Looking at a map of Switzerland, I noticed a town called La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva and wondered how it was pronounced. Wikipedia told me it was [la tuʁ də pɛ] (ah, the transparency of French spelling!), but then I wanted to know where the name was from, so I proceeded to French Wikipedia, where I found this:
Dans son livre « Noms de lieux des pays franco-provençaux », Georges Richard Wipf écrit que « le gallois blaidd (loup) étant à l’origine des termes bela, belau, bele et bel, ce qui postule ble → bel, on peut penser que *bleiz a aussi pu évoluer […] en *beilz, d’où *peilz. » L’auteur prend toutefois soin de préciser qu’« il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse, mais elle expliquerait le nom de Peilz (La Tour-de-Peilz, VD). »
Cette étymologie est toutefois controversée et plusieurs autres explications ont été avancées. Celle retenue de préférence aujourd’hui est une origine remontant à un gentilice latin Pellius, hypothèse confortée par le lieu-dit En Peilz, à l’est de la ville, où ont été retrouvés de nombreux vestiges romains.
I mean, I’m all for trying to peer into the past of words, but the pile-up of “ce qui postule … on peut penser … a aussi pu évoluer” hardly needs to be clarified by “il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse.” I am irresistibly reminded of the insufferable Brichot.
But that Welsh word blaidd ‘wolf’ is interesting; it goes back to Proto-Celtic *bledyos (etymology unknown: “Probably borrowed from a non-Indo-European substrate language”), whose Old Irish descendant bled (eDIL) means ‘sea-monster; whale.’ There’s a fine piece of semantic development for you! I deduce that the Irish, not having wolves, applied the inherited name to their native sea-monsters. (The modern term for ‘wolf’ is mac tíre ‘son of the land’; make of that what you will.)
Under “blaidd”, GPC also compares Old Irish blesc “whore”, saying “literally, ‘she-wolf’, cf Latin lupa.”)
Wikitionary offers descendants in Brythonic and Old Irish but nothing else. Is that enough to postulate a proto-Celtic term? Can someone offer more information about “bela, belau, bele et bel”? Are they forms of some phase of French or Romance with a secure link to the meaning wolf?
Edited — I may be wrong. Wiktionary in English doesn’t link a Gaulish etymon, and my French is poor. Hat’s very citation calls it “le gallois blaidd”.
But the word looks weird to me (based on my crash course in Gaulish related to the lead curse tablets a month ago. Beware the man of one google search). And though French wiktionary has Gaulois blaidd, I’m not clear what to make of their entry:
>Apparenté au breton bleiz.
>blaidd \blaið\ masculin
>(Zoologie) Loup.
>Exemple d’utilisation manquant.
>Ajouter un exemple
Is this an attested form or a postulated form?
FWIW, wikipedia asserts that: “The last wild wolf in Ireland is said to have been killed in 1786, 300 years after they were believed to have been wiped out in England and 100 years after their disappearance from Scotland.” What is or was the Scottish Gaelic word for the carnivore in question?
Given the paucity of Celtic data which aren’t either Brythonic or Goedelic, there wouldn’t be a lot left of proto-Celtic if one always insisted on Gaulish corroboration.
Having said that, this proposed Celtic etymology looks pretty silly, and involves not only metathesis For No Reason but also an unmotivated shift of b > p. And why on earth call a village “Wolf”, anyway?*
The Roman gentilic looks much more likely to me.
* “Wolverhampton” is named after a bloke called “Wulfrun.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverhampton
Is this an attested form or a postulated form?
Blaidd is the perfectly ordinary Welsh word for “wolf.” I hereby attest it.
I presume that they just mean that they haven’t got round to adding a text example. Indeed, they encourage you to do so …
(“Apparenté” means “related”, but I imagine you know that.)
I meant attested in Gaulish though. The entry I was citing purported to be for a Gaulish word. And Wipf claims to base his etymology of Peilz in a Gaulish “blaidd.” I suspect he postulated blaidd as Gaulish based on the cognates in Brythonic.
The so-called “Gaulish Handbook”, which is admittedly just a compilation of attested forms and reconstructions by a learned amateur, but a very comprehensive one that includes multiple scholarly versions of all available long inscriptions, shows no words that look like blaidd, even allowing for different transcriptions of tau gallicum. All the -aid words are citations of old Irish to support his reconstructions or translations.
I think you’d enjoy sampling that, David. You might tear it apart. I’d be interested to know your assessment.
In French wiktionary, it wasn’t apparente that threw me, but “(Zoologie) loup”. Normally I would expect that to mean “used in a zoological scientific context”, not “use the animal definition of this word”. Especially for a word as common as loup, where I think only non-animal definitions would need to be clarified.
