouse". I can understand a bat being a flying mouse, a flutter mouse, or a blind mouse, but how could anyone think it a bald mouse?

The answer is a bit roundabout. French chauve derives from Latin calva, which also means "bald", following the standard patterns of c > ch (capo > chapeau; canto > chant) and al > au (salva > sauve; palma > paume).

This brings us back to Latin. The standard Latin word for bat was "vespertilio". Vesper is evening, and the rest I think is some sort of diminutive ending whereby vespertilio means something like "the little guy who comes out at night", which seems plausible enough. (From this word, according to my Zingarelli, derives the modern Italian pipistrello, though how it got from one to the other is beyond my ability to explain. I mean, I can sort of see the similarity in sounds, but they're not that similar.)

At this point my investigation gets a bit murky. The best I can find is this page, in French, along with a couple of others that summarize the same story. According to it, another Latin term for a bat was "calva sorix", the source of the modern French word, which was an alteration of Greek "cawa sorix", meaning "owl-mouse". This sounds plausible. One can see owl-like qualities of a bat: a predatory nocturnal flyer.

And yet, I'm skeptical. For starters, I'm bothered by the apparent misspelling in "sorix". Although it does decline to soricis and similar forms, the correct Latin word is sorex. I'm no Latin scholar, but I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a "sorix". For a Francophone, accustomed to seeing souris, perhaps it's an understandable mistake, but it doesn't give me confidence in the reliability of the proposed etymology.

I'm even more suspicious of "sorix" as a Greek word. In Latin, "sorex" refers specifically to a shrew, not a mouse, though perhaps in the old days people weren't so clear on distinguishing the two. The Greek word, also referring to the shrew is ... I don't know how to render Greek letters in my blog software, but it transliterates to hyrax. (This Greek word eventually became the English name of a mysterious African mammal which looks like a large rodent but is not genetically related to rodents at all. Indeed, the hyrax is sometimes named as the closest living relative to the elephant, though that claim is sometimes disputed.)

I can see how Greek hyrax becomes Latin sorex, which in turn becomes French souris, changing from shrew to mouse along the way; but I see no basis for calling "sorix" a Greek word. And that's to say nothing of "cawa". Not only does it not correspond to any Greek word for owl that I can find — the owl is prominent in classical Greek symbolism, where it is glaukos — but I don't even know what "cawa" would transliterate. The "c" is a kappa, I suppose. What is the "w" supposed to be? beta? upsilon? "Cawa" just doesn't make any sense at all.

The "this morning" that opens this post was actually August 4. That's when I wrote this, but I never finished it. Today seemed like a good day to resuscitate it, what with the loose association of bats with Halloween.

The post I found in my file just stops. I think I didn't write any further because I didn't have any more to say, but I never posted because I realized I never answered the initial question: Why do all the other languages have such fancy names while in English it's just "bat"? I don't know. Doug's etymology dictionary tells me that it comes from Middle English bakke, which probably derives from the same word in Old Swedish. It also mentions Old English hreremus ("shake-mouse"), which is obviously related to the German and Dutch words.

So the question is still there, but in slightly different form: Why did all the other languages retain their longer compound words for this animal while we in English abandoned ours in favor of a short word borrowed from Swedish?

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