Skeat, The Century Dictionary, and others followed him, though Skeat suggested that monkey was an alteration of Old Italian monicchio, a diminutive of monna. He based his conclusion on the fact that the name of a female monkey surfaced before the name of its masculine partner. In the nineteenth century, etymologists accepted the explanation of Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance comparative philology, who looked upon mona as a “corruption” of Madonna. The source of those words remains undiscovered clearly, monkeys were as foreign to the Romance speaking lands as they were to the English and Germans. In Spanish, mona (feminine) and mono (masculine) resemble monkey, and in Middle French monne (Modern French mone) has been attested. The suspects are two: northern Germany and some Romance country. The question is about the original land of the import. Before the sixteenth century, ape was the generic term for both species. No extant citation of monkey predates 1530 (so the OED), and the word cannot be much older. This means that the names of both animals are, most probably, borrowed. (Mine, however, will appear at the end of the present post.) Only one thing is clear: wherever the ancestors of the modern Germanic speakers lived, including the southernmost areas of the lands they once inhabited (Italy and the shores of the Black Sea), they could not observe monkeys and apes roaming tropical woods. Despite the multitude of hypotheses, the sought-for solution is not in view. In the revised version of the OED, monkey is also discussed at a length, otherwise rare in this online edition. In the most recent dictionary of German etymology (Kluge-Seebold), the entry Affe “ape” is one of the most detailed. Primates have given Germanic language historians great trouble.
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