The lack of attestation, combined with “Zoologie” had me wondering whether this entry was added by some “Gaulish revival” goofball. I don’t see any evidence that “blaidd” or “blaið” was a known Gaulish word.
I’m fine with postulating blaidd in Gaulish. But if you’re doing that in order to support some thinly evidenced etymology for Peilz, at least show your work so we can see how thin the evidence is.
There’s a fine piece of semantic development for you! — the modern Irish for whale is míol mór from míol “critter” and mór “big”. Non-cetacean animals with míol in their names are bugs, lice, etc.
There are numerous “last wolf in Ireland” tales covering the whole 18th century. The Irish wolfhound went extinct and was re-created by English breeders, ochone
A bloke! I think not! (Though I admit the statue may not be an accurate likeness.)
I meant attested in Gaulish though. The entry I was citing purported to be for a Gaulish word.
You’ve mistaken French gallois ‘Welsh’ for gaulois ‘Gaulish.’ Easy to do.
I don’t see any evidence that “blaidd” or “blaið” was a known Gaulish word
“Blaidd” couldn’t possibly be Gaulish: not only is it distinctively Welsh in form, but it’s distinctively modern Welsh, including (of course) the digraph dd for /ð/.
The Middle Welsh form is bleid, which was written bleit earlier, but the final consonant has always been /ð/; this is lenited from *d after a vowel, something that only took place in Welsh after the language had borrowed all those Latin words it’s full of, like swydd “office” from Latin sedes.
Irish had the same change, but independently, and later on it changed ð > ɣ out of sheer wilful perversity.
[Ah: Hat’s comment is rather more to the point. I hadn’t thought of that. The French word for “Welsh” is fairly familiar to me, for some reason … to the point that I forget how confusing it is to Real People.]
A bloke! I think not!
I beg the lady’s pardon. She did have a son called Spot, though, so she must have had a sense of humour.
Regardless of the exact timing of the “last wolf in Ireland” it seems far too recent to account for Irish not using a descendant of the supposed proto-Celtic word. Although maybe wolves were like bears in that taboos might arise against using their inherited “real name”? “Son of the land” sounds as politely euphemistic as “the brown one.”
Somewhere in the public records of the old Northwest Territory for the very early 19th century (as in, just prior to Ohio becoming a state) is a notation recording the payment of I think six silver dollars from the public fisc to my four-greats-grandfather as the bounty due to him for having been so public spirited as to kill some wolves. I think it was three dead wolves at two per head, but I haven’t gone back and looked at the source in some years so maybe it was two at three per head.
And what is bleiz meant to be? Wipf marks it as a hypothetical form, but it’s just Breton, and just a modern as blaidd. And a modern Breton word is unlikely to crop up in a Vaudois place name, with weird metatheses or without.
Thanks, Hat, and for the larger explanation, DE. Silly mistake, but maybe understandable.
>three dead wolves at two per head
Pelts de peilz in the French/English trapper pidgin? At least the one where the native language on the French side was Middle Franco-Provencal.
@Ryan: our English word “pelt(s)” lacks Saxon ancestry but is from a French etymon imported by the Normans. However, the modern French cognate appears to be peau(x), they having lost some consonants along the way.
the modern Irish for whale is míol mór from míol “critter” and mór “big”
Resembles Welsh morfil, from mor + mil, with the latter half being apparently cognate to míol but the former part, despite superficial similarity to Irish mór, is a “sea” in Welsh.
Wiktionary is telling that mil / míol was coming from a word for “small animal” in PIE. Feels weird to use it for a whale, the more so that the Welsh and Irish terms seem to be independent. Is there a chance that Welsh speakers calqued the Irish word misunderstanding “mór”?
OTOH, Welsh mil may not have the “small critter” connotation anymore, given the fact that milfeddyg typically does not treat lice and fleas.
Madadh-allaidh, ‘savage dog’. If someone else has answered that question already I apologise, I got a bit lost!
I don’t know how often madadh turns up just meaning ‘dog’ – there’s also madadh-ruadh, red fox.
Oddly, a spider is damhan-allaidh, although Scottish spiders are not notoriously savage…
ETA:
Just to prove that everything is linked, there is also madadh-cuain, ‘sea-dog’, for orca/killer whale.
An undifferentiated whale is muc-mhara, ‘sea-pig’, though
“Sea-wolf” calqued into (New World) Spanish is “lobo marino,” which = the AmEng “sea lion,” Zalophus californianus. Just looking at the beast it’s not IMHO obvious whether to go with a canine or a feline analogy if you haven’t already been primed for one over the other.
@prase:
Mil is just “animal” in Welsh, with no implication of smallness. It’s straightforwardly cognate with the Irish word.
This “small” just belongs to the supposed PIE ancestor; there’s no reason to think the etymon ever had that sense in Celtic.
