Etymology: Cognate with Old Frisian katte (West Frisian kat), Middle Dutch catte, cat (Dutch kat; currency in Old Dutch may be implied by the place name Cathem), Middle Low German katte, Old High German kazza (feminine), kazzo (masculine) (Middle High German katze, German Katze), Old Icelandic kǫttr (masculine), ketta (feminine), Old Swedish katter (masculine; Swedish katt), Old Swedish katta (feminine; Swedish katta), Old Danish, Danish kat; further etymology uncertain (see discussion below). In Middle English probably reinforced by Anglo-Norman cat, kat (12th cent.; also chat), corresponding to Old French, Middle French, French chat (12th cent.) < post-classical Latin cattus (see below).Gender and stem class in Germanic languages. The gender and stem class show considerable variation in the Germanic languages; Old English has cat (masculine) and catte (feminine). An apparently early, but not fully explained, formation from the same stem is shown by Middle Dutch cāter (Dutch kater ), Old Saxon kataro (Middle Low German kāter ), Old High German kataro (Middle High German kater , katere , German Kater ) male cat; it is uncertain whether this is connected with the first element of caterwaul v. No related word is attested in Gothic (in which no word for cat is recorded). Further etymology. Similar words denoting the cat are found in Germanic languages (excluding Gothic), Byzantine Greek, classical Latin (hence in Romance languages), Celtic languages, and Baltic and Slavonic languages, but the connection between them is unclear. Considerations of word form show that they do not all go back to a shared Indo-European antecedent. The word is very possibly not of great antiquity in any of these language families. Plausible attempts to identify an origin within either Germanic or Celtic have been made; alternatively, the word is often considered to be a loanword in all of these language families, very possibly having spread as recently as the first centuries of the first millennium a.d. Words of broadly similar form have often been adduced from languages of North Africa such as Nubian or Berber, but also from Basque, Turkish, and Finnish. If, as sometimes thought, the word ultimately has an imitative origin, recalling the hissing sound made by a cat, then the same development could well have occurred independently in different languages at different times, and some or all of these resemblances could well be purely coincidental (as could some of those between different branches of Indo-European). Compare similarly meow int. Attempts to link a narrative of the spread of the word with the geographical spread of the animal are also often countered by the argument that the word may originally have denoted a different animal. Byzantine Greek had κάττα (in magical texts (possibly Hellenistic Greek) and various scholia) and later κάττος, as familiar terms corresponding to ancient Greek αἴλουρος; modern Greek has γάτα from Italian. In post-classical Latin, both cattus (masculine) and catta (feminine) are attested from the 5th cent. (Classical Latin catta in Martial ( Epigrams 13: 69) is almost certainly the name of a bird, and the same may also be true of the same form occurring in the Vulgate (Baruch 6:21, where Vetus Latina has gutae, probably to be read as gattae; Greek αἴλουρος in the corresponding passage in the surviving manuscripts of the Septuagint may reflect an erroneous scribal alteration of κόττος cock, interpreted as an error for κάττος). Beside French chat, in other Romance languages compare: Old Occitan cat, gat, Catalan gat, Spanish gato, Portuguese gato, Italian gatto. Compare in Celtic languages: Gaulish cattos (masculine; in names), Early Irish catt (masculine; Irish cat), Welsh cath (usually feminine), Old Cornish kat (feminine; Middle Cornish cath, Cornish kath), Middle Breton caz (masculine; Breton kazh). Compare also in Slavonic languages: Russian kot, Czech regional kot, Bulgarian regional kot, Slovene kot, all in sense ‘male cat’, Polish kot male or female cat; also, in Baltic languages, Lithuanian katė cat.