Hello,
I agree fully with you Arle, and my impression is Orest also shares
this view. The only difference might be that here, at the spot, we
live in coutries named "Austria", "Hungary", "Ukraine", "Poland" etc.
(geographical areas ruled by elected governments, in borders which
are fixed by international treaties). These words have a simple
practical and official geographical meaning.
"In Ukraine" is something I easyly can write but "ukrainian" I will
carefully need to decide and evade if I am in doubt. But thats only
natural. Nobody would deny the difference in the array between
"England" and "english": english is spoken in England but not every
one whose language is english lives in England :-)
Back to the subject! A more general point of view:
I see a tendency to label hurdy-gurdy types with the word used for it
in the language where this certain type seems to be common:
"Vielle", "Tekerö", "Lira", "Zanfona" are typical examples for this.
This leads to a link between language and instrument design, which
can be quite unfortunate and misleading. All these words inside their
language cover all forms of hurdy-gurdies (and sometimes much more,
from bagpipe via accordeon to fiddle).
In french one can say "vielle autrichienne" meaning "hurdy-gurdy from
Austria" or "Austrian style". I mentioned before the "Lira
ukraińska", "Lira hiszpańska", "Lira francuska" in polish. Balas
Nagy's Handbook for the hurdy-gurdy is a "tekerölantosok könyve" in
hungarian, naturally.
Special problems occure when these language-labels start to move or
are more withspread than thougt. Like if someone in Germany making a
"Vielle" or in the US a "Lira". Or if like "Lira" the word is common
as a possible word for the hurdy-gurdy in a very wide variety of
languages: German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Russian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Belarus, Ukrainian, Czech, Romainian,....
There are alternatives: using descriptive words like "Luthback hurdy-
gurdy" or using Makers names, like "Louvet" "Pimpard" etc... or the
name where the historical evidence is taken from: "Berchtesgadener-
Leier" , "Grodda-Lira", both after museum-instruments or "Bosch"
after the painter, modelnames like Allegro or Orka (is the Orka an
"american" hurdy-gurdy?).
Kind regards
Simon - Vienna, Austria
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have a look at:
http://hurdygurdywiki.wiki-site.com
http://drehleierwiki.wiki-site.com
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my site:
http://simonwascher.info