Vaguely similarly sounding town name of Belz (of mein shtetele Belz fame) (vowels don’t count and consonants count for very little) also has a nice array of proposed sources. From aunt Wiki
few theories as to the origin of the name:
Celtic – belz (water) or pelz (stream),
German – Pelz/Belz (fur, furry)
Old Slavic and the Boyko language – «белз» or «бевз» (muddy place),
Old East Slavic – «бълизь» (white place, a glade in the midst of dark woods).
The name occurs only in two other places, the first being a Celtic area in antiquity, and the second one being derived from its Romanian name:
Belz (department Morbihan), Brittany, France
Bălți (Бельцы/Beljcy, also known in Yiddish as Beltz), Moldova (Bessarabia)d East Slavic – «бълизь» (white place, a glade in the midst of dark woods).
The name occurs only in two other places, the first being a Celtic area in antiquity, and the second one being derived from its Romanian name:
Belz (department Morbihan), Brittany, France
Bălți (Бельцы/Beljcy, also known in Yiddish as Beltz), Moldova (Bessarabia)
Obviously from Farefare bulga (stem bul-) “well, spring.”
(Well, it’s more plausible than the “Celtic” offerings … at least it’s based on a real word.)
This led me to look for the origin of the name of the major Farefare town, Bolgatanga:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolgatanga
Trouble with the etymology given there is that although tãŋa does mean “hill” (but not “rocks”), boole not only does not mean “clay”, but seems to exist only as a loan from English “ball.” (And the “Gerunsi” link is to a page on the only-quite-distantly-related Grusi languages, not to Gurenne/Farefare. Boole doesn’t mean “clay” in them, either.)
Ah: bóalga does in fact mean “clay” in Mooré. And tãnga means “hill”, again. So boalg tãnga actually is perfectly cromulent for “Clay Hill.” In Mooré.
(And just because a Farefare cognate *bɔlga isn’t in my dictionaries doesn’t show that it doesn’t exist. I should have learnt that by now …)
I was confused by the fact that I reckoned I already knew the Mooré for “clay” – and I did: it’s yáka, reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta and present in every language I actually have a word for “clay” in. However, on reflection, this etymon seems always to refer specifically to potter’s clay.
More than one word for “clay” … should tell Kemp et al …
https://languagehat.com/languages-and-concepts/
Yup: Gulimancema also has boalli “clay, adobe”, along with bualugu “clay”, beside yóagu “clay” (which has an example sentence about women digging it, probably suggesting a pottery context rather than housebuilding.)
There’s a problem with this, though: WOV non-initial /l/ should correspond to Gurma /n/, not /l/. So it may be a loan from Mooré rather than evidence that the word goes back to proto-Oti-Volta.
Mac tíre looks to me a name you would give to an animal whose real name you didn’t want to use for fear of summoning it, like the early Slavs saying honey-eater for bear, or Germanic calling the same beast Brownie.
^ “. . . looks to me like a name . . . “
Proverb 141 in Rapp’s Die Gurenne-Sprache in Nordghana, which I just got hold of today, actually has bollen, translated “Mörtel”; I think this must be the actual Farefare bolle (as opposed to “boole”) word alluded to in the WP article, with the locative enclitic -n. It has the same stem as bɔlga, different noun class.
Rapp’s book looks very interesting; and it marks tones more or less throughout! (Inaccurately, by the look of it, and tonology wasn’t all that sophisticated back in 1966. But even so: Respect!)
Already discovered that Farefare has a lot more single-aspect verbs than Niggli’s and Kropp Dakubu’s grammars suggest. I thought their apparent fewness was likely to be a matter of under-description rather than a genuine feature of the language. So it proves.
Some of the proverbs are very droppable-into-casual-conversation, too:
Ba ka toggere kiim tenga yelle paala kukka.
“You don’t need to tell a ghost the latest from the underworld.”
Hard to argue with that.
Unlike the proverbs scattered throughout Naden’s dictionaries, these ones come with explanations of what they actually mean, which is frequently not obvious from the literal sense.
I like
Ba ka faare pognyaanga yire saana.
“You don’t rob a guest in an old woman’s house.”
Not (as you might think) a woke injunction not to be so MAGA, but a warning that the old lady is probably not as resourceless as you have foolishly assumed.
Wiktionary synonyms of mac tíre are:: cú allta, faolchú, madra alla, madra allta
And traces faolchú > faol back to PIE *waylos Etymology
Waylon Jennings is presumably from the corresponding neuter.
No, “the wild one” (*n-stem noun from an adjective cognate to Latin ferus, itself from a root noun for “wild beast”). Brown and its cognates seem limited to Germanic, and the whole concept of “brown” is very young – up into the 17th century the word meant “dark and shiny” instead of referring to a color.
That’s mortar – as opposed to brick. So bolle is another interesting addition to the languages-and-concepts database and the colexification database…!
