The Valleys of Tirol: Their traditions and customs and how to visit them. Busk Rachel Harriette

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      Atti,5 father, and datti, ‘daddy.’

      frei, pleasant.

      zoana, a wattled basket.

      schlutta and schoope, a smock-frock.

      täibe, anger.

      kîba’, to strive.

      rêra’, to weep.6

      musper, merry.

      tribiliera’, to constrain.

      waedle, swift.

      raetig werden, to deliberate.

      Tripstrüll, = Utopia.

      wech, spruce, also vain.

      laegla, a little vessel.

      hengest, a friendly gathering of men.7

      koga, cursed, also corrupted.

      fegga, a wing.

      krom, a gift.

      blaetz, a patch.

      grind, a brute’s head, a jolterhead.

      bratza, a paw, an ugly hand.

      briegga’, to pucker up the face ready for crying.

      deihja, a shepherd’s or cattle-herd’s hut.8

      also dieja, which is generally reserved for a hut formed by taking advantage of a natural hole, leaving only a roof to be supplied.

      garreg, prominent. (I think that gareggiante in Italian is sometimes used in a similar sense.)

      Other words in Vorarlberg dialect are very like English, as: —

      In Wälsch-Tirol, they have carega, a chair.

      But all this is, I am aware, but a mere turning over of the surface; my only wish is that some one of stronger capacity will dig deeper. Of many dialects, too, I have had no opportunity of knowing anything at all. Here are, however, a few suggestive or strange words from North and South Tirol: —

      Pill, which occurs in various localities12 of both those provinces to designate a place built on a little hill or knoll, is identical with an Etruscan word to which Mr. Isaac Taylor gives a similar significance.13 I do not overlook Weber’s observation that ‘Pill is obviously a corruption of Büchel (the German for a knoll), through Bühel and Bühl;’ but, which proceeds from which is often a knotty point in questions of derivation, and Weber did not know of the Etruscan ‘pil.’

      Ziller and celer I have already alluded to,14 though of course it may be said that the Tirolean river had its name from an already romanised Etruscan word, and does not necessarily involve direct contact with the Etruscan vocabulary.

      It remains only to excuse myself for the spelling of the word Tirol. I have no wish to incur the charge of ‘pedantry’ which has heretofore been laid on me for so writing it. It seems to me that, in the absence of any glaring mis-derivation, it is most natural to adopt a country’s own nomenclature; and in Tirol, or by Tirolean writers, I have never seen the name spelt with a y. I have not been able to get nearer its derivation than that the Castle above Meran, which gave it to the whole principality, was called by the Romans, when they rebuilt it, Teriolis. Why they called it so, or what it was called before, I have not been able to learn. The English use of the definite article in naming Tirol is more difficult to account for than the adoption of the y, in which we seem to have been misled by the Germans. We do not say ‘the France’ or ‘the Italy;’ even to accommodate ourselves to the genius of the languages of those countries, therefore, that we should have gone out of our way to say ‘the Tyrol’ when the genius of that country’s language does not require us so to call it, can have arisen only from a piece of carelessness which there is no need to repeat.

      CHAPTER I.

      VORARLBERG

      … Everywhere

      ‘Traditions, myths, legends! what is the use of recording and propagating the follies and superstitions of a bygone period, which it is the boast СКАЧАТЬ