True on that title, but you gotta give me "鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩" -- that one's a mouthful in any language.
You asked for commentary, and I am afraid you will get commentary:
狸 is, pace Kroll, something that I think rrrrrrreally needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In general, this is my not-a-criticism-just-an-observation take o…
True on that title, but you gotta give me "鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩" -- that one's a mouthful in any language.
You asked for commentary, and I am afraid you will get commentary:
狸 is, pace Kroll, something that I think rrrrrrreally needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In general, this is my not-a-criticism-just-an-observation take on Kroll: accuracy and precision are wonderful things and admirable goals, but if your sources did not uniformly share your commitment to accuracy, which they most definitely did not in the case of 狸, then you're just paddling yourself up Shit Creek and congratulating yourself all the way. I really do love and admire the fussiness, but the idiom 膠柱鼓瑟 comes to mind.
That said, 狸 does generally seem to be more in the wildcat/civet/raccoon-dog range. What happens - mostly starting toward the very end of Kroll's period, and picking up in the Song - is that pet cats get called 狸奴. At some point I'm going to try to start a fight about the Sinological tendency to slavishly translate 奴 as "slave" (or better yet, "caitiff") even in cases where it clearly doesn't mean that -- in his partial version of the thing I'm translating for the next update, Wilt Idema (who knows better) calls a cat named 佛奴 "Buddha's Slave." There, as in 狸奴, and many other places, it feels a lot more like a suffix "-ling": diminutive and not *generally* positive, but not actually hitting the ear as "slave."
My brain automatically filed the word 狸奴 as "kit-ling" the first time I saw it, because my brain has a weakness for too-cute translations, but I think that rendering of it might work for giving one plausible(-ish? your guess is as good as mine) explanation for how the one turned into the other. By the time we get cat-fancying Song poets, 狸奴 feels to me like it's squarely in "kittycat" territory, without any conscious association with civets or anything of the sort, but I'm approaching from the late Ming, when 狸奴 definitely has nothing to do with any non-cat creature.
True on that title, but you gotta give me "鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩" -- that one's a mouthful in any language.
You asked for commentary, and I am afraid you will get commentary:
狸 is, pace Kroll, something that I think rrrrrrreally needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In general, this is my not-a-criticism-just-an-observation take on Kroll: accuracy and precision are wonderful things and admirable goals, but if your sources did not uniformly share your commitment to accuracy, which they most definitely did not in the case of 狸, then you're just paddling yourself up Shit Creek and congratulating yourself all the way. I really do love and admire the fussiness, but the idiom 膠柱鼓瑟 comes to mind.
That said, 狸 does generally seem to be more in the wildcat/civet/raccoon-dog range. What happens - mostly starting toward the very end of Kroll's period, and picking up in the Song - is that pet cats get called 狸奴. At some point I'm going to try to start a fight about the Sinological tendency to slavishly translate 奴 as "slave" (or better yet, "caitiff") even in cases where it clearly doesn't mean that -- in his partial version of the thing I'm translating for the next update, Wilt Idema (who knows better) calls a cat named 佛奴 "Buddha's Slave." There, as in 狸奴, and many other places, it feels a lot more like a suffix "-ling": diminutive and not *generally* positive, but not actually hitting the ear as "slave."
My brain automatically filed the word 狸奴 as "kit-ling" the first time I saw it, because my brain has a weakness for too-cute translations, but I think that rendering of it might work for giving one plausible(-ish? your guess is as good as mine) explanation for how the one turned into the other. By the time we get cat-fancying Song poets, 狸奴 feels to me like it's squarely in "kittycat" territory, without any conscious association with civets or anything of the sort, but I'm approaching from the late Ming, when 狸奴 definitely has nothing to do with any non-cat creature.