Those on earth who do not love animals are not human

Sometimes the most common words have the rarest, most unusual stories, and nowhere is this clearer than with household pets. The origins of both cat and dog alike have long puzzled linguists, but for opposite reasons: while dog has no known relatives outside English, cat almost has too many! Cat, from Old English catt, has close cognates in other Germanic languages such as German and Norwegian, and the word is traditionally considered to be either an early borrowing of or related to Late Latin cattus, replacing earlier Latin fēlēs. While cattus may be the ultimate source of many other Indo-European words for “cat,” from Irish cat to Russian kot, the source of cattus itself remains unclear. A popular proposal links cattus to an Afro-Asiatic language because of the uncanny resemblance to Arabic qiṭṭ and Syriac qaṭṭa. If valid, cattus would be an example of a wanderwort, a word spread across distantly related and unrelated languages through trade. Alternatively, cat has been tentatively connected to a generic Uralic term for a furry animal, such as a stoat. One final hypothesis is that cat is ultimately based on an imitation of a cat's hiss, which would explain why similar words for the same animal appear in multiple language families. If true, this would not be the only word for “cat” that resembles feline noises; compare Egyptian mjw and Mandarin Chinese māo, which resemble English meow.