Talk:Jew's harp

Some Ideas by a Historical Linguist
Origin of the instrument name "Jew's harp" in English and other languages

[ etymology, English Jew's harp ]

( A "Jew's harp" is a small musical instrument of great antiquity which is like a kazoo. )

Here's some ideas by me. I got a BA in Linguistics and work a lot with foreign languages and etymologies. I wrote this up, wanted to put it online, but couldn't find a good place where it would accessible. I'm going to try the Talk page for "Jew's harp", too, because it's empty and I might be the only person who cares and is qualified to have a say. Why "Jew's harp" ? It's just been on my mind and is interesting etymologically.

I think the answer might lie in foreign languages' terms for Jew's harp.

I think the phenomenon is limited only to English and Dutch, that it's phonetically (sound-wise) related to the French guimbarde *gwimbaarda and other Eurasian words for Jew's harp. I speculate that it went from something like

[ (Continental original, something like **gwimbaarda > (calque and or phonetic borrowing) *jaw-harp > *jaw-harp > *Jew-harp > Jew's harp

I think that this was adopted as a variant because the instrument is small, whereas a harp is much bigger, Jews being commonly regarded as stingy in Europe. Likewise, other English variant forms are "juice harp" and "jaw harp". Phonetic borrowings don't even have to make sense, look at eggplant (from Persian).

Wiktionary lists many of them. ( Wiktionary, "Jew's harp". > translation)

Most call it a "mouth drum". Only in Dutch do we get Jew's harp. In Germanic languages we see Danish: jødeharpe c : Jew-harp Dutch: mondharp f : mouth-harp German: Maultrommel (de) f : mouth-drum Icelandic: gyðingaharpa f, kjálkaharpa f, munntromma f x-harp, x-harp, mouth-drum Netherlands: mondharp m mouth-harp Norwegian: munnharpe mouth-harp Swedish: mungiga (sv) c mouth-x

When we look up "jaw" in Wiktionary, we find : Middle English jawe *dZaawa, jowe *dZowa, geowe *dZowa (my reconstructions) Middle Dutch kauwe : fish jaw Middle Dutch kouwe : mouth cavity dialectal German Ka:u , Keu : jaw, donkey jowl Irish gob : mouth

What was "Jew" in Middle English ? Wiktionary says Giw *Juu and Ju *Juu, which, not surprisingly, is the same as today's.

So then the variant form [ West-Germanic *Jew's-harp ] must have arise and given rise to modern English Jew's harp and Modern Dutch jødeharpe sometime between Proto-Germanic and today. If you go back far enough in time, the West Germanic peoples probably did not know that Jews existed, so maybe it's a Roman Empire onward thing.

This is just from the data given in Wiktionary.

So I think that the article as-is is great, but if someone could find more ideas in some source by a qualified individual, that would also be cool. Musical instruments (and jargon) tends to have interesting etymologies. It's also Jew-related and the Jews are interesting and do some neat stuff throughout time. It's also related to the use of ethnonyms in word-formation and idioms, a rare but intersting phenomenon.

Another major (?) English word whose etymology is resolved by examination of foreign language equivalents is "butterfly", which I think was originally "flutter-fly". As with "Jew's harp", the specific construction usually doesn't go much beyond the West Germanic level. Beyond that it's "Indo-European roots" and this kind of thing. Supposedly.

Dwarfkingdom (talk) 01:55, 4 July 2014 (UTC)