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Flore Teezyste-Rifo Hāpst
article from Lāngār+Tibān 7-1 (1993)
In this issue of Lāngār+Tibān, Terre Ūtefusot-Pahoj suggests a new etymological approach in view of the names Spooksoliy and spokānda. Flore Teezyste-Rifo Hāpst, lecturer in general linguistics at the Academy of Bōrā and lexicographer in the Historical Department of Hirdo, reacts to this.
On the whole, I agree with Ūtefusot-Pahoj's view that it is certainly not self-evident to regard the names Spooksoliy and spokānda as being derived, either directly or otherwise, from the Old Norse root spakr, or perhaps as derived as a whole. But I cannot resist commenting on Ūtefusot-Pahoj's argument. First of all, a remark of secondary importance: I dispute that our loan word klimmā was passed on to us in the Viking era, as happened with words like knōr, wik or lo’buti. In 1876, professor Moffain Gerneert established that klimmā was first used in a church announcement (Ergynne notification) from 1801, in which a priest voiced his strong disapproval regarding those forms of sports in which the participants came into physical contact with each other. Of course wrestling was one of them, and the priest in fact wrote:
"First and foremost, I bring to mind the pursuit in which men demean themselves to angry dogs who try to floor each other with any body part that is able to cling, and in which grabbing and twisting protruding body parts degenerates into a pleasurable activity. Such vulgar shenanigans do not fit in with our spiritually high-minded Ergynnic culture, and the fact that they nevertheless are held all over the place can only be ascribed to an excrescence of Viking culture that keeps on penetrating further, and which, as we know, flooded our islands almost 800 years ago. That the inhabitants of that cold climate need to thaw their limbs by such bestial activities, which they call klimā, is perhaps imaginable from their angle, but to tolerate something like klimā in our realm, with its milder temperatures, should be very much frowned upon, and had I the power to do so, in my capacity of priest, I would even ban it."
From this passage of a church announcement from 1801, possibly written in the Gārder monastery at Staef, it will be apparent that wrestling is explicitly referred to by the word klimā (nowadays written as klimmā [1]). Professor Gerneert proves that this church announcement was the reason that klim(m)ā entered into our language, originally in order to denote "wrestling". After approx. 1944, when regular wrestling had lost its lustre as a popular sport, the term klimmā was used for jujitsu (nowadays: judo), but professor Gerneert was no longer around to witness this. It falls outside the scope of my reaction to Ūtefusot-Pahoj's article, to look into this in more detail.
Anyhow, we may conclude that the loan word klimmā is definitely not a part of the cultural inheritance the Vikings left us.
My second point of criticism regarding Ūtefusot-Pahoj's article is more serious. The romantic glorification of Vikings in the 18th century, resulting in the fact that various cultural facets in our Spocanian society are erroneously attributed to Viking influences, is certainly not ignored to the extent my esteemed colleague would like to suggest. Repeatedly, historians and linguists have pointed out how in the 18th century a form of falsification of history took place (and perhaps also falsification of science), precisely due to Vikings being idolized. It is true that also Olyva Koles, who is quoted by Ūtefusot-Pahoj, is guided in her scientific views by this "romantic-religious train of thought" (as Ū-P puts it), but why does my esteemed colleague ignore scientists like Moffain Olōf-Frāmenn and Fernent Frākkeny Rifo Flāgpe-Itārzatreef Rifo Troef, who, in the same period as Olyva Koles, have fulminated against precisely such tendencies? As early as 1908 or 1909, so even previous to Koles' article in Cūltura, Frākkeny Rifo Flāgpe established that any etymological approach of the word Spooksoliy, based on whatever Germanic language should be labelled as a clear-cut figment of the imagination. In doing so, he not only rejected the spakr etymology, but also the sprec theory, like Koles and Ūtefusot-Pahoj wish to do.
I am surprised that my colleague is not aware of the work of Frākkeny Rifo Flāgpe, or if he is, that he ignores this work and revives the sprec theory once again. All this is old hat, 19th century fantasizing, for which there indeed no longer should be a place in modern linguistics.
My rejection of any etymology based on a Germanic language of course demands an acceptable alternative. I think I am able to offer this: it seems to me that Ūtefusot-Pahoj's suggestion that the last part of Spooksoliy is cognate with our modern verb xole [2] indicates a new insight, which I entirely endorse. Also I am well able to follow his train of thought that the initial k of -ksoliy together with the final k of the element spok may possibly have resulted in doubling the o in spook. But we will have to distance ourselves systematically from the idea that the first part of our country's name is Germanic in origin and has something to do with "wise" or "speak". If we accept that the second element -ksoliy is typically Atlantic, it is natural to also regard the first element as typically Atlantic. What Atlantic word might then be cognate with spook? Ūtefusot-Pahoj could also have wondered about this, and, had he done so, he would have arrived at the idea of relating spook to spāke. In my view, the compound spāke + ksoliy could very well result in Spooksoliy, in the sense of "fenced off plot of land that is lent to someone" or perhaps "a liege's land". It is outside my competence to prove that the shift ā > o(o) is in line with the phonological rules of (Old) Spocanian, but other colleagues in my opinion are able to do so without problem. And historians can perhaps find a relationship between our old feudal system with lieges and the appearance of a notion like "borrowed land", of which the semantic field has widened to "home country", finally becoming the proper name Spooksoliy.
Thus, I would like to urge my esteemed colleague Terre Ūtefusot-Pahoj to cast aside the 19th century illusion of the sprec theory, and to immerse himself in a study of the development of spāke > spook-. Perhaps this purely Atlantic approach will offer the basis for an explanation of the name of our language spokānda as well, in the sense of spāke + andol or spāke + ender.
I am curious about the fruits this new research will yield!
© translation: Joost den Haan
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