El Gato, the nameless cat

It was revealed last week that Jeremy Corbyn's cat does not have a name, and he simply calls it 'el gato'. Or is that El Gato? It was in an interview with the Independent, and you can't hear capital letters, so we may never know. Perhaps it doesn't matter. But perhaps it does!

El Gato, the cat. 

Corbyn himself appears to regard this as not a name, as he goes on to talk about how cats don't know their own names anyway. However, El Gato could be a perfectly good name, if he chooses to think of it that way. Yes, it means 'the cat', but we can use common nouns as proper nouns quite easily. My friend does exactly this, as her car is nicknamed El Gato. Another friend's mother has a cat whose name is The Little Cat. Ella Fitzgerald and all the other Ellas are just called 'her', by the same token, but we think of it as a name. Adam West and all the other Adams are just called 'man', but again, no problem here.

Words I have learnt

I always learn some new vocabulary when I'm at LAGB. Sometimes from the language tutorial (every year there's an in-depth look at an unfamiliar language), sometimes just from examples in the papers. Last year, for instance, I learnt that Swahili for lion is simba, presumably where the lovable yet headstrong (and somewhat dim) character in The Lion King gets his name.

This year I learnt that Turkish for man is adam. It's also the same in Hebrew, I think, as the name of Adam (the Biblical one) is supposed to be from Hebrew. People seem to disagree over what it means though - it also means red, like the earth (which Adam was supposedly made from). However, this new word is not surprising, only mildly interesting.

I also learnt the Tundra Nenets word for bread, which is na'an. Tundra Nenets is a Samoyedic Uralic language spoken in Russia. We get the word naan from Urdu (or Persian, according to the OED), which is a whole lot different from Nenets. I don't think there's been a lot of contact between northern Russian peoples and Urdu speakers, so what the heck is going on here? Could it be just coincidence?