…and that seems to be a taboo replacement of its own: “the dangerous one”.
translated “Mörtel”
As in “mörtel combat”, was my first topically tangential thought (brickbats are permitted). Looking for the origins of the expression, I found a rather long and brilliant essay in Antigone by one Mateusz Stróżyński: The Mortal Combat of Foxes and Hedgehogs; or, Why Do Eagles Win?. It segues into The Hobbit, so should find friends here.
What about the rather strange logic that the existence of “nombreux vestiges romains” supposedly proves that Peilz is derived from an alleged Latin nomen gentile Pellius. Is there any evidence that this is a real Roman name? It is not in Wiktionary’s list of Latin nomina gentilia, and even the Pauly-Wissowa Realenzykopädie has no such entry.
Ha! Thanks for checking on that; again I am reminded of the indefatigable Brichot.
From Alberto Barrón Ruiz de la Cuesta (2017) El Sevirato augustal en Hispania y las Galias:
I haven’t been able to consult Xavier Delamarre 2007 yet, but I have his 2017 Les Noms des gaulois on my shelf and Pellius does not figure in its index that I can find, for an etymological discussion. Nor does he have a Pellus; see below.
Note the entry for Pelius, Pellius, etc. here in Alfred Holder (1904) Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz, vol. 2, 963, and the overheated etymologizing of Pellus below that in the same column, associating the name with Irish cíall and Welsh pwyll, although for Pellus, that requires a lot of phonological developments to be taken on good faith. The development of Old Irish ciall (Mod. cíall), Bret. poell, Welsh pwyll is usually given as *kʷei̯sleh₂- ‘faculty of seeing (?)’ > *kʷei̯slā- > *kʷei̯llā- > OIr. ciall, Bret. poell, W. pwyll,‘sense, reason’. The PIE root is *kʷei̯s- ‘to see, heed, perceive’ (originally a desiderative *kʷei̯-s- of the simplex *kʷei̯- ‘to see’), as in Gaulish exsops pissíiumí ‘aveugle, je verrai’ (Tablette de Chamalières, 10); Irish (ad·)cí ‘he sees’; Latin cūra ‘care, concern, solicitude, etc.’ (< *kʷoisā ‘oversight, heeding’); Middle Persian kēš, Persian کیش kēš ‘religion, sect, cult’ (< *kʷoisos ‘view, teaching’ or the like), etc., etc. Albert Carnoy (1907) ‘Éléments celtiques dans les noms de personnes des inscriptions d’Espagne’, Le Muséon n.s. vol. 8 (1907) took up Holder’s etymology of Pellus with Pellius here, p. 23. It’s all very uncontrolled.
John Carey (2007) Ireland and the Grail, p. 110f, note 4, throws cold water on all this:
If Pellius is the ultimate etymon, whatever its origin, then what about the spelling Peilz? Does it preserve the old nominative? (Cf. Old French filz, from fīlius; oblique fil from fīlium) Or considering the nearby toponym En Peilz (see footnote 5, p. 69 in Albert Naef, ‘Notes descriptives et historiques sur la Ville de la Tour-de-Peilz’, Recueil des publications de la Société havraise d’études diverses here), even an old ablative plural along the lines of Aix, Reims, etc.? I will cease speculating here and leave it to others. This would require some phililogical investigation of early spellings in administrative documents, etc.
Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is the first protagonist of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi. It would be pleasing to think of him settling in Switzerland with his beloved Rhiannon.
I thought of him too! Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed a oedd yn arglwydd ar seith cantref Dyfed…
It is worth noting that just on the other side of Vevey from Tour-de-Peilz lies the lovely town of Chexbres — The pronunciation of which is also not a given.
I was confused by the wiki-history of the name, which at first read seemed to say that modern Chexbres was a reversion to a medieval spelling. On a re-read, I think they’re saying that the spelling Chexbres is attested more or less continuously, though spellings eliding the x go back nearly a millennium.
The article also says this:
>It could be derived from the Roman personal names Cabrius, from the Gallic words Caebre (meaning city on a hill) or from Cabus (hemp)
I might have expected a longer word that got eroded down, but the article offers no options, which puts more emphasis the Cab-/Caeb pathway.
I guess this implies the x is epenthetic as a sound, a letter or both. Would that be a strong possibility based on known sound changes or spelling conventions, or more speculative?
Editing to add that while English-wiki gives a series of alternative names in Cabr-/Chebr- starting in 1100, French sources, (of wiki-quality) start the non Chex- series with Carbarissa in 1079. So there probably was some intervening sound there.
