{"id":494,"date":"2018-10-24T07:56:01","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T07:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=494"},"modified":"2018-10-24T09:59:15","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T09:59:15","slug":"werewolves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/10\/24\/werewolves\/","title":{"rendered":"Werewolves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hallowe\u2019en will soon be upon us, so it is only right we turn our attention to monsters. Consider the werewolf. It\u2019s a wolf, sort of, as the name indicates, but what\u2019s a were<\/em>? The usual assumption is that it\u2019s a leftover of an older word meaning \u2018man\u2019 that fell completely out of fashion by the 14th century. As a result we have what looks like a compound word, except that one of the parts doesn\u2019t have any meaning on its own. Perhaps not, but that hasn\u2019t stopped people from squeezing some value out of it nonetheless: if a werewolf is a person who turns into a wolf — or at any rate, part person, part wolf — then a were-bear is a mixture of person and bear, and so on down to were-turtles.<\/p>\n

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Actually, people don\u2019t seem to be that literal-minded when it comes to word meanings, if the various were-creatures in circulation are any evidence. The monster from “Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” is not half-human, half-rabbit, but more just kind of a monster rabbit, with a thicker pelt. (Visually calqued, I suspect, from the not-particularly wolf-like wolfman of the wolfman movies featuring Lon Chaney Jr.)<\/p>\n

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And were-fleas, to the extent that they exist, appear to be carriers of lycanthropism rather than human\/insect conglomerates. None of this is yet reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary\u2019s<\/a> entry on were<\/em>– (you need a subscription for that but it’s free if you have a UK public library card!). Give it a few decades more maybe.<\/p>\n

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Strangely, words for werewolf in other languages share a propensity for being compounds made up of \u2018wolf\u2019 plus some other completely opaque element. The first part of Czech vlkodlak<\/em> is vlk<\/em>, which means \u2018wolf\u2018, but dlak<\/em> on its own is not an independent word. (Not in Czech at any rate, but in the related language Slovenian the equivalent word volkodlak<\/em> is clearly made up of volk<\/em> \u2018wolf\u2019 and dlaka<\/em>, which means \u2018hair\u2019 or \u2018fur\u2019.) And the French werewolf, loup-garou<\/em>, has the word for \u2018wolf\u2019 in it (loup<\/em>), but garou<\/em>\u00a0is not an independent word (other than being an unrelated homonym meaning ‘flax-leaved daphne’). That part seems to have been our very own Germanic word werewolf<\/em> borrowed at an early date (earliest attestation as garwall from the 12th century). Both of these have, like werewolf, given rise to further monstrous hybrids like Czech prasodlak<\/em>, from prase<\/em> \u2018pig\u2019, or the French cochon-garou<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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In fact, Czech and French have gone one step further than English. Though I just wrote that dlak<\/em> and garou<\/em> were not words, that was being a bit pedantic. Neither of them are listed in the authoritative Academy dictionaries of Czech<\/a> and French<\/a>, but nonetheless they do seem to have split\u00a0off from their host body, rather as happened — if we can be permitted to mix monster metaphors — to the hero of 1959’s “The Manster (a.k.a The Split)”.\"\"<\/p>\n

For example, this Czech website<\/a> tells us about\u00a0vlkodlaci i jin\u00ed dlaci<\/em> ‘werewolves and other were-creatures’ (dlaci<\/em> is the plural of dlak<\/em>), and in French the phrase courir le garou<\/em> ‘run the garou<\/em>‘ used, at least, to be in circulation, meaning basically ‘go around at night being a werewolf”. That use in turn apparently spawned a verb garouter<\/em><\/a>, meaning much the same thing. The curse lives on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hallowe\u2019en will soon be upon us, so it is only right we turn our attention to monsters. Consider the werewolf. It\u2019s a wolf, sort of, as the name indicates, but what\u2019s a were? The usual assumption is that it\u2019s a leftover of an older word meaning \u2018man\u2019 that fell completely out of fashion by the 14th century. As a result we have what looks like a compound word, except that one of the parts doesn\u2019t have any meaning on its…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,58,4,18],"tags":[],"coauthors":[71],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analogy","category-czech","category-english","category-french"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":523,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}