Yesterday it was Basques in Idaho, today it’s Hmong in Minnesota — Phineas Pope of MPR News says “Tuj lub players want more Minnesotans to give the Hmong sport a whirl“:
A unique sport, thousands of years old, is played in areas across the United States, including in Minnesota. Tuj lub, pronounced “tuh-LOO,” has strong ties to Hmong heritage. Now, players want to share the sport with more Minnesotans.
Tuj lub, or “spin top,” has quite a few rules and penalties, and each round is a little bit different. At its core, the sport consists of players launching tops through the air at other tops on the ground, trying to knock them over. When the tops — themselves actually called tuj lub — make contact with each other, they produce a loud clicking sound. […]
“You might bump into a group of people, maybe look like they were picnicking. But you look closely, they’re playing a top spin game,” said state Sen. Foung Hawj, who helped explain the game by comparing it to some other sports. “It’s like bowling, bocce ball or horseshoes, because they take a little range,” he said. […]
Striking the tops takes some real skill, even at close range. But Hawj says even if you’re not very skilled at tuj lub, players are good at complimenting those who are new to the game — at least in the United States. “In Highland Laos, we expect that everybody know how to play. So, if you play bad, they going to pick on you, say, ‘Why are you bad at this?’” he said with a chuckle.
Click through for more, including images; since Wiktionary seems not to have much Hmong, I can’t give you etymologies for tuj and lub, but I can tell you that the final consonants are actually tone marks — see Wikipedia for the messy details. Thanks, JWB!
On YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FWhgnRjQME et al.
Hmong/Hmoob at LH.
Thanks for digging up that ancient post; I like my summary from back then:
Related, one way or another, to 陀螺, I imagine.
I checked the index to Martha Ratliff’s book Hmong-Mien Language History, but she only has an entry for what I think is a completely differebt lub, a classifier for “bowls/houses” which she (in an avowedly “quite speculative” proposal) suggests might be from Middle Chinese ̀ʔom “thatched hut” (庵, Mandarin ān). Reference is on p. 225.
(If the correspondence to the Middle Chinese seems odd, Ratliff the context here is about borrowed words being supplied with valid onsets in Hmong-Mien. The idea is that Hmongic supplies *l, Mienic *n.)
Related, one way or another, to 陀螺, I imagine.
Indeed — thanks!