--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know what the origin of Micifuz "pussycat, Puss-in-Boots" is? It's first attested c. 1639 in Lope de Vega's "Gatomaquia." �
> I suspect that it's related to mico "monkey" in Modern Spanish, but "cat" in Old Spanish and also Galician according to the on-line Galician dictionary.
[DGK]
I doubt that Micifuz has anything to do with <mico> 'monkey'. I would look first at the Spanish interjections <miz>, used to call a cat, and <fu>, used to express the snarling of a cat. The former, reinterpreted as a vocative, has produced <Miz> as a familiar cat's name, which in turn has been thematized as appellatives, <mizo>, <miza> (more commonly <micho>, <micha> by a form of hypocoristic palatalization adapted from Basque; cf. <chicharra> 'cicada' which has also substituted a Basque ending), familiar-register terms for 'cat'. However, <fu> has been nominalized as 'snarl, sound of disgust, expression of disgust'. Thus, an obsolete Spanish noun *miz meaning 'call which summons a cat' is conceivable.
In proverbial collocations, one word is sometimes deformed to match another. English <rough and tough> provides an example. These adjectives did not rhyme in Old English, or even in Chaucer. The collocation forced <tough> to rhyme with <rough>. Similarly, if the nouns *miz and <fu> were used in a 17th-century Spanish collocation, <fu> might have been deformed into *fuz. What I have in mind is *Miz-y-Fuz 'Call-and-Snarl' as the familiar name of a finicky cat. When someone calls this type of cat, even for dinner, he typically snarls in disgust, like Morris of cat-food commercial fame. In this view, Micifuz is simply a univerbation of *Miz-y-Fuz.
If Lope de Vega's 'Catfight' was veiled political satire like Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels', perhaps Micifuz was intended as the representation of an actual leader with finicky habits, but I have too little knowledge of relevant history to suggest a possible identification.
> I suspect that both words go back to Latin mictus, mictiare "to piss" --i.e. referring to the male cat's habit of spraying his territory.
[DGK]
Since <mictus> is the participle of <mingere> 'to piss', I suspect that the stem-vowel was short and Spanish *mecho would be expected as its reflex.