Here is a more scholarly version, from 1906:
>Chexbres, Vaud. M. Gremaud y rapporte le Carbarissa, 1079,
M. R. VII, 4; Chibriacum vers iioo, M. R. XVIII, vers 1072, Dict. hist. vaud., Cabarissa, ii45, Chabris, ii34, Chabre, iil\2, Cerbre, iihy, ii54, Chebra, ii65, Chabrii, 1179, Chabres, 1221, M. R. XII, Chaibri, 1248, Chaibry, i368, Chebry, 1453, Chexbres, xvi^ s. Une autre loc, chalets à Blonay. Ce nom a sans doute la même origine que Chabrey, D. Avenches, de (fundum) Capriacum, domaine d’un Caprins, ou Cabriacum, de Cabrius, variante gauloise. Chebris a le même sens : c’est le datif pluriel de Cabrias (domus, villas), du même gentilice pris adjectivement. Quant à l’x, on voit que c’est une lettre parasite qui apparaît fort tard, au xvi^ s. Ces additions se présentent souvent ; ainsi M. de Jubainville remarque que Gesvres, de Gabria, du même gentilice Gabrius, a deux s de trop, un au milieu, l’autre à la fin. Pour Carbarissa (villa) et Cabarissa, noms peut-être défigurés par les chancelleries allemandes (chartes de Henri IV et de Conrad II), c’est peut-être une altération de l’adjectif dérivé de la forme gauloise Gabrius qui serait Gabrisca, comme Barbarisca de Barbarius, Bardinisca de Bardinius.
Note I quickly tried to restore C’s (under the 15-minute edit deadline) that the Columbia U. text scanner classed as G’s. Hopefully I did that correctly.
At odds with the idea above that the x “is a parasitic letter appearing quite late, in the 16th century”, you can trace the wiki phrase about Chexbres appearing in 1139 via the Historic Dictionary of Switzerland, to Pasteurs et Paroissians de Chexbres au temps de Leurs Excellences. But I can’t find that work, nor even determine what the time of Their Excellencies was.
Here’s the book, but alas, no preview.
@ryan, hat
The work you are talking about is a recent (well, 1948) work by pierre leuba
https://davel.vd.ch/partnerdetail.aspx?ID=1598
English wiki for the village has
In 1079 King Henry IV gave the village and lands to the bishop of Lausanne.
But German Wiki has
Im Jahr 1079 schenkte König Heinrich IV. das Dorf und sein Umland dem Bischof von Lausanne. Die Interessen des Bischofs wurden durch den Kastlan von Saint-Saphorin vertreten.
I would hazard a guess that leurs excellences are the Chatelain of Saint-Saphorin
and his liege (or spiritual overlord) the Bishop of Lausanne, who would normally be addressed (referred to) as (Son) Excellence, I think even now.
FWIW, wikipedia suggests that the custom of referring to generic RC bishops as “Excellency” is a 20th-century innovation:
By a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Ceremonial of 31 December 1930[8] the Holy See granted bishops of the Catholic Church the title of Most Reverend Excellency or Excellentia Reverendissima in Latin. In the years following the First World War, the ambassadorial title of Excellency, previously given to nuncios, had already begun to be used by other Catholic bishops. The adjective Most Reverend was intended to distinguish the religious title from that of Excellency given to civil officials.
The instruction Ut sive sollicite of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, dated 28 March 1969, made the addition of Most Reverend optional,[9] sanctioning what had always been the practice, except possibly for the beginnings of letters and the like.
***
I am glad to read elsewhere on wikipedia that “In Ireland, the style “His/Your Grace” (Irish: A ghrása) is traditionally used for all Catholic bishops, not just archbishops.”
Chibriacum
Heh heh, chibre.
The Henry / Heinrich IV quotation is available online, though I’ve now lost track of it. The surmises about excellency may be accurate. But the lingering question is whether there is really an instance of “Chexbres” from 1139. That cites back to the Leuba book. But it’s not clear where Leuba got the date, nor whether he may have misinterpreted “an early note from 1139 about the village (in modern times) called “Chexbres” as if it were a reference to a document that used that name in 1139.
I somewhat suspect that’s what happened, because I can’t really understand why there would be no intervening references with the extra consonant from 1139 to the 1500s, and then it would reappear.
When -ez shrank to [e], -ez became available as a spelling for final [e]; the most notorious case is the ethnonym Cansez, whence Arkansas and Kansas.
I suppose that happened around the abovementioned 16th century. It seems that x was drawn in in Switzerland, too; Chamonix comes to mind.
Interesting. A name with a similar set of attestations — the word has a final consonant other than the grammatical suffix 1,000 years ago, loses it, gets it back, and has few examples between the early and late ones.
– Campus munitum (c. 1090)
– Chamonis/Chamunis (1283 in Latin documents, continuing through 1325) usually in reference to the priory
– Campimuniti (mid-1300s through at least 1483 — 7 attestations in a scholarly paper on local ecclesiastical courts, all in the genitive — comunitatis campimuniti, ex parte domini campimuniti)
– Chamo(u)ny (1581/1652)
– Chamonix (1793)
The silent final z/x is familiar. It’s the mid-word x that’s unusual in Chexbres.
