moosa
Hopi edit
Etymology edit
Perhaps from Proto-Uto-Aztecan *musa (“wildcat”) (compare Classical Nahuatl miztli (“puma”)), with the meaning shifted to "domestic cat" under the influence of Spanish mizo (“(domestic) cat”) (resulting in the empty semantic space for "wildcat" being filled by the Ute loanword tokotsi).[1]
Noun edit
moosa
- domestic cat (animal)
References edit
- ^ 1998, Kenneth C. Hill, Spanish loanwords in Hopi, in The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright (edited by Jane H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, Lyle Campbell), page 22
Further reading edit
- A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon (→ISBN, 1985)