Unclear, due to its not being mentioned by Imperial Era botanical or agricultural authors and being continued in only comparatively early Romanized Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania citerior theorized to have died out elsewhere by the end of the 1st century BCE but brought there in the century before that by Sabine settlers and having been derived from Sabine catus, which is the semantic equivalent of Latin acūtus and thus as an etymological equivalent of catus preserves its literal meaning “spiky”, with the suffix as in the tree-names carpinus and fraxinus, which is formally possible as Sabine had not weakened the penultimate vowel in proparoxytones of this kind. Note the name of the related species herba Sabīna (“savin”, literally “Sabine herb”), arbor Sabīna (“savin”, literally “Sabine tree”), and even the genus name jūniperus is formally marked as Sabine. Otherwise a Punic borrowing, of the same Semitic origin as κέδρος (kédros), thus a doublet of cedrus from Greek and of Medieval Latin catrānum (“bundle of brushweed dunked into tar”) from Arabic. To Proto-Finnic *kataga (“juniper”) respectively Latvian kadiķis, Lithuanian kadagys, Old Prussian kadegis (“juniper”) there is no way in either direction.
catanum n (genitive catanī); second declension (hapax)
Second-declension noun (neuter).
| singular | plural | |
|---|---|---|
| nominative | catanum | catana |
| genitive | catanī | catanōrum |
| dative | catanō | catanīs |
| accusative | catanum | catana |
| ablative | catanō | catanīs |
| vocative | catanum | catana |