I ran across the information that Mafia was derived from a Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which surprised me and made me curious about further etymology. The OED (entry revised 2000) wasn’t much help — it just says “< Italian mafia (1865; also †maffia), probably back-formation < mafiuso, Italian regional (Sicily) mafiusu” — but the Wikipedia article has this fairly astonishing etymology section:
Mafia (English: /ˈmɑːfiə/; Italian: [ˈmaːfja]) derives from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which roughly translated means “swagger” but can also be translated as “boldness” or “bravado”. According to scholar Diego Gambetta, mafiusu (mafioso in Italian) in 19th-century Sicily, in reference to a man, signified “fearless”, “enterprising”, and “proud”. In reference to a woman, the feminine-form adjective mafiusa means “beautiful” or “attractive”. Because Sicily was under Islamic rule from 827 to 1091, Mafia may have come to Sicilian through Arabic, although the word’s origins are uncertain. Mafia in the Florentine dialect means “poverty” or “misery”, while a cognate word in Piedmontese is mafium, meaning “a little or petty person”. Possible Arabic roots of the word include:
■ maʿfī (معفي), meaning “exempted”. In Islamic law, jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands, and people who pay it are “exempted” from prosecution.
■ màha, meaning “quarry” or “cave”; the mafie were the caves in the region of Marsala that acted as hiding places for persecuted Muslims and later served other types of refugees, in particular Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts” after their embarkment on Sicily in 1860 in the struggle for Italian unification. According to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo [it], cave in Arabic literary writing is Maqtaa hagiar, while in popular Arabic it is pronounced as Mahias hagiar, and then “from Maqtaa (Mahias) = Mafia, that is cave, hence the name (ma)qotai, quarrymen, stone-cutters, that is, Mafia”.
■ mahyāṣ (مهياص), meaning “aggressive boasting” or “bragging”.
■ marfūḍ (مرفوض), meaning “rejected”, considered to be the most plausible derivation; marfūḍ developed into marpiuni (“swindler”) to marpiusu and finally mafiusu.
■ muʿāfā (معافى), meaning “safety” or “protection”.
■ maʿāfir (معافر), the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo. The local peasants imitated these Arabs and as a result the tribe’s name entered the popular lexicon. The word Mafia was then used to refer to the defenders of Palermo during the Sicilian Vespers against rule of the Capetian House of Anjou on 30 March 1282.
■ mafyaʾ (مفيء), meaning “place of shade”. Shade meaning refuge or derived from refuge. After the Normans destroyed the Saracen rule in Sicily in the 11th century, Sicily became feudalistic. Most Arab smallholders became serfs on new estates, with some escaping to “the Mafia”. It became a secret refuge.
Does anyone have any thoughts about that parade of possibles?
The derivation from marfūḍ is considered to the most plausible by Mafia historian Salvatore Lupo, in Storia della Mafia, p. 49, but he also writes: “Di per sé non è molto interessante sapere da dove derivi il termine mafia”.
A person from Capri is called capriccioso and a person from Amalfi is called Mafioso.
“Di per sé non è molto interessante sapere da dove derivi il termine mafia”
How do you say “a harmless drudge” in Italian?
Di per sé non è molto interessante sapere da dove derivi il termine mafia
Alas, we are trying to explain colour to a blind man here.
Even by folk etymology standards, that’s an impressively terrible array of efforts. My primary takeaway from that is that some people really desperately want Mafia to have an Arabic etymology, but don’t much care which one. Perhaps it’s the same people who say that Africa begins at Rome.
Even by folk etymology standards, that’s an impressively terrible array of efforts.
Just as I thought! But you’d think there would be something more plausible by now.
I thought I’d look up the origins of the names of related organizations. Cosa nostra (what the Sicilian mafia calls itself) is straightforward Italian “our thing.” ‘Ndrangheta (from Calabria) looks weird, but it’s just from Greek ἀνδραγαθία, “manly courage.”
