I’ve started reading Yuri Annenkov’s 1934 novel Повесть о пустяках [A story about trifles], set in Russia in the first couple of decades of the century; it was looked on with disfavor by almost everyone, because not only did it use suspiciously modernist devices (montage, ornamental prose, etc.), but the “trifles” are two revolutions, WWI, and the Civil War, and nobody was up for treating world-historical events as background for the personal life of some nobody. I, however, am up for it, and am enjoying it so far (even if the opening is basically a straight ripoff of Bely’s Petersburg).
Now, at one point he’s describing a turn-of-the-century interior and he uses the word ламбрекен [lambrekén], which meant nothing to me. No problem, that’s why God created dictionaries, so I turned to my trusty Oxford and found it defined as “pelmet.” I cursed and looked that up, and discovered that it means (to quote Wiktionary) “A decorative item that is placed above a window to hide the curtain mechanisms, visually similar to a cornice or valance.” Ah, now valance I knew, thanks to the educational efforts of my first wife, so the sense was more or less clear. But what of the etymology? Wiktionary doesn’t have one, but the OED (entry revised 2005) says:
Probably a variant of palmette n. (compare sense 2 at that entry), palmette designs having been a conventional ornament on window cornices. Compare:
1925 Pelmet, a word used by upholsterers and sometimes by art dealers, who prefer the word ‘palmette’, to denote the horizontal stiff curtains or valance hiding the rod, rings and headings of the hanging curtain decorating a door, window, bed, etc.
J. Penderel-Brodhurst & E. J. Layton, Glossary of English Furniture 123
But what about ламбрекен? Well, that’s straightforwardly from French lambrequin, for which Wiktionary says:
From Middle French lambequin, perhaps from Middle Dutch lappekijn, lepperkijn, from Old Dutch lappakīn. By surface analysis, lambeau (“scrap, strip”) + -quin (diminutive suffix).
And it turns out that French word was borrowed straight into English as well; the OED (entry from 1901) has the sense “A scarf or piece of material worn over the helmet as a covering” from 1725 and this more modern one:
2. U.S. A cornice with a valance of pendent labels or pointed pieces, placed over a door or window; a short curtain or piece of drapery (with the lower edge either scalloped or straight) suspended for ornament from a mantel-shelf. Also transferred and attributive.
1883 Mr. Barker smiled under the lambrikin of his moustache.
F. M. Crawford, Dr. Claudius iii
[…]1888 The carved marble mantle-piece was concealed by a lambrequin.
T. W. Higginson, Women & Men 162
The whole quest was worth it for the phrase “the lambrikin of his moustache” (seen here at Google Books).
Pelmet, in my experience, is a very familiar word in the UK, while valance is unknown. In the US, it’s the other way around. They are the same thing, as far as I know, but home decor mavens may insist there are critical differences.
Pelmet sounds familiar — previously on Language Hat (2015), AJP was familiar with them: “A pelmet has fabric or wallpaper as a finish and it’s attached to a piece of masonite or similar that is set flush with the wall above the window opening. It conceals the ugly hanging hardware of old curtains: hooks, small metal or nylon wheels etc.”
Pelmet, in my experience, is a very familiar word in the UK, while valance is unknown.
Yes re pelmet. Valance means a decorative fringe around a bed [Witkti sense 3]. I’d only come across it in hotels: it’s one of the annoyances you have to park in a corner, along with the surfeit of throw-cushions. They started appearing in corporate/’international’ hotel chains in the ’90’s (?’80’s), so I assumed the word and the thing was a US import.
In UK I’ve never known ‘valance’ to mean the same as ‘pelmet’.
In NZ (can’t speak for UK any more) you now get ‘valance sets’ which is a load of matching decorative flim-flam for beds. This discount chain includes a ‘hotel at home’ brand.
Pelmet sounds familiar — previously on Language Hat (2015)
Sigh. Ah well, maybe I’ll remember it now!
Separated by a Common Language also had a post on bed skirts, dust ruffles, valances, with discussion of pelmets in the comments. “Pelmet” was also discussed in the post on British words (most) Americans don’t know, with images.
