The Savoyard and His Marmot.

Lots of links!

The traditional language of Savoy is not French but Arpitan, formerly called franco-provençal. The song Avecque la marmotte must be a folk song, with only the piano arrangement by Beethoven. Avecque is an older, alternate form of avec ‘with’ but could also be the usual Arpitan form. I have heard the form in the local French of the region just South of Savoy. Incidentally, does the Russian quote actually say “learned marmots”, or “trained marmots”?

It occurred to me after reading about the petits Savoyards formerly chimney-sweeping in France that my father’s ancestors in the male line were from a village in la Savoie, where no one of the name has lived for a century and a half, and that perhaps one or more of them came to Paris as chimney sweeps and stayed, perhaps later showing marmots as adults. When I was young I thought my family was boring, but the more I learn about them the more unusual they become! But perhaps that is a common reaction.

Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, an amazing book on the history of magic and related performing arts by Ricky Jay, a magician and historian of magic. As it says at Amazon, “calculating pigs and acrobatic horses, stone eaters, poison resisters, daredevils, and mind readers”, as well as Matthias Buchinger / Matthew Buckinger, an armless and legless magician and painter of miniatures who gave his name to Buckinger’s boot, a slang term for ‘vagina’. I can’t resist retelling one of the book’s stories:

A magician was performing the classic “saw a person in half” trick. He called for volunteers from the audience and selected one of the men, having him walk up to the stage. The trick went off as planned: the volunteer got into the box, which was duly sawed in half and the cut ends displayed to the audience. The magician rejoined the box, the volunteer got up (entirely intact, of course), shook the magician’s hand, and started to return to his seat.

But he never got there. Halfway along, he collapsed to the floor, and split into upper and lower halves along the line of the saw cut. The halves began to crawl in separate directions: one half toward the stage, the other half back towards the seat. By the time the halves were a few feet apart, the eyes of all the audience were on them. The effect was sensational, in the fullest sense of that overused term. People screamed in horror, jumped out of their seats, and thundered for the exits. The theater had to be closed and the rest of the show canceled. The trick was never performed again: it was simply too effective to be bearable.

Graham Robb’s discovery of France remarks that wild marmots became extinct shortly after it was discovered that they were so relaxed they could be boiled alive without resisting. I am quite sad about this, and I wish someone had learned them to object.

Just remembering Brassens:

Autrefois, quand j’étais marmot,
J’avais la phobie des gros mots,
Et si j’ pensais “merde” tout bas,
Je ne le disais pas…

Not the same kind of animal though.

des: I never heard this about marmots. Wild marmots are not extinct but they are probably not as common as they used to be. My family spent many summers in the Alps when I was young and when hiking above the tree limit we could hear them whistling, although we never saw one. According to the Wikipedia.fr article marmotte, the marmots in the Pyrenees were extinct for centuries before being recently reintroduced, but in the Alps marmots migrated up into the mountains under the pressure of human expansion (and are coming down again and becoming less shy as the human presence is diminishing in the mountains).

The article says that before the current strict regulations, mountain people captured marmots during hibernation, marking the dens before the winter so as to find them under the snow. Of course hibernating marmots would be “relaxed” and unable to resist. I doubt that there would have been any point in boiling them alive though: if prepared for food they would first have had to be skinned (and the valuable fur preserved) and the insides cleaned.

p.75 “(The marmot is the large and floppy mountain rodent that sleeps in a burrow and was harvested rather than hunted, tossed into a rucksack and sometimes boiled when still asleep.)”

This reminds me that Sunday was Groundhog Day (our native marmot, also called the woodchuck). Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so six more weeks of winter can be confidently predicted.

Apparently a marmot (nowadays “kid, brat”) was originally a monkey. Up to the 19th century un marmot was the name of a big monkey with a long tail (DHLF). The feminine une marmote (single -t) was used at least between 1170 and the 14th century to mean “female monkey”.

The marmot monkey business is said to have come from the verb marmotter, a variant of marmonner (“to mumble”), probably because of the lip movement often made by monkeys. The same origin is mentioned for marmotte, since the rodent apparently moves its lips while whistling. So in essence a marmot is mumbling, and that’s how it got its name.

Marie-Lucie, marmot meaning “kid” is not a word used by Martians. I heard about it by listening to Brassens or through my readings. Marmotte isn’t used either, for lack of any marmot on Mars.

Six more weeks of winter would still make an early spring.

Ditt murmeldyr! “you marmot” is a common Norwegian greeting/insult to heavy sleepers. And that’s odd, since the animal is neither native nor biblical. The word isn’t native either, but an obvious calque from German Murmeltier, which, according to Yann Caprona’s brand new Norsk etymologisk ordbok, was made by contaminating Lat. mus montis with murmeln “growl”. I don’t know why the Lat. term is needed, since the German word is a parallel to French marmotte < marmoter “mutter, mumble”. Both the German and the French names look recent. I wonder what they replaced.

