Language: Weird as Hell, Man

Photo borrowed from Flickr user markfftang under Creative Commons license.

A little while ago, Mle and I were chatting and the Spanish word for “rabbit” came up: conejo.

I assumed that this word was connected, linguistically, in some way to the rural English slang for rabbit, “coney” (e.g. Samwise Gamgee, the most stereotypically “pastoral” of Tolkien’s hobbits, telling Gollum, “There’s only one thing to do with a brace of coneys!”), though I wasn’t sure of the source of that connection. Fortunately, I have access to this amazing connected network of computers with a surprising amount of information shared between them – some sort of “inter-net,” you might say – and I was able to do some research and figure it out.

English is a particularly weird language, being thousands of years worth of mishmashed influences of Celtic languages, Germanic languages, Latin and Norman French. Spanish, on the other hand, is much more directly evolved from Latin, and one can generally find the Latin roots of most Spanish words (at least of Spanish-from-Spain words; many American Spanish words come from the languages of the various Central American native groups).

But…the generally accepted Latin word for “rabbit” is lepus – or at least, if you plug “rabbit” into an English-to-Latin translator widget, that’s what you get. The French word bears this out: lapin. But, as with any linguistic detective work (especially anything relating to the always-bizarre English language), this is just the surface and one must dig deeper.

So: what’s the connection between the Spanish conejo and the Rural English coney? Well, it turns out that the Latin lepus is more properly the word for “hare,” which is, of course, a species related to but distinct from the rabbit. More specifically, we’re talking about the European rabbit, native to the Iberian penninsula, for which the proper Latin word is cuniculus. The Latin cuniculus transformed into both the Spanish conejo and, eventually, the English coney.

Here’s where it gets interesting: because tunnels and burrows were so strongly associated with rabbits, the word cuniculus was borrowed to apply to tunnels and burrows in general. Thus, the Linnaean nomenclature for the Burrow Owl is Athene cunicularia, and there is a species of tunneling ant called Formica cunicularia. Underground channels for the diversion of water were known as cuniculi.

But, the human brain being what it is and working based on patterns and comparisons, and language being what it is, forever developing slang and using pre-existing words for different ideas…well. The word meaning “tunnel” or “burrow” also developed into the Latin cunnus, a vulgar term for a portion of the female anatomy that resembles a tunnel or burrow. From this we get the term cunnilingus, and, speculatively, one of the English language’s more rude and vulgar 4-letter words (though no definitive connection between the Latin and the English words has been proven).

So, there you go. Unknown connection between rabbits and ladyparts. Just where beavers come into the picture, I’m not certain.