Re: USAGE: English, Masculine, Feminine

On 15 Jun 2004 Roger Mills <rfmilly@MS...> wrote:

> *Ah yes, does have: cucifici ~cuci ~fici ["tSutSi'fitSi] 'a silly or
> inane person, esp. as applied to the idle rich'.
  It sounds comletely Hungarian and reminds me a productive
Hungarian word-forming method, the repetitive co-ordinative word
composition (or "szo'ikeri'te's" 'word gemination' as we call it in
Hungarian), that is the type of English "teeny-weeny".

  During this the base word is repeated. If the word begins with a
consonant, it is replaced by a labial [b], [p] and [m] in the
second instance. If the word is vowel-initial, a prosthetic labial
[b], [p] or [m] is added. If the original word begins with a labial
consonant, it will be the second element and the repeated instance
-- which comes first in sequence -- looses its labial intial
consonant.

> I forget where the cuci- part comes from
  May I propose Hungarian "cucli" [tsutsli] 'dummy, pacifier,
rubber teat (for babies)'? Being infant is often treated as some
kind of silliness or inanity (cf. word "infantile").

  Or: Idle rich men are often accompanied by "sex-kittens" who are
called sometimes jokingly "cuncimo'kus" [tsuntsimo:kuS] in
Hungarian ("cunci" comes from the baby-talk and often used by
finical husbands to address their wife, or vice versa; "mo'kus"
means 'squirrel' and this is also a nickname between spouses.)

> -fici is a corrupted diminutive of fitros 'paradise, ecstasy' [...]
> Extra points for identifying the origin of _fitros_.
  Is it a metathetical form of "fritos" which is due to the
delabialization of Spanish "frutos" 'fruits'? Eden was a fruit
garden anyway...