Pigs

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
> Yes, I'll get around to that, Bob. In the meantime, I've checked six
> French dictionaries covering the time from 1606 to 1835, and there's
> nothing that shows up for "coche" with the meaning of "pig". I'd begun to
> think, so I'm so not just beginning to think, that Taylor devised the
> "coche" = "pig" thing because it made things easy to explain. But the jury
> is still out.

By way of background that is perhaps more apparent to Michael and Romance
linguist Robert Rankin (dissertation on Romanian) than some of the rest of
us, I take it that cochon is an augmentative in form, and is being taken
as such by Allan Taylor, and that *coche would be the perhaps hypothetical
underlying base or simplex form?  The problem would be that the base form
is not attested, or at least not in the relevant period.  The calling form
kyouche-kyouche is, of course, essentially the hypothetical "coche, coche"
variant of the call.

I have to confess that I haven't yet tracked down Allan's paper.