Is the reversion from a vernacular name in late medieval Latin documents to a Latin name in early modern records a common sequence? It seemed surprising to me. It’s also possible the two are from different contexts.
How long did ecclesiastical courts maintain the use of Latin? (For all I know, the answer will be till Vatican II.)
I suppose if é isn’t an option somehow, z and x were the next best…
Humanism: use the proper Classical Latin form, or invent one.
Although the 1300s look a bit early for Humanism…
Yeah, I think I wrote the question out before I cataloged instances of campimuniti. (And I screwed up campus/m munitum – went to the source to check what case they used, then only corrected the adjective).
I do think the medial x in Chexbres is doing the same work as finial x Chamonix, and despite formations like Franche Comtat, I don’t see much evidence that traces of the t in muniti or the poorly attested r in Ca(r)barissa would last much longer in Franco Provencal than French, so I don’t think etymology is relevant to either. But I don’t really understand why medial x was used in Chexbres with few if any other examples. To further distinguish the word from chevres because they didn’t want to be thought of as goats?
I had not realized till reading the toponym section of the wiki on Franco-Provencal that purely orthographic -z is the opposite of -x, differentiating the stress in CLU-sah from that in Chamo-NEE.
I had not realized till reading the toponym section of the wiki on Franco-Provencal that purely orthographic -z is the opposite of -x, differentiating the stress in CLU-sah from that in Chamo-NEE.
Ryan’s point is important, I think. The video here on this point is informative. (LH readers who do not understand French can perhaps turn on the automatic subtitle translation feature in the YouTube settings, which seems to work well.)
To speculate… Maybe the -x- in Chexbres was originally meant to suggest [tʃɛbrə] or whatever the local Arpitan pronunciation was, because a form without -x- was too liable to suggest [tʃəbrɛ] or the like according to these regional spelling conventions. (That is, -x- was extended in this instance to mark any tonic syllable with a full vowel,and not just at the end of a word, rather than one with a reduced vowel.) I have to go to sleep now, but maybe someone else can follow up on this regional tradition of spelling.
Being on holiday, I haven’t been able to follow the Hattic discourse very closely, but I suddenly had a few moments on a bench in the shade of a huge acorn tree at Place Pépinet in Lausanne. And not only am I in la Suisse Romande, but I just came out from Librarie Payot where I bought Bossard & Chavan: Nos lieux-dits – Toponymie romande!
… but the family called. To be continued.
While thinking about these names, I’ve had in mind a trip we took to Haute Savoie to visit friends of my wife, so it’s surprising that I hadn’t thought of their village, St. Jean de Sixt. My French isn’t phenomenal, but that seems like an unusual consonant cluster, that would normally have been reduced.
The village seems to have been given that name only in the mid-19th century, before which it was Villaret. Its church, St. Jean Baptiste, only dates to 1869, replacing the Eglise du Cret. I can’t find anything about why it was given the name or whether there was a local St. John. The French pronunciation is sikst. One online lexicon offers both St. Jian de Sixt and the simple “Si” in different compilations of Franco-Provencal.
Nearby are the villages of St. Sixt (San Fi in Franco-Provencal) and Sixt Fer a Cheval (simply “Hi” in Franco-Provencal), as well as the Massif de Sixt under Mt. Blanc.
Sixt Fer a Cheval has an abbey, which was known in medieval Latin manuscripts as the abbatia or domus de Siz.
St. Sixt is clearly just Saint Sixtus, but are they all using a derivative of Sixtus? The name does seem to be present in other parts of France in the form Sixt, though I don’t see other clusters (It’s all tough to google or map because of the car company). None of the Popes Sixtus were native to the area.
But I guess the various Franco-Provencal versions of these names all suggest there is nothing Arpitan about the -x-, which seems to have been lost.
Does that mean that all these Sixt involve deliberate archaizing by the French when/as they took control of the region? Or that ecclesiastics maintained a more archaic, Latinizing pronunciation while the local vernacular drifted, and the ecclesiastic form was taken by the French? The popes are “Sixte” in French, so if these are pope/saint names, the French did not adopt their version of the name.
… but the family called. To be continued.
*chews fingernails while hanging on tenterhooks*
Yes, I had missed that while my comment window was open. Intriguing, Trond.
