Swiss cow

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Gottfried Locher : Berner with a cow, satirical miniature around 1790

Cow Swiss , cow milkers , cow tails, cows' hawks (kuogehîer) or calf makers were insulting swear words for the Swiss confederates in the late Middle Ages .

origin

Cow Swiss, cow milkers, cow tails, cows' hawks ( kuogehîer "Kuhbegatter") or calf makers alluded to the rural origins of the Confederates. These names originally came from the vocabulary of the Mediterranean arable farmers and applied to the part of the population in the foothills of the Alps and Alps who drove cattle , but were adopted by Austrian propaganda and applied to the Swiss in general. Milking the cows was a woman's affair with the arable farmers until the grass-roots conversion in the 19th century, so insulting men as cow milkers, for example, belittled them as “effeminate”.

history

Küeswanz and Kuogehîer for Swiss can be found in the Swiss Idioticon as early as the 14th century. At the time of the Old Zurich War , the cow-ridicule was extended not only to the Swiss, but also to the Black Forest cattle breeders who sympathized with the Confederates. Isenhofer von Waldshut uses the metaphors cow's tail and peacock's tail to identify the various camps from the Upper Austrian nobility and bourgeoisie. The imagery was also transferred to other Confederate allies. The people of Basel were accused of "kissing the little girl under the tail". Mulhouse was derided as "Kuogstal".

The defamatory use of these swear words was often used to provoke rash enemy attacks. The cow-mockery was often used during the repeated clashes between the Confederates and the nobility of Upper Austria and in connection with the Swabian War of 1499. The chronicler Kaspar Frey reports that the federal federations lying in Koblenz on the Rhine were insulted by the Austrian side by concerted Kueghîer shouts : «You all left the Ryn the day after the ymbyß, so the landtsknecht were full of wyn, uss Waldßhuott and as shameful and unchristian to the Swiss confederates and ettlich gnempt by name: Kuegkyer, calf maker. The ones who were generally shot. And if the man got tired, then students and boys bring them, who have to shout and shout at the same time. " During the escalation of the political situation, Frey reported a provocation of imperial mercenaries at this level , who put a calf in wedding clothes near the village of Azmoos and drove them to the Swiss positions with the request to hold a wedding: «Sy put a calf on a tuechly uff , forten das by the schwantz, dantzent to the confederates, screaming, sy should send inen the bruttman, then the brutt were ready. " Frey sees the cow mockery as an important cause of the Swabian War. The Kueghîer and calves makers is the culmination of Kuhspottes the Swiss.

Etymology of Kuoghyer (incorrectly also: Kuogyer, Kuhgeiger )

The word Gehîer, Gehîjer, with hiattilgendem <g> also Gehîger written syncopated Ghîger, is a noun agentis for MHG. Verb gehîwen, gehîen, gehîjen, <g> with hiattilgendem gehîgen written, 'marry; to mate, to have sexual intercourse 'and still fall as a word in today's Swiss German as gheie, ghiie with the meaning'; throw 'lives on. It goes back to ahd. Hî (w) o 'housemate; Spouse 'or hî (w) a ' wife, wife 'and hîwen ' marry 'and is related to nhd. Words like marriage and perhaps home . In the late medieval Alemannic language, it was used to mean ' having sex ', it happened in connection with fornication, incest or bestiality, and the word served as a bad swear word.

Kuhgeiger, on the other hand, is a false Verneu High German that is first found in Christian Gottlob Haltaus ' Glossarium Germanicum medii aevi from 1758 and refers to Aegidius Tschudi's ku (o) ghyger . . Neither the word has something to do with NHG fiddling 'lain' in the definition that a young connotation of fiddling 'violin' is; see. fiddling 'playing the violin', which can also have the secondary meaning 'sleeping in'. These connotations (as well as fuck ) by the context of rubbing caused and have no connection with mhd. Gehîen .

literature

  • Jürg Altwegg , Roger de Weck (ed.): Kuhschweizer and Sauschwaben. Swiss, Germans and their love-hate relationship . Nagel & Kimche, Munich / Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-312-00315-6 .
  • Andre Gutmann: The Swabian War Chronicle of Kaspar Frey and its position in the federal historiography of the 16th century . (= Publications of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg, Series B: Research, Vol. 176). W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 28 f., 466-478, ISBN 978-3-17-020982-4 .
  • Claudius Sieber and Thomas Wilhelmi : In Helvetios - Against the Kuhschweizer. Foreign and enemy images of the Swiss in anti-federal texts from the period from 1386 to 1532. (= Swiss texts. New series, volume 13). Bern 1998.
  • Heinrich Walter: The Topos of the «Cow Swiss»: Stigmatization and Stigma Management of the Confederates (PDF; 196 kB), History Seminar of the University of Zurich, Dr. Alois Niederstätter, WS 1999/2000.
  • Matthias Weishaupt : farmers, shepherds and “frume noble puren”. Peasant and peasant state ideology in the late medieval Confederation and the national historiography of Switzerland. Helbing & Lichtenhahn, Basel 1992, ISBN 3-7190-1237-9 .
  • Richard Weiss : Folklore of Switzerland. Layout. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1946; 3rd, unchanged edition Rentsch, Zurich and Schwäbisch Hall 1984, ISBN 3-7249-0567-X , esp.p. 107 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Weiss: Folklore of Switzerland. Layout. Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1946; 3rd, unchanged edition Rentsch, Zurich and Schwäbisch Hall 1984, ISBN 3-7249-0567-X , p. 107 f.
  2. ↑ Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume IV, Column 197, Article Chüe-Mëlcher Bed. 2 ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume II, Column 111, Article Esel-, Küe-, Märhen-, Sû-G-hîjer ( digitized version ); Volume IX, column 2030, article Chue, Chüe-Schwanz Bed.2a ( digitized version ).
  4. ↑ Schweizerisches Idiotikon , Vol. II, Col. 1106 ( ge-hî (j) en meaning 2c: “futuere” ) and Col. 1111 (Esel-, Küe-, Märhen-, Sû-Ge-hî (j) er ) ; German Dictionary , Vol. V, Sp. 2342 f. ( read in meaning 2a – c ) and Col. 2350 ( Geheier ); then Etymological Dictionary of German, developed under the direction of Wolfgang Pfeifer, s. v. Marriage; Smart. Etymological dictionary of the German language, edited by Elmar Seebold, s. v. Marriage .
  5. ↑ German dictionary s. v. violins and fiddles .