I’ve never heard about Yuri Annenkov, which proves my ignorance, and not diminishes his importance. Russian wiki has a dedicated page for the novel. Two things caught my attention. First, is that it was published under pen name Б[орис] Темирязев (B. Temiryazev). What are the rules in this case? B.Temiryazev failed to become famous and other contributions of Anennkov look more substantial. Making a Melnikov-Pechersky and Mamin-Sibiryak out of him looks worse than either of unhyphenated choices.
The second is “disfavor by almost everyone” (as in OP) completely fails to register. The wiki page says
Книга […] в своё время была высоко оценена в эмигрантских кругах. О ней с похвалой и с восторгом отзывались Е. И. Замятин, М. А. Осоргин, В. Ф. Ходасевич, […] и другие[17].
(The book […] was highly regarded in émigré circles at the time. It was praised and admired by E. I. Zamyatin, M. A. Osorgin, V. F. Khodasevich, […] and others[17].)
This [17] (just like previous 16) seems to be from some sort of foreword for Russian edition and you do not expect it to say “this is complete garbage, but we had to print something“, but still.
“The Antimacassars of Curtain-Rods”, a lost poem by Wallace Stevens
I’ve never heard about Yuri Annenkov
I highly recommend his Дневник моих встреч, which vividly describes his encounters with all sorts of famous people in the early decades of the last century; it’s online (Vol. 1, Vol. 2), but without the illustrations (his drawings of the people he writes about) that make my print edition such a pleasure.
“disfavor by almost everyone” (as in OP) completely fails to register
I forget where I developed that idea; I’ll have to look into it. But I did say “almost”; Zamyatin, Osorgin, and Khodasevich may have been the exceptions, and certainly none of them represented any kind of consensus, either emigré or Soviet. They were three of the most independent writers of the time.
There is a well-known photography showing Annenkov, Mandelstam, Chukovsky and Lifshits on the first day of WWI. Annenkov was in epistolary contact with Chukovsky in the 1960s.
His portrait of Anna Akhmatova (the first one, from 1921) is very well known. In the 1960s he wanted to illustrate her Poema bez geroya, but she wouldn’t allow it; basically for the same reason she wouldn’t allow Artur Lourié to compose music for it (an idea she herself had toyed with earlier) – they knew the world of 1913 Petersburg, but not 1940 Leningrad.
I vaguely remember that Orson Welles at some point also met Annenkov (whom he called George) and had very fond memories of him.
I was wondering whether all the OED’s quotations for pelmet were British, but hit a snag trying to find this one:
That book apparently didn’t exist — but searching for the quotation on Google Books finds Furnishing Your Home by Cycill Geraldine Tomrley, To-M-R-ley, with the r after the m. I thought at first that must be Google’s typo, but no, that really was her name, according to the title page and many other sources. Yes, she was English — no idea how an English person gets a name spelled like that. (The OED’s misspelling is inherited from the 1982 Supplement.)
Bizarre! But a Google Books search confirms there were other Tomrleys, e.g. (from Lloyd’s List Law Reports Vol. 69, 1941) “The car which Tomrley was driving was a car which he had hired from one Warnes, who was a proprietor of a garage and had cars which he let on hire to persons who proposed to drive themselves.” And there’s now a Corinna Tomrley. Notify the OED!
Aha, there’s an Austrian/Czech/Polish surname Tomrle (Czech feminine Tomrlová) which must be the source, but I can’t analyze that either.
“Cycill”, too. Never seen that one before.
Tomrle < Tomar < Tomas or so, but I can’t explain why.
to mrlo “that died”?
Doesn’t make sense, but plenty of Czech ( > Viennese) names are -l participles: Pospíšil, Výcichl, Krčal…
@dm
Postumus?
Variant of Tamele, Tomrdle? This is from a German dialectal Tammerln ‘sheep’ according to Josef Beneš, Marie Nováková (1998) Německá příjmení u Čechů, vol. 1, visible to LH readers on GB here, I hope.
