Thatching Info.com is one of those delightful sites that assembles masses of detail about some subject unknown to most people today:
The information available here, is the result of over three decades of practical experience, plus more than a dozen years of research; into the history and various working methods, employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain. Thus this site covers thatching throughout the Island of Britain and the islands around it, from Shetland to Sark, with a few excursions to other lands…
Of course what caught my attention was this, in the following paragraph: “there is a large glossary to help you.” And so there is, A Glossary of Thatching Names and Terms:
As well as a list of the technical terms and names, used throughout this site; I have also included other names, which are not mentioned in the text. Hopefully allowing this glossary to also act as a basic reference, to the myriad nomenclature found in the craft. Also included are terms from the dialects and languages, of the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland…. […] Alternative names are in brackets. Other glossary entries are in italics. (I have not cross referenced all the various names, for a Thatching Spar, due to the many terms, used to describe this humble article….
The main list runs from A Frame (Principal Rafter) “The largest timbers, in a normal roof construction” to Yoke (Jack or Groom) “A forked stick, used to carry a Burden of Yealms on to a roof,” including such savory terms as Biddle (either “A wooden frame, with pair of spikes set in the top” or “Yet another name for a Legget or Bat”), Flaughter Spade (“A form of breast plough”), Tekk (“The name, used in Shetland, for Oat Straw”), and Witch’s seat (“a large flat stone set in a chimney”); then there follow lists of terms from the Channel Islands (“Gllic: Thatch”), Cornwall (“Teyz: Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time”), Wales (“Gwrachod: A tied underlayer of thatch”), and Scotland (“Fraoch: Heather or Ling”).
Finally a couple of Gaelic proverbs…
Is tr’om sn’ithe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.
Tigh a tughadh gun a sh’iomaineachadh… Thatching a house without roping it. (Is to surely labour in vain!)
And of course there are plenty of informative images.
Gllic?!
MacCulloch and Carey’s 1903 Guernsey Folk Lore says, “He was carrying a torch of “gllic” (glui—thick straw and resin), and felt that, thus armed, nothing could attack him,”, and adds in a footnote, “These torches of ‘glui’ were called ‘des Brandons.’” All this doesn’t matter. Thus armed, nobody can beat me at Scrabble (yealm and flaughter help, too.)
I once read a book whose name I can’t remember, by an American enthusiast of traditional Japanese culture, who traveled to Japan in the early 1970s, when local appreciation of traditional culture was at a low point. He has a vivid description of thatching a house; a great part of the art of it was collecting different grasses, sometimes the same grass at different times of the year, for different purposes and parts of the roof.
German: Dach “roof”
Wow, thanks! Literally two days ago I was pondering what plants Native Americans would have used to thatch and how it would have been done. And then lamenting that the father of a friend, who had learned to thatch as a young man in Ireland, was no longer around to ask about it.
The book I’d been thinking of is Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan, originally published as 美しき日本の残像. Here’s the passage (I evidently remembered it inaccurately after having read it about 20 years ago):
Wow, thanks! Literally two days ago I was pondering what plants Native Americans would have used to thatch and how it would have been done.
I never know which of my posts are going to turn out to be useful to people!
I mean, duh, what else are you gonna carry a burden of yealms with?
OED has yelm, n.:
And under helm, n.3 we get:
A difficult word.
The apostrophes in the Gaelic should all be grave accents on the following letter.
(I suppose there might have been some original form which couldn’t print accents, but missing them out entirely would be better than that…)
Highland thatch also has rocks on the end of its ropes, in the hope of preventing the whole thing from taking off – I don’t think they do that in the chocolate-box English villages…
The latest episode of my favorite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, has a segment on thatching. I think some of these terms may have come up (though my brain helpfully forgets most of the content of each episode almost immediately, so that I can listen to it again).
The Irish proverb is ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scoilb, i.e. , the windy day is not the day for thatching. I was unable to find a Scots version.
PP: here it is with illustration, although that’s not what I was searching for!
https://digital.nls.uk/an-comunn-gaidhealach/archive/125256936?mode=transcription
though my brain helpfully forgets most of the content of each episode almost immediately, so that I can listen to it again
This is how my wife and I can watch cop/crime/detective shows we’ve seen as recently as a few months ago: we remember the vivid characters but not whodunit and why.
@jen
Chan e la na gaoithe la nan sioman.
The sioman is the rope, there is sioman fraoigh (“heather rope”) on the islands (cause not as much straw available or cause tougher/stronger?).
http://www.aisf.or.jp/~jaanus/deta/k/kayabuki.htm
Even supposed experts on the topic are far too often unaware of the Thatching of Sark.
Off-topic, but maybe interesting — the predictive power of the comparative method:
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/dia.20009.bod
And the Cliff Notes version:
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2021/04/linguists-predict-unknown-words-using.html
@Ryan
“If directly asking for the concept did not yield a form that could be considered cognate, the prediction itself would be suggested. This would sometimes result in a cognate form as well, as this method of elicitation encourages respondents to think beyond the box, to dig in their memory, and also captures words that may have undergone semantic change or lexical compounding.”
This is for me reminiscent of false memory implantation or certain interrogation techniques. As a control, they should perhaps have introduced some words known to the fieldworker to be non-words and see how many of these were pronounced (literally????) to be words by the respondent. The other problem is of course if a respondent knows more than one of the languages and is able to create words in their L1 based on existing words in a L2.
The sioman is the rope, there is sioman fraoigh (“heather rope”) on the islands (cause not as much straw available or cause tougher/stronger?).
I don’t know – both, maybe, or just that straw was more in demand for other things and heather was inexhaustible. (And they tend to grow barley and oats rather than wheat, I don’t know what that does to the straw.)
This website says that heather rope is stronger (also that in England thatch is held down with wood, which I did not know.)
Another reminded me that you don’t often see heather at full length now, as it’s so often burned off to keep it short, so you’re not using the scrappy bits I was kind of imagining.
@ lh “Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time.”
@ David Marjanović “German: Dach “roof”
Also etymologically related to English thatch and German Dach are Latin toga and English deck. The general sense is ‘a covering’.
Is tròm snìthe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.
Reminds me of the somewhat more upbeat Kusaal proverb
Mɔɔdi pilig ka yu’ada bɛ.
“The thatch has come off but the rafters are there.” (i.e., where there’s life, there’s hope.)
Also etymologically related to English thatch and German Dach are Latin toga and English deck.
… and Welsh tŷ, Old Irish tech “house.”
Possibly Kusaal speakers have better weather 🙂
Actually, the rainfall there is about the same as the UK average, but the difference is that for seven months of the year it never rains at all.
True record of a conversation I had in Edinburgh with a Scots missionary on furlough from Nigeria (years before I went to West Africa myself):
Me: Are you looking forward to going back?
Him: Oh, yes! I want to get back to a country where there’s a dry season as well as a rainy season …