@ryan
Saint-Sixt tient son nom de la famille noble Sancy d’Reposittorio, bienfaiteurs de la Chartreuse du Reposoir. Ils se sont fixés au début du XIIIème siècle, implantant leur maison et leur nom francisé de Saint-Sixt.
https://www.saint-sixt.fr/decouvrir-et-bouger/tourisme/la-commune
Maybe the mairie is making up a story. If not, then the name is “really” Sanci, the de Sancy familly seems to have taken their name from another place called Sanci in Lorraine.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancy_(Meurthe-et-Moselle)
Interesting range of forms:
Then this may actually be a case where the modern -x- preserves something, with -xt being a remnant of Castrum, preserved in German, francique lorrain, and maybe romance dialects. Or is there another way the de Sancy family name would develop into Senzich/Senzech/Saint Sixt?
Does allemand in the forms for Sanci above mean German broadly or Allemannic? I’m now guessing the latter. As I now realize that francique lorrain is a dialect of Franconian, not French.
Even if the -xt- in Saint Sixt is a remnant of castrum, it wouldn’t explain St. Jean de Sixt nor Sixt Fer a Cheval. But it does offer an example of a consonant cluster resolving to -xt-, which might mean that the other Sixts have parallel explanations, and even opens the door a crack for the possibility that the x in Chexbres represents something that was still found in a local dialect.
@Ryan: What do you mean by “castrum” in this context?
See my preceding comment, where I cite the name Sanceum Castrum.
It’s interesting how many of these place names are first attested in the 11th century. Contemporary with St. Bernard’s foundations in the passes across the alps. I’m assuming north-south trade changed in some major way at this point.
I also find the castrum in Sanceum Castrum interesting.
For that period, I recommend Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (see my posts on it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Thanks!
Written German broadly. It is exceedingly unlikely that tz vs. z in the cited forms ever corresponded to a pronunciation difference, and Franconian is not Alemannic.
Me: To be continued.
Hat: *chews fingernails while hanging on tenterhooks*
I may have raised the bar too high. But before I continue the story towards its anticlimax, we should take a few steps back.
We came to Sion in Valais Tuesday and strolled the castle area until they closed the gates at five. Going back down into town, we knew we would have to find a hotel, but we made a stop at la Liseuse, a local bookshop that our daughter wanted us to see The clerk was amused and impressed by the request for dialectologie romande and literature au patois valaisan, and immediately showed me Andres Kristol: Histoire linguistique de la Suisse romande in three volumes, and then he went down in the deeps of their basement to search for what he thought was a trove of local publications. He had no luck there, except that he found Kristol in a new, one volume edition – and another phone book sized work that I had to forego because luggage and which I’ve since lost the name of. But I was very happy.
Next day, driving down the valley towards Lac Leman, I noticed toponyms (like the repeating Secx) that I wanted to have explained. We stopped at the medieval Château de Chillon, whose name also intrigued me, and the 16th C German spelling Zillung that I saw on old coats of arms made me make theories. Later, we made a short stop in Montreux before driving slowly on city streets past an endless row of Belle Époque riviera buildings. Eventually, we asked the GPS to get us back to the Autoroute. That was in the town of Peilx, whose name I was sure I had seen recently, and which also intrigued me. I’m now sorry I didn’t make another stop, but I decided to go looking for a book on toponymics in Lausanne.
Fast forward to the bench under the acorn. I took up my phone to check for messages when I remembered to look for replies on the comment on Swiss Sunday closing in the other thread. That’s when my eyes fell on Peilx.
But it’s been a long day. From Lausanne, we drove back through the Swiss lowland to Zürich, only stopping in Altstatt Aarau for sightseeing and dinner. I’ll have to pick up again tomorrow.
To be continued.
^Peilz
I wrote one right and one wrong. Then I wronged the right one instead of righting the wrong one.
Did all this tedious smalltalk take us anywhere? Not yet. First I have to tell that I also got Reymond & Bossard: Le Patois Vaudois – grammaire et vocabulaire, but sitting at the bench in Lausanne, I still hadn’t looked much inside it. HLSR was in my suitcase in the car, and in Nos lieux-dits, I had just looked up a couple of examples from memory before deciding to buy.
The book is somewhat annoyingly structured after themes and roots, and the placenames are listed as examples in each section, but there is an alphabetic register. Peilz is not listed, so not used as an example in the book, which probably tells that it’s unexplained, but if I were to go where better men have failed, I might suggest that <-ilz> is an archaic orthographic tic representing [ʎz] and a derivation from the element pell- that shows up in a lot of toponyms and is given the meaning “pasture, field”.
Thanks for the enjoyable travelogue! Even though we didn’t get any actual answers, I can at least let go of these damn tenterhooks.
I may have more to tell when I’ve had time to cross-examine the three books. The Vaudois one has a section on phonology and orthographic conventions that I think will be useful.
(From the cafeteria of the Landesmuseum, where we’re hiding from the sun after spending the morning in Altstatt. The ladies chose the arts while I went for archaeology. Surprisingly, I got enough before they did. I may have to go back in just to keep up appearances.)
the element pell- that shows up in a lot of toponyms and is given the meaning “pasture, field
That looks Indo-European, but neither Celtic nor Germanic. Intriguing.