Camorra (Campania) is more interesting. It seems to have a number of folk etymologies. One connects it to another meaning of camorra, “kind of smock-frock or blouse”; the OED has an 1865 cite from The Saturday Review that says “its name is conjectured to be that of a species of short coat worn by members of the society.” A more popular, albeit fanciful, suggestion is that it comes from a gambling game called “morra.” The group’s name is said to come from c’a-morra, “with the morra,” or capo morra, with capo (“head”) referring to the money skimmed off the top of the game.
Merriam-Webster points out that camorra (or gamorra) itself was used to refer to gambling games:
Merriam-Webster says the further etymology is unknown, but other sources say it comes from Spanish camorra, “quarrel.” That does look to be the ultimate etymon, although whether the term for gambling actually played a role is not clear. The name of the criminal organization could have easily been adopted directly from the Spanish word.
Likewise, the Florentine and Piedmontese words have meanings which are unrelated to the Sicilian or each other.
Wiktionary’s comments on the etymology of mafia are entirely sensible:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mafia#Sicilian
Quite so:
“An uncertain Arabism” is very good.
But it seems that term is an American invention. Joe Bonanno claims he first heard it in the late 1920s (after he had come to the US from Castellamare) and that he hated it (he rather uses “the Sicilian tradition”). The Sicilians seem to have adopted it after the war when they emerged from Mussolini’s prisons and made contact with their American colleagues again.
Cosa Nostra as defined by Gambino underboss Agniello “Neil” Dellacroce: “Cosa Nostra means that the boss is your boss!”
If no clear etymology has been found for as prominent a word as “Mafia”, that probably means that the data are insufficient to establish what its etymology in fact is.
I have the impression that appeal to “Arabic” is a kind of last resort by scholars working on Sicilian when they fail to find an obvious indigenous (=Romance) etymology for a word. Which at least has some basis in fact -Sicily has long been a place where Romance was in contact with Arabic* (And Greek too -making me wonder whether it might be worth some scholar’s time to explore the possibility of “mafia” having a Greek etymology). Also, “Mafia”, with its intervocalic /f/ not located at a morpheme boundary, looks quite un-Romance-like, making a foreign origin a natural hypothesis.
This tendency to use Arabic as a kind of “language of the gaps” to explain non-Romance words/structures of Sicilian reminds me of the trend among early (and some later) scholars of Latin to explain (explain away?) words of unknown etymology (and un-Indo-European-looking features of the diachronic phonology and/or morphosyntax of Latin) as being due to Etruscan influence (the fact that Etruscan is so poorly known made it -and still makes it- all too easy to use it to explain anything otherwise inexplicable/mysterious in Latin).
*Incidentally, would any hatter (Lameen?) know whether there is any evidence as to whether Berber was ever widely spoken in Sicily? If so, well, if no convincing Arabic and no convincing Greek etymology can be found…
I think the Sicilian tradition meant referring to mafiosi as “uomo d’onore” (meaning “men of honor”). Related is that made men were not allowed to discuss mafia business until they had been introduced by another made man known to both of them using the proper formula. In Donnie Brasco,* Al Pacino’s character explains the difference between calling someone “a friend of mine” and “a friend of ours,” with the latter indicating an inducted mafia member.
However, there may not have been a name for the Sicilian mafia organization as a whole. This is probably at least partially due to the fact that organization above the level of individual crime families was very loose (although not as loose as in the ‘Ndrangheta). Before the 1920s, it may not have been uniformly agreed that all Sicilian mafiosi even belonged to the same secret society.** Moreover, “men of honor” was never a term always strictly limited to members of the Sicilian organization. When dealing with other groups like the Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta, the Sicilians sometimes used uomo d’onore for them as well.
* The plot is heavily fictionalized, with various characters having quite different roles in the movie than they played in real life. However, the broad outline of the plot is accurate. FBI agent Joe Pistone posed as a jewel thief and became an associate of the Bonanno crime family. Over several years, he collected a lot of information about how the mafia operated, until the operation had to be wrapped up, because it had become too successful. Pistone’s undercover identity of Brasco was on the verge of being inducted into the mafia, but that would have required him to perform a contract killing, so he was pulled out.