What is this Tammerln? This word is given for the meaning ‘Schafe’ for Heinrichsöd (Hrdoňov) in this work Rudolf Kubitschek (1943), Böhmerwäldisches Spottbüchlein, 2nd ed., here.
The 1609 edition of Johann Dietenberger’s 1534 German Bible translation uses the word taͤmmer his bible translation of what for him was 3 Esdras 1:7 (that is more familiar to most LH readers as 2 Chronicles 35:7), highlighted here, bottom of column a, I hope.
See also Heinrich Micko (1930) Die Mundart von Wadetstift im Böhmerwald, I. Lautlehre, p. 3, middle of the page here :
The reference to Schmeller goes to the 1872 revised edition of his Bayerisches Wörterbuch here, end of column 506.
This is more interesting stuff to be said on this word, but I cannot pursue it further because I have to go to sleep now. I’ll let other LH readers follow up.
What is this Tammerln?
I wonder if it’s the same kind of semantic extension as in Welsh dafad “sheep”, < Celtic *damat- "tamed"? Looks like it might even be cognate.
Nothing to do with the Lord of High Asia, then.
Was he Welsh too?
I don’t know the word, but I’ll read the Google Books links and report back…
However, “tame” underwent the HG consonant shift – adj. zahm, verb zähmen – so we can’t be looking at a cognate. It could still be a Celtic loan in specifically High German, though. (The other two I know of are Eber[esche] “rowan” and Stiege “staircase”.)
“Preview unavailable”.
I get the snippet preview, which fortunately shows that passage; other than that, “Preview unavailable” again. Importantly, the title of the book makes clear this is a Silesian dialect of eastern Bohemia, unlike the Bavarian ones of western Bohemia (if not Bavaria, I haven’t checked) of the 1943 source, so that would explain why the /m/ is suddenly short – consonant length is lost that far north.
Why it would be long in the first place is a different question; but see below.
Hardly to the end; the last entry is about the onomatopoetic verbs dammern & dampern. (Compare pumpern, known to me.) But the 4th entry in that column is what we’re looking for:
“this is how you call your sheep to you”; “the sheep, the little lamb, (western Salzburg).
The etymological-phonetic transcription is, badly, explained on pp. VIII and the unreadably numbered following one. á is [a], so far, so good (Hungarian is explicitly mentioned); but ê is… “e or ê, the pure e”… apparently it’s supposed to be a mid vowel, between é (which is “floating toward i“) and è (“floating toward á“). ə is more or less what it looks like. There is no specific sign for [ɐ], so that could actually be what the two forms with ə and á both mean. The hyphen is a syllable boundary – dámə-l must have three syllables; that’s particularly fascinating because the sequence [ɐl̩] does not occur in my dialect, and the only way I can come up with to make etymological sense of this is that non-rhoticity had only just become established and there really is a *r in there, *dæmər-əl as a diminutive of *damər…?
In any case, the á corresponds regularly to the aͤ of Dietenberger’s Bible, but the short m does not agree with the mm (which was almost certainly still long in 1534 and 1609, and in any case would have prevented the preceding vowel from lengthening, which in turn could only be spelled out by doubling the following consonant letter…). But if the r is real, we can probably blame West Germanic consonant stretching somehow (consonants are lengthened in intervocalic, but not word-final, clusters with a following resonant, leading to paradigmatic chaos).
I’m not sure about Salzburg, but much or all of Bavaria and surrounding areas have merged initial /t/ into /d/. So that part is trivial, probably.
the title of the book makes clear this is a Silesian dialect of eastern Bohemia, unlike the Bavarian ones of western Bohemia
The Google Books metadata for the file as a whole is not correct. The file linked to on GB contains volumes 3–8 of Beiträge zur Kenntnis sudetendeutscher Mundarten, of which no. 3 is Friedrich Festa (1926) Die schlesische Mundart Ostböhmens and no. 5 is Heinrich Micko (1930) Die Mundart von Wadetstift im Böhmerwald. I. Lautlehre. The form Tammerln that interests us is found in Micko’s study of Wadetstift. As far as I have been able to discover, this Wadetstift was apparently in southern Bohemia and was inundated by the creation of the Lipno Reservoir.