I regretted not putting a tilde in front of pell., but I don’t think that would have been enough. It seems that I plainly misread the book, and no such element can be identified.
Presumably you would have put a tilde to highlight the Iberian association of pell- ?:
>As indicated by the etymological origin of the word “tilde” in English, this symbol has been closely associated with the Spanish language. This peculiarity can help non-native speakers quickly identify a text as being written in Spanish with little chance of error.
>The 24-hour news channel CNN in the US later adopted a similar strategy on its existing logo for the launch of its Spanish-language version, therefore being written as CN͠N.
Basically, I confess my ignorance. What would a tilde represent? Is that a standard way of indicating an approximate spelling in linguistics?
You might ask Tilde Swanson what she thinks about that. Or perhaps her parents ?
Ryan: Basically, I confess my ignorance. What would a tilde represent? Is that a standard way of indicating an approximate spelling in linguistics?
Not necessarily spelling, but approximate form. That’s the meaning I’ve picked up, but I can’t answer for real linguists and actual linguistics.
Cool thanks.
A couple of loose ends:
Me: I noticed toponyms (like the repeating Secx) that I wanted to have explained.
(Another misspelling by yours truly. It’s Scex.)
This was easy (and it was the one I read most closely before buying the book).
I don’t know what wider lessons we can draw about the functions of <c> and <-x>
We stopped at the medieval Château de Chillon, whose name also intrigued me, and the 16th C German spelling Zillung that I saw on old coats of arms made me make theories.
The “official” etymology given at the site (and on French Wikipedia) says:
Semantically, “platform” seems unnecessary, but I could see a chail “stone, rock” be used for the islet itself or for the rocky promontory behind it, and an -on suffix could pop up anywhere. Phonologically, however, the change a > i seems unusual.
The theory I started making was that the name is from a form parallel to OF cel “cell”. The use in toponyms in this region is attested in Appenzell in Eastern Switzerland and Radolfzell on the north shore of Lake Constance. I suggest that the islet – apparently the largest of two in the whole lake* – was once settled by a small society of monks. Their reason would be the same as for the later fortification: The main pilgrimage route from Northwest Europe to Rome passed, and the promontory made this the narrowest point on the route before the crossing of the Alps. Archaeologically, the oldest part of the castle is the crypt of an abandoned church, reused as foundations for the front court. A crypt means that there was a community of prelates.
But does it work linguistically? That’s why I got Le Patois Vaudois. First, for derivation, -on is very common as a diminutive suffix also in Vaudois, but that says nothing in itself. Second, e and i “tonées” seem to have pretty much switched places compared to French. Third, ts- is the (or at least a) regular outcome of Lat. c-. Together, this should make *tsillon the probable local reflex of cell- + -on. The Bernese conquerors rendered it as Zillung.
* The other one is the even (much) smaller Îlot de Peilz, confusingly situated near the Leman mouth of the Rhône.
>The theory I started making was that the name is from a form parallel to OF cel “cell”.
Even if you’re not right, it’s such well-reasoned speculation with multiple fields of evidence that it’s fun to read. And my opinion doesn’t mean much, but I’m convinced.
Same here!
Thanks, I had fun writing it, too*. Now on to spotting the holes:
Me: Archaeologically, the oldest part of the castle is the crypt of an abandoned church, reused as foundations for the front court. A crypt means that there was a community of prelates.
This needs some nuance and elaboration. There are different types of crypt. This one had an apsis and an altar, which means that it was a ceremonial crypt, and that means a community of prelates.
* I’m reading the books at night at the hotel room and writing comments in the day as I wait for women around the city. Today I’ve been hanging about at three different Flohmarkten, and that gave me time, not only to finish up the comment above but to read through much of the last week of posts and comments.
Tomorrow we’ll be flying back home.
^Flohmärkte. That stood out even to me.
But is there nothing on Peilz?
Not directly, no. I’ll come back to it, but it takes some cross-reading of sources, and I’m not sure when I’ll have something to say.
Back to the tenterhooks!
What I can say pretty confidently is that the final -z, also rendered -t in the older attestations, is an orthographic device to avoid silencing of the final l.
I can also say that there are lots and lots of Latin gentilica and cognomina that are unattested except for their reconstruction from toponyms. That goes for the entire Gaul and probably beyond. What’s suspicious about Peilz is that it’s supposed to appear without any of the usual suffixes.
Day saved. I’ll mention the logo of the Instituto Cervantes: ⊣˜⊢.
An approximation in mathematics, and by metaphor elsewhere.
Thewrdannckh.
(My latest above was condensed from HLSR, Chapitre 3, La période gallo-romaine.)