Torda bungatytyu shingle bullroarer

bungatytyu

bungatytyu (Torda Hungarian; standard orthography bungattyú) = 'the droner', from bung- 'to boom, drone' with the instrument-forming suffix -attyú — the same formation as the Arad zúgattyú, 'the roarer', from zúg- 'to roar'.

A wooden roof shingle bored through at one end, a length of cord drawn through the hole and knotted fast: swung hard at your side or over your head, it said bung. That is the whole of the bungatytyu as Viski Károly set it down in his word-list of the Torda dialect in 1906 — an implement defined entirely by the noise it makes, and named straight out of that noise. Torda had a second way of getting the sound with no string at all: a flat stone gripped between the tips of five fingers, spun and skipped along the middle of the street, droning if the throw came off. Viski was Torda-born and collecting in his own town, a Transylvanian salt-mining place whose speech he thought worth a book of its own, and the whirrer went into it among the street games, the tools and the local words for things a stranger would not have known to ask about.

bungatytyu: bungató szerszám, mely úgy készül, hogy egyik végén átfúrt zsindejbe zsineget húznak s erősítenek; oldalt, vagy fej felett gyorsan forgatva: bung.

bungatytyu: a droning implement, made thus — a cord is drawn through a shingle perforated at one end and made fast; whirled rapidly at the side, or above the head: bung.

Viski Károly, A tordai nyelvjárás (Nyelvészeti Füzetek 32), Budapest, 1906, p. 43

Particulars

Object

A wooden roof shingle (zsindely, dialect zsindej) perforated at one end, with a cord drawn through the hole and made fast, whirled rapidly at the side or above the head.

Function

A droning implement: whirled fast at the whirler's side or over the head until it sounds — 'bung.'