Apologies to LH readers if they had problems finding the form in Schmeller, I confused it with the location of the form at the bottom of column a in Reitenberger that was linked to.
Glancing over the file of Dietenberger, he seems to use plural taͤmmer consistently in translating the frequent word כְּבָשִׂים kəḇāśîm, plural of כֶּבֶשׂ keḇeś ‘young ram, male lamb’ (often especially as being a suitable sacrifice), as at Leviticus 23:18 and Numbers 29:13.
Per GB, Johann Neumann’s 1977 Tschechische Familiennamen in Wien has something to say here, but it is not accessible.
Antonín Kotík’s 1897 study of Czech surnames lists Tomrle with Tomáš-related names.
Re Celtic,
Matasovič has
*damo-, *damato- ‘bull’ [Noun]
GOID: OIr. dam [o m] ‘bull, deer’
W: MW dafad [f] ‘sheep’; defaid, defeidiau [p]
BRET : MoBret. dahvad
CO: OCo. dauat gl. ouis
GAUL: Damona (?) [Theonym], Gallo-Lat. damma (> Fr. daim) ‘roe’
PIE: *dmh 2 o- ‘the tamed one’ (IEW: 199f.)
COGN: Skt. damya- ‘young bull to be tamed’. Alb. dem ‘bull, steer’
ETYM: The Celtic a-vocalism is best explained by starting from a proto-form *dm-Ho-, with syllabic *m. The Brit, forms point to a derivative *damato- ( OIr. dam. The PIE root *demh 2 – is presumably also reflected in the British tribal name Demetae (> MW Dyfed), which can be interpreted as ‘Tamers’
–from this I would guess “livestock kept for meat, originally tamed deer (or bull?)”
“Fr. dairri” will be an OCR error for “daim.”
That reminded me of the false friend biche*, which seems to be of unclear origin, but might even actually be related to “bitch.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biche
* Addressing your beloved as ma biche has a subtly different nuance from “my bitch” …
@de
Sorry, I meant to correct that.
Fixed with my magic powers!
So Welsh dafad is the same word as Gaelic damh? I wonder if that will help me to remember it…
(I can’t remember the Welsh for deer, only that it’s a bit like beer.)
Carw, which is indeed a bit like cwrw.
Carw is obviously cognate with Latin cervus; cwrw is the same etymon as Spanish cerveza, ultimately a Celtic loanword, because Celts are just that cool.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cervesa#Latin
We gave the Romans words for “beer” and “car”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carrus#Latin
because we invented drunk driving.
Ah. Definitely a Bavarian dialect, then.
So d/t is probably of no consequence, but the short /m/ (and the correspondingly lengthened /a/ – lengthening in open syllables) is important.
I can wave my hands harder, though. The humble footstool is Schemel m. in Standard German, traced through OHG -scamil to a “Late Latin” scamillus, a Not Very Classical double-or-so diminutive of scamnum, which is said to mean “bench”. So far, so good. But… in my dialect it’s /ʃamːɐl/ n.: the -l is interpreted as a diminutive, which is why the word is neuter, and there’s a long /mː/. So, at some Pre-WGmc point, /skɑmɪl/ and /skɑmlV/- must have coexisted, the latter underwent WGmc consonant stretching (/m.l/ > /m.ml/), the former later underwent umlaut*…
…and Wiktionary tells me the Norwegian version is skammel. If that’s true**, that’s fascinating, because North Germanic is not supposed to have a comparable consonant-lengthening process***, so it must be a loan from the already stretched WGmc form, and also because there’s no umlaut, which… should only be the case in the short form in Scandinavia, not in the long one, so I have to conclude both were borrowed, then the long one underwent umlaut, and then they were conflated.
