system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are European languages's words for "dog" all different but their words for "cat" all basically the same?

English *dog,* German *Hund,* Spanish *perro,* French *chien,* Russian *sobaka,* Greek *skýlos,* Irish *madra,* vs English *cat,* German *Katze*, Spanish *gato,* French *chat,* Russian *kot,* Greek *Gáta,* Irish *cat.* The words for "dog" all sound completely different from each other, but the words for "cat" all sound the same, just adapted slightly to fit the sound of the language, like a loanword. Why is this, considering cats and dogs were both domesticated by humans well before any of these languages branched off from Proto-Indo-European?
gpt
Part of this is time depth - most European languages are related (the Uralic languages, including Finnish and Hungarian, and Basque are the main ~~examples~~*exceptions* that aren't on the periphery). The word for dog in many of those is related: English hound, German Hund, Latin canis, French chien, Armenian šun, Latvian suns, Russian suka, Irish cú, Greek kýon are all from the same original word. Russian sobaka is also from the same root, but was loaned in from Indo-Iranian rather than inherited directly. Most of those relations have just been thoroughly masked at a surface-level glance by millennia of sound changes. English dog, Spanish perro, and Irish madra represent relatively recent innovations that aren't of clear origins.

Cat, on the other hand, was loaned through Latin in many languages, substantially lowering the amount of time sound change had a change to mask the origins. It makes sense it was borrowed because it's of vastly more recent origin - while it was technically *domesticated* some time around 10000 years ago, domesticated cats *in Europe* are substantially more recent: they were first introduced into the Mediterranean very roughly 3000 years ago, and their spread beyond the area of the Roman Empire only happened near the start of the Medieval period.