** When setting up criminal syndicates in America, Italian groups in different places had differing views on how closely their new organizations should be tied to particular Old-World groups. While Sicilians were predominant for a long time, particularly in the Northeast, there were important exceptions. For example, Paul the Waiter, who was the preeminent figure in the Chicago Outfit for decades, was a Camorra guy.
Merriam-Webster says the further etymology is unknown, but other sources say it comes from Spanish camorra, “quarrel.”
I would need to know the identities of those “other sources” to have an informed opinion.
There is a detailed wikipedia article about camorra. It includes
emphasis added
As to camorra in Spanish, the Spanish Academy Diccionario de Autoridades c. 1734 doesn’t include it, and the most recent DRAE publication has
“De or. inc.
1. f. Mafia napolitana. Sin.:
* mafia.”
As best I can tell, the etymological note, “De or. inc.” stands for de origen incierto, of uncertain origin.
Camorra shows up in the 1780 Royal Academy dictionary meaning fight, riña, or quarrel, pendencia. In any event, all of the RAE publications from 1780 to 1992 have riña and pendencia as the definition. Some later 20th c. works add an Argentine entry for a type of sausage sandwich.
That there is a Spanish word camorra meaning quarrel is definite. Its possible migration to an Italian criminal organization is not clear. If I have correctly understood other material presented here, camorra was present in Naples before the word was documented in Spanish.
Where did “squirrel” come into this?
At some point in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, names translating to “Black Hand” became widespread in multiple countries/languages for what wikipedia generically calls “criminal and underground groups,” ranging from e.g. the Andalusian anarchists known as La Mano Negra to the Serbian irredentists known as Црна рука. It’s not clear to me whether someone somewhere originated this first and then it “went viral” (to use an anachronistic phrase) because plenty of other groups immediately recognized it as a cool or “metal” sounding name and borrowed it, or whether there were a bunch of independent coinages because the usefulness of the image for creating an aura of secrecy plus intimidation is pretty obvious.
Some sources about US mafia prehistory try to specify “Black Hand” as the name of a particular genre of extortion racket the proto-mafiosi pursued rather than as a name (or at least a slang exonym) for the groups themselves, but I doubt actual usage was that tidy. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_mano_nera is an Italian movie, but set in the Italian-American community of early 20th century NYC.
Ricardo Soca, who often writes persuasive notes on Spanish etymology, states without supporting documentation that the Neapolitan criminal organization was formed by Spanish delinquents and that those Spaniards gave the outfit its name.
“ Esta palabra tiene en español dos significados: es el nombre de un poderoso grupo delictivo que opera en Nápoles y en toda la región de la Campania, semejante a la Mafia siciliana o a la ‘Ndrangheta calabresa, y coloquialmente, el de ‘riña’, ‘pelea callejera’.
La gente suele pensar que el segundo significado proviene del primero, pero es exactamente lo contrario: la Camorra napolitana, que en sus orígenes habría estado formada por delincuentes españoles, tomó su nombre de la palabra castellana, o sea que los miembros de la camorra fueron llamados así por su agresividad y su permanente disposición a la pelea.
El origen de camorra es desconocido, aunque diferentes etimólogos han tejido las más diversas hipótesis al respecto. Corominas enumera muchas de ellas en un largo artículo en el que tacha como carentes de fundamento semántico propuestas tales como el castellano quimera, el siciliano camurra ‘opresión’, ‘aplastamiento’ y el árabe qamr ‘juego de azar’.
Sin llegar a expresar una preferencia, el etimólogo parecer mirar con simpatía el adjetivo catalán camorro ‘res que padece la modorra, enfermedad convulsiva que ataca la cabeza del ganado lanar’, y señala su parentesco con palabras vascuences como amurru ‘la rabia del perro’, amurratu ‘enredar’, ‘desordenar’, ‘molestar’ y amorratua ‘rabioso’, ‘encarnizado’.
