# Sıçan



## er targyn

Hello, have you ever wondered about the meaning of this word?


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## Erkin D

er targyn said:


> Hello, have you ever wondered about the meaning of this word?



I don't entirely understand what you mean. You know, I thought we already knew what it meant. It means "rat" in Turkish. If it was something else what you tried to tell us, let us hear it.


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## er targyn

Isn't that "mouse" in the first place? Doesn't it mean "defecating one"?


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## macrotis

er targyn said:


> Hello, have you ever wondered about the meaning of this word?



Frankly, no because I've known what it _literally_ meant since my childhood. There was even a _punny_ puzzle about it that I heard when I was a child as, "_Bir gün bir yerde sıçarken bir sıçan gördün, korkup kaçtın. Şimdi, o boku sıçan mı temizler kaçan mı?_"



er targyn said:


> Isn't that "mouse" in the first place? Doesn't it mean "defecating one"?



Yes, but people in villages don't think it's something shameful or obscene to speak. I'd used to say _göt cebi_ instead of _arka cep_ until I came to the town from my village, where I was taught it was rude, but it wasn't so in the village.

I think it was very rude for townsfolk to say that word so they imported _fare_ centuries ago from Arabic.


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## er targyn

Thanks. I wanted to discuss the probability of that etymology. Why only mouse is named after process, common to all animals? I think that the two words coincided. This type of etymology is called naive or folk etymology.


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## macrotis

Nişanyan and Gülensoy unanimously assert that it comes from the verb _sıç_- + suffix -_gan_. Do you have another information?

Why only the mouse? Well, it may be that people (women!) were more interested in their leaving feces here and there than their being rodents. I don't know.


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## er targyn

In Mongolian related words are çiçağa and çiçağuli, in Tungus-Manchu sosa and sucaki. They are not the same, only in Turkic they became homonymous. (But not in Chuvash)


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## macrotis

Thank you. The Chinese word for it is 鼠 (şǔ).


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