Re: micifuz, mico

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> --- 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.
>
> 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;

>

I won't say "adapted from" but "shared with". But in this case you choose a bad example, as Basque has no palatalized form (see below).

> cf. <chicharra> 'cicada' which has also substituted a Basque ending),
>

Spanish chicharra is an expressive palatalized variant (dialectal Mozarabian for Coromines) of cigarra id., cognate to Basque txigar.

> > 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.
>

I think this is very unlikely.