▪ Perhaps from lLat
cattus ‘cat’, of unknown origin. More likely, however, the Lat and the Ar words both have the same ancestor in an older Eastern culture. Littmann1924: 14 thinks most probably this is Ancient Egypt, because of the prominent position cats had in Eg culture. (Recent archeozoological findings indeed support the thesis that Europe came to know domesticated cats through the Romans, who imported them from Egypt.) The domestication process itself, however, seems to have taken place, for the first time, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent region.
1
This would support the thesis, put forward by Rolland2014a, that the origin of the word probably has to be looked for in a Mesopotamian, Iranian, or Sem lang.
▪ Klein1966 and
EtymOnline even do not exclude the possibility of an AfrAs origin (cf. Nub
kadīs, Berb
kadiska ‘cat’).
▪ For other terms for ‘cat’, cf. ↗
hirr (ultimately onomatop.) and ↗
bass (from Eg).