VISKI1906-001 - lexical attestation
Torda bungatytyu shingle bullroarer
Romania - Torda (Turda), Torda-Aranyos county, Transylvania - Eastern Europe
Play / practical
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
- 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. The word-list gives no dimensions, no cord length and no wood species.
- Function
- A droning implement: whirled fast at the whirler's side or over the head until it sounds — 'bung.' The entry records no rite, season or occasion.
- Source
- Viski Károly, A tordai nyelvjárás [The Torda dialect], Nyelvészeti Füzetek 32, szerkeszti Simonyi Zsigmond (Budapest: Athenaeum Irodalmi és Nyomdai R.-Társaság, 1906), Tájszók (dialect word-list), s.v. bungatytyu, printed p. 43 (= PDF p. 45), left column; series number 32 from the Nyelvészeti Füzetek bibliography (the title page carries the series name but…
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 43 (= PDF p. 45), left column
- Source confidence
- high Turda (Hungarian Torda) town centre, Cluj County. Viski states in his introduction that the description is confined to the one community, so the town itself is the whole attested area — no sub-district or street anchor is available or needed.
- Toy / secular survival