"Rosse Woelmuis" sounds lovely (I think I can pronounce it properly). My grandad used to call bats: "flitter mice" which surely goes back many centuries. He w

"Rosse Woelmuis" sounds lovely (I think I can pronounce it properly). My grandad used to call bats: "flitter mice" which surely goes back many centuries. He was a farmer in Devon and things move quite slowly down (t)here. German famously has der fledermaus (opera and creature) and vleermuis is the Dutch for bat. In the Germanic languages you can swap out v and f, d and g and y and get pretty similar words. Maus and muis and mouse are pretty obvious too. No idea why we use bat in modern English - we are obviously the odd one out in the Germanic languages here and yet clearly we did used to use a similar word/description to NL and DE: Flitter mouse - vleermuis - fledermaus - bat (wtf!) I think that vleer (NL) means furry and fleder (DE) means ...something... and I know that flitter (EN) means to move erratically and fast. When I try to get Google translate to translate fleder it spits out bat and it also spits out bat for fledermaus. I doubt that German is broken. What does fleder (DE) mean? and how does it relate to fledermaus?