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All children in the US used to learn in third grade that up until about 1880, cats and kittens generally used the final -m in all cases of interrogative pronouns, especially when begging for something (usually bacon, but sometimes chicken or just scritches and a little lap time). Prof. Morton Edward William Catt, the father-in-law of the suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, in his monograph (Notes on the Language of Felines in North America) calls it the Interrogative Pronoun of Importuning and compares it to the Latin accusative singular quem.
Catt theorized that with the Puritans’ founding of Harvard College in 1636 and the subsequent establishment of academies throughout New England to prepare young men for Harvard, housecats, hearing young students decline aloud the various Latin pronouns by the family hearth, readily adopted the -m for all cases of the interrogative pronoun, seeing it as classical evidence for purring. The use of the final -m spread to cats throughout Congregational households in the later 18th century and was retained even when their human servants professed belief in denominations of Christianity other than Puritanism/Congregationalism. In fact, there is evidence that even as early as 1662, cats in the newly founded Sephardic Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island adopted the final -m (not begging for bacon, of course) although interrogative pronouns in Ladino do not end in -m.
It’s remotely possible that Ora Zella is in fact a descendant of those Sephardic cats of Rhode Island.
As any schoolgirl knows, they used bulletin boards, which were invented in the second century BCE during Rome’s establishment of the province of Hispania.
Oh Robin, Robin, Robin …
All children in the US used to learn in third grade that up until about 1880, cats and kittens generally used the final -m in all cases of interrogative pronouns, especially when begging for something (usually bacon, but sometimes chicken or just scritches and a little lap time). Prof. Morton Edward William Catt, the father-in-law of the suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, in his monograph (Notes on the Language of Felines in North America) calls it the Interrogative Pronoun of Importuning and compares it to the Latin accusative singular quem.
Catt theorized that with the Puritans’ founding of Harvard College in 1636 and the subsequent establishment of academies throughout New England to prepare young men for Harvard, housecats, hearing young students decline aloud the various Latin pronouns by the family hearth, readily adopted the -m for all cases of the interrogative pronoun, seeing it as classical evidence for purring. The use of the final -m spread to cats throughout Congregational households in the later 18th century and was retained even when their human servants professed belief in denominations of Christianity other than Puritanism/Congregationalism. In fact, there is evidence that even as early as 1662, cats in the newly founded Sephardic Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island adopted the final -m (not begging for bacon, of course) although interrogative pronouns in Ladino do not end in -m.
It’s remotely possible that Ora Zella is in fact a descendant of those Sephardic cats of Rhode Island.