* “Secondary” umlaut far enough south, i.e. MHG /æ/ > modern Bavarian /a/, rather than “primary” MHG and modern /e/; “primary” is blocked by any labial, so only “secondary” happens.
** Norwegian Wiktionary doesn’t have an article for it.
*** Only *-ɣj- > -ggj-, *-kj- > –kkj-.
Just discovered that Welsh ewig “doe” is derived from a feminine derivative of the root that appears in Latin ovis.
Evidently our European forebears did not worry too much about fine distinctions among larger mammals, what with sheep/bulls, does/mares/bitches and does/ewes.
The Estonian-born astrophysicist Alar Toomre presumably has nothing to do with the Czech Tomrle.
For some reason, I had thought Alar (my father’s master’s advisor) was dead, but apparently both he and his brother Juri are still alive. So they could still get the Nobel prize they deserve.
and Wiktionary tells me the Norwegian version is skammel.
Yup, skammel ‘(foot)stool,’ pl. skamler.
I am looking at the scan of Reitenberger 1609 on my computer now, rather than on my phone in bed, and it seems the instances of *taͤmmer that Google Books found are just OCR errors for laͤmmer, that is, Lämmer. Which leaves only the Bavarian dialect words collected by dialectologists in the past two centuries. Apologies! I should have been alerted by the fact that I found nothing in the online DWB for anything like Tammerln.
So I looked at it again… and found… it’s intermediate between the t in the same line and the l in the next. ~:-| You’re right it’s more similar to an l, though.
skammel/skamler: If that’s Bokmål, does it even have a long /m/? It’s spelled the same in Danish and we have no truck with consonant length, the double letter is just to mark a short vowel. (And a cluster does the same, so only one m is needed in the plural).
Something something syllabic balancing in our brethren to the north, so even if the word was borrowed with short vowel and consonant, one of them had to change. Trond will now tell me I’m wrong.
No, that sounds about right. I imagine there are central dialects that have given it the full balancing treatment and turned it into skåmmål.
Bokmål or Nynorsk, we use consonant doubling to write short vowels. Except when we don’t. Unlike in German, we mess up the system by not doubling word-final m’s.
Et lam – lammet – flere lam – alle lamma/-ene (lamb)
But
Et lass – lasset – flere lass – alle lassa/-ene (load n.)
Oh, and really disappointing that tamm- turned out to be a ghost. It looked so exciting that my brain went overdrive searching for long lost dialect forms. I suggest we resurrect it on dispensation.
Only the attestation in that one Bible is a ghost.
Tamele, Tomrdle
dā’mɐlɐ „Tammerln“ = Schafe (vergl. Schmeller I 506)
dámə-l, dámál! dámi, lámi! dámál lê lê! so lockt man den Schafen. Das Dámə-l, das Schaf, das Lämmchen, (Pinzgau).
non-rhoticity had only just become established and there really is a *r in there, *dæmər-əl as a diminutive of *damər…
In connexion with the form of the Czech surname Tomrdle with -d- mentioned at the beginning of his discussion of Tammerln, perhaps note on the dissimilation of r to d before l on p. 94 of Josef Schatz (1897) Die Mundart von Imst: Laut- und Flexionslehre, on GB here.
This got me wondering, what obstacles might there be to the proposal that the group of Tammerln, Dámə-l,, etc., arose from Lammerl, Bavarian-style diminutive of Lamm, as a Lockwort, through dissimilation of the first l- to d- and deformation in calling (variability being well-known in Lockwörter)? Granted, the explanation by dissimilation of l- to d- is completely ad hoc, and this particular dissimilation is unparalleled in German varieties, at least that I could find. (But dámi, lámi! are right there beside each other in the example in Schmeller…)
…except that, in my dialect anyway, that’s Lamperl. I think what happened is that /nl̩/ > /ndl̩/ was reinterpreted as morphological, generalized as a remarkably abstract fortition process, and applied to all sorts of diminutives. Pferterl.
Hallucinant, quoi. But that’s a rhotic dialect on the border to Alemannic; I don’t think this was ever widespread.