Pigs

[ROOD DAVID S]

Allan tells me that his citation of "coche" and similar forms comes from
Walther von Wartburg, Franzoesisches etymologisches Worterbuch, Band 2,
Halbband 2, Basel, 1946, p. 1254. Wartburg was always held up to me as THE
example of how to do etymology when I was in graduate school.  We don't
seem to have it in our local library.

David



David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Koontz John E wrote:

> 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.
>