Just as there were no rabbits in Australia until they were taken there by British settlers in 1859, there were no rabbits in England or in northern Europe till they were introduced from southern Europe in the twelfth century. Accordingly, most of the languages of northern Europe鈥攊ncluding English, Celtic, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Finnish鈥攈ad to borrow their words for rabbit from one of the Romance languages, that is, from one of the languages that developed from Latin like French, Spanish, and Italian. English, for example, derived its original name for the rabbit鈥攃ony鈥攆rom the French conis, which in turn developed from the Latin name for the long-eared creature, cuniculus. Cony first appeared in English at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but at that time the word referred only to the pelt or fur of the rabbit: it did not come to mean the living, breathing animal until the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century is also when the now more familiar name, rabbit, was first introduced. Rabbit initially meant the young of a cony, and did not really begin to replace cony itself until the eighteenth century. To some extent, the demise of cony was caused by its pronunciation: when first adopted, the word was pronounced so that it rhymed with money or honey, as demonstrated by poems in which it is used as part of a rhyme; this pronunciation apparently troubled no one until about three hundred years ago when a moral minority complained that the pronunciation of coney was too similar to that of cunny, a word that had emerged in the early eighteenth century as a diminutive of cunt. Benjamin Smart, for example, who published a pronunciation dictionary in 1836, declared that in solemn places, such as a church, the pronunciation of the creature’s name should be changed so that it rhymed with words like pony (for a long time, saying coney in church could not be avoided because it was used in older translations of the Bible). Eventually, however, the controversy over the pronunciation of coney faded away as the word itself vanished: rabbit was increasingly used in its place, both in everyday speech and in biblical translations. Today, coney is only heard in Coney Island, a place where Dutch immigrants once bred rabbits. The word rabbit, incidentally, derives from the Walloon rabotte, Walloon being a form of French spoken in Belgium.