SERVIER1970-010 - secondary catalog
Navarre, Basque Country, and Aragon
Spain - Navarre - Basque Country - Aragon - Europe - Iberia
Play / practical
brunzidor Spanish translation of French original
Source term: brunzidor / rombo
brunzidor — Catalan name for the cord-whirled bramadera; Servier extends the term across the Navarre/Basque/Aragon region.
Etymology. A Romance buzz-word from brunzir, to buzz or drone. (medium confidence)
Basque shepherds carved the bullroarer they called the furrunfara from a thin plate of wood with toothed edges, decorated with the Basque cross of helical commas — the symbol, Servier writes, of celestial motion. A note from the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, which he quotes, describes the use: a herdsman swings the little board on the end of a cord, sometimes itself tied to a stick, and the droning sound drives off animals that do not belong to the flock — chiefly stray mares, which at night can panic the rams in their fold. The same instrument, Servier reports, is known across Spain as the brunzidor, attested in Navarre, the Basque Country, and Aragon, on the authority of Ramon Violant y Simorra's 1954 survey of children's and shepherds' instruments in Catalonia. Across the border in Béarn, shepherds whirl their own version, the burrumbo or hurrumbo, to drive wandering mares back from the rams' folds. The brunzidor proper is a Catalan word; the strict diamond-board-on-a-cord form it names is what the Spanish cultural authorities still catalogue as the bramadera, a child's noisemaker whose name comes from bramar, to bellow.
En España, el "brunzidor" es conocido en Navarra, en el País Vasco y en Aragón (R. Violant y Simorra: Instrumentos músicos de construcción infantil y pastoril en Cataluña...).
In Spain, the "brunzidor" is known in Navarre, in the Basque Country, and in Aragon (R. Violant y Simorra: Musical Instruments of Children's and Shepherds' Construction in Catalonia...).
Jean Servier, El hombre y lo invisible (Spanish trans. of L'homme et l'invisible), p. 140
- Function
- Servier gives the Navarre/Basque/Aragon regional distribution; the Spanish Ministry cultural thesaurus confirms `brunzidor` as the Catalan term for a strict cord-whirled bramadera toy.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Navarre/Pamplona representative regional anchor for a three-region term; source does not give a single locality or exact use site
- Source location
- p. 140
- Toy / secular survival