Jew’s Harps
Sep 10th, 2007 by Doug Berch
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Musician and Appalachian Mountain Dulcimer Maker
Sep 10th, 2007 by Doug Berch
You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Jew’s Harps”.
Hi Doug,
Some remarks,
There is no jewish tradition in jew’s harps. Nevertheless this name dates back to late mediaevil times. More likely jew is derived from the latin gabuta which means to play (as in the French Jeu). Or from the Scottish name Gewgaw (which means jew’s harp). A similar name can be found in Walloon Belgium, Gawe.
Trump is English and is still used in Scotland.
Trompe is French
Tromp is old Dutch today ist’s called mondtrom (Belgium) or mondharp (Netherlands).
Yours faithfully,
Harm J. Linsen
As an addtion I can say that jue’s trumpes is found in a charter of 1481, being the oldest known notation in English.
See the article on http://www.jewsharper.info a site of Michael Wright.
Yours, Harm
Hi Harm,
Thanks for the comments. I’m happy for the information about variations of the name “trump” in different countries.
Do you have a web page?
All the best,
Doug
Sorry, no webpage but I’ve written some articles on the net, one in the latest newsletter of the jewsharp guild (www.jewsharpguild.org) and two on the french site guimbardage.net ( http://www.guimbardage.net/spip.php?article33 and http://www.guimbardage.net/spip.php?article37) these last two to improve my French. One of these is translated in Russian(http://www.khomus.ru/lb_art8.shtml) but when you have the jew’s harp guild version you don’t need to translate the story. There are a lot of sites regarding jew’s harps but the thing is to find them.
Yours, Harm.