Otra hipótesis es que provenga de la expresión napolitana c’a morra ‘con el grupo’.”
source: https://www.elcastellano.org/envios/2021-09-08-000000
There is a logical gap in this statement. “ la Camorra napolitana, que en sus orígenes habría estado formada por delincuentes españoles, tomó su nombre de la palabra castellana, o sea que los miembros de la camorra fueron llamados así por su agresividad y su permanente disposición a la pelea.”. The Neapolitan Camorra, which is said to have originally been made up of Spanish criminals, took its name from the Spanish word, meaning that the members of the Camorra were given this name because of their aggressiveness and their constant readiness to fight.
It assumes that the Neapolitans (1) knew the Spanish term, and (2) decided to use that foreign word, rather than a Neapolitan equivalent to describe the brawling foreigners.
There is a section on etymology of camorra here:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camorra
Where did “squirrel” come into this?
Old eyes, smudged glasses. I noticed my error and removed the squirrelly comments.
Sorry.
Here Sammy Gravano tells the story how he refused to talk to West Coast mobster Jimmy Fratianno because they hadn’t been properly introduced.
The Chicago organisation was always different, especially in the early days. Founded by Jimmy Colosimo (basically, a pimp), they had non-Italians in leading positions (Jews like the Guzik brothers, even a Greek like Gus Alex). There is a story that New York boss Joe Masseria had Al Capone and some of his Italian henchmen inducted into the Sicilian mafia so they could be on equal terms with each other; I have my doubts about that story, but the Chikago Outfit always had close associations with the Masseria-Luciano-Genovese family.
@ulr: Yes, the Outfit was different and didn’t hew to the policy of New York families that they were part of the same organization as the mafiosi back in Sicily. But the Chicago boss has always had a seat on the Mafia Commission, which not even all of the Five Families have had continuously—the Bonannos having lost their place after the Donnie Brasco fiasco.
(And you link is just back to this page.)
Wolf Durian wrote in 1926 an enjoyable novel (what now would be called YA), Kai aus der Kiste, translated to English as Bill of the Black Hand, about a gang of poor and working-class kids in a big city called The Black Hand. They are quite wholesome scofflaws. In the book they outwit one arrogant guy to win a competition for advertising American cigarettes.
The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang is a book of picture puzzles, centered around a group of child detectives who use that name. When I read it as a kid, I don’t think I had heard of the Black Hand criminal organization.
Here Sammy Gravano tells the story
No URL; if you’ll provide it, I’ll add it.
This is the URL.
Fixed!
i feel a need to mention the best folk etymology, by my lights: Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela!
(a history of organizational names chosen to fit an acronym would be lovely to have*)
.
* says me, who was once part of a theater project called ALCTRASJ.
Ah yes. Truly a classic.
whether there is any evidence as to whether Berber was ever widely spoken in Sicily?
There were certainly historically Berber-speaking groups in Sicily; whether they brought their original language with them is less clear. In any event, phonotactically “Mafia” looks nearly as un-Berber as it does un-Romance.
Phoenician it is, then.
*duck & cover*
Of course. The name “Mafia” originally referred to the clandestine resistance groups that opposed Roman rule after the annexation of Sicily from Carthage at the end of the First Punic War.
The root is cognate with Hebrew פעה “groan.”
Only a conspiracy can explain the silence on the obvious origin, Sicanian.
I like that.
Not Sicel?
Of the early languages of Trinacria, Siculian and Elymian were most likely Indo-European and quite possibly Italic. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone knows what Sicanian was. Indo-European? Tyrsenian? An isolate?
a scribal error for sicariian, clearly, as the semitic root hints.
Not Sicel?
A little is known about Sicel, as Brett mentioned, which makes it inconvenient for those of us who prefer to rely on sheer irrefutability.
Elymian was the one I couldn’t remember. 🙂
Or, maybe somewhat more likely, Crotonian.