The book also notes that the name of the Croatian currency, Kuna, means “marmot”, a memory of when marmot furs were currency. I see that it’s a different word from Russian сурки.

I saw a marmot once in the swiss alps. They’re not extinct there.
Groundhog day in Chicago was as sunny as could be, but given the winter we’ve had so far, there was never any hope of spring coming either just around the corner or in only 6 more weeks (not that there ever is around here).

‘Marmot’ originally meant monkey? ‘Marmoset’ – presumably a variant of the same word – still does in English.

Pig strikes as a good word for marmot – we were fed marmot meet by the Kyrghyz poachers who hunted them, yes, for fur.

It never occurred to me that Russian surok may be onomatopoeic – any sound similarities if existed must have become opaque over time. As a child, I imagined the beady-eyed marmot from the song when we were given, for a nack, a глазурованный сырок (chocolate-covered sweet cheese bar) 🙂

M-L re: “учёный” learned (human) or trained (animal) – neither is the most popular translation. Most Russians would first utter, “scientist”. A classic Israeli Russian tale depicts a child psychologist baffled by a recurrent theme of an animal chained to a tree in his subjects’ drawings, which the kids describe to him as “Scientist Cast” 🙂 🙂 🙂 The creature is, of course, Trained Cat the Song-Singer from the opening stanzas of Pushkin’s “Ruslan & Ludmila”.

Is сурок related to the anomalous Russian word for “forty”, сорок? Somewhere it seems to me I read that the etymology of сорок was an animal skin worth 40 somethings or other, or something like that.

I think that dressé refers to a wild animal that has been trained

Dressage is a competitive equestrian sport. The identical word is used in the French Wiki entry.

With humans, the verb dresser ‘to train” . . . means ‘to subject (a youngster) to strict discipline’.

As in “He was given a good dressing down” — and the ‘he’ can be of any age, and a ‘she’ too.

According to AHD, the word goes back to assumed Vulgar Latin *directiare and to Latin directus. The sense is “to place, to arrange, to put in order.”

JC, the verb dresser also mean ‘set up, set upright’, as in dresser la table ‘to set up the table’: not just set the plates, etc on the table as for an ordinary meal but take special care in preparing the table, perhaps extending it with “leaves”, using a special tablecloth, and often adding flowers, candles and other decorative elements. As I mentioned in another thread, medieval tables were not necessarily fixed but were often simply boards set up on trestles, which were dismantled afterwards until set up again for another meal. Similarly, convention hotels do not have huge dining rooms reserved for the purpose but use folding tables when preparing a “multi-purpose” space for a banquet according to the number of expected guests.

I think that all the meanings of dresser, and some of the English dress words, have in common the special treatment required to impart to things, animals and even humans the appearance (and behaviour).considered socially desirable.

Meanwhile on p.173 (op. cit.) we find Horace-Bénédict de Saussure pondering “in the early 1780s” the decline of the Chamouni marmot population, as a result of hunting. I guess I overegged the extrapolation; my bad.

There is a “sort” of comic bullfight called “Don Tancredo”. Its etymological origin is confused but it seems related to an “torero” who had that first name, according to Wiki.es. Our dictionary contains a word that came from it: “dontancredismo”; it means, pretty much, “unperturbed attitude showed by who seems doesn’t realize that there is a danger.” Often it’s used in a pejorative sense, above all, against politicians.

Alexei: Vasmer …. [says that] сурок is an imitation of its whistling. Honestly, I just don’t hear it in the word.

As a historical linguist, I can tell you that when all else fails, many of my colleagues are prone to resorting to onomatopeia as an explanation even in cases where a word of disputed origin does not at all resemble any natural sound. Just because the word here begins with the sound [s] is hardly a sufficient reason to declare it onomatopeic.

Because murmeln, like “mutter” and “mumble”, is a low-frequency sound. Most of the fox sounds I’ve found in the internet are high-pitched.

Alexei: Vasmer …. [says that] сурок is an imitation of its whistling. Honestly, I just don’t hear it in the word.

marie-lucie: As a historical linguist, I can tell you that when all else fails, many of my colleagues are prone to resorting to onomatopeia as an explanation even in cases where a word of disputed origin does not at all resemble any natural sound. Just because the word here begins with the sound [s] is hardly a sufficient reason to declare it onomatopeic.

שרק sharak means ‘he whistled’ in Hebrew. The sound so emitted is a שריקה shrika. According to BDB, the word is found in Leviticus and has a cognate in Aramaic. BDB says the primary meaning of the biblical word is ‘hiss,’ but that’s a secondary meaning today — so secondary I didn’t know it until I looked it up.

Google [ whistle museum ] for a special bonus.

I suppose I should reveal how the trick was done. The person walking back to his seat was in fact two people: a Little Person sitting on the shoulders of another Little Person. The clothes concealed this from the audience. But what made the trick so utterly convincing was that the “volunteer” originally sawed in half was the upper LP’s otherwise (nearly) identical twin brother!