Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/490

posed to question this reputed German paternity of the word. Dol is a Bohemian word meaning a mine, pit, and sometimes also a valley; at best, it is only a cognate of the German Thal. The ending ar (modern Bohemian usually ář) belongs in the same class as the German and English er or the French eur; hence, dolar might mean an inhabitant of a valley, a worker in a mine, or, impersonally, something originating in, or pertaining to, a mine or valley. A coin circulating in a mining district might very easily, and appropriately, be known as a dolar. Mining, particularly of silver (more recently, of radium and uranium) is done in the neighborhood of Jáchymov, whose antiquity is indicated in the native place name. This, in modern Czech, would be Jáchymův (possessive-noun-adjective form, masculine = Joachim’s.) The Old Czech name, retained to this day, must antedate by some centuries the German Joachimsthal. Under the circumstances, it seems more reasonable that Bohemians themselves should have called a coin minted in their own territory early in the sixteenth century a dolar than that they should have waited for Germans to christen it Thaler. They appear, at any rate, to have forgotten the matter; and, although Bohemian-Americans have long since reabsorbed the word as dolar (toral is a modern corruption sometimes heard in rural communities), I dare say that not one in a hundred suspects the term of having other than an American origin. By another freak of fate, the word ananas, originally a native West Indian designation for the pineapple, is practically unknown in the United States, but has, through the Spanish, found its way into Czech, where it signifies not only, usually, pineapple brandy, but the fruit itself. The English word tarot, more directly from the Italian, exists in Czech as tarok, the name of one of the cards used in a very popular game among Bohemians, taroky. Americans in Czech communities who have learned this rather complicated game call the cards taroks.

Apart from the words Czech, Slovak, and Moravian, and, of course, Czecho - Slovak and Czecho-Slovakian, which, at least in a sense, may be considered as contributions of the Czech language to the English vocabulary, