“Tyger, tyger, burning bright”, opens William Blake’s late 18th century poem.
Earlier Middle English forms included tygre or tigre, from the Old French tigre, having evolved from the Latin tigris, which in turn came from Greek. At this point, its etymology becomes uncertain: the Oxford English Dictionary says of the Greek τίγρις that it is “a foreign word, evidently eastern, introduced when the beast became known”.
A popular account tells of how the word possibly comes from an Old Iranian source, given the Old Persian tigra, meaning “sharp, pointed”, and the Avestan (the language of Zoroastrian scripture) tīghri “arrow”. Various early common era writings in Greek and Latin even conflated the naming of the beast and that of the river Tigris – “because it is the fastest of all rivers”. Modern scholars have found little evidence for this.
Other work points to the first encounters of Europeans with tigers – and their first appearance in Greek writings: when Alexander the Great in 326BC was presented with tamed tigers by Indian ambassadors, and subsequently when Seleucus I in 300BC, in token of his subjugation of lands “as far as the river Indus”, sent a pair of live tigers to Athens.
The Sanskrit vyāghrá “tiger” – derived from “one who tracks by smell” – thus may well be an ultimate source for the word. Various Indo-Aryan forms descended from this, including the Hindi bāgh; and it is cognate with the Middle Persian babr/bebr, and related to the Old Armenian vagr and the Old Georgian vigr.
In modern English, the animal’s characteristics have produced several phrases. The fiercely successful smaller economies of East Asia in the 1980s, especially those of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, were nicknamed the “Four Tigers”.
Why you should wear your lucky red underwear for Lunar New Year
A “tiger mother”, strict, overprotective, demanding – who purrs, and growls – especially when pushing her children to high levels of achievement, was recognised early in the 20th century, and popularised by Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.In contrast, “paper tiger”, calqued from the Mandarin zhǐ “paper” + lǎohǔ “tiger” (an equivalent expression also noted in Cantonese), refers to an entity that appears powerful or threatening but is actually weak or ineffective.
Already used in the early Ming dynasty, it gained currency after Mao Zedong’s use of the phrase – in 1956 to describe the United States – but especially with the 1964 translation of his “little red book”, asserting how “imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers”.
Here’s wishing us not the qualities of a paper tiger, but energy, ambition and courage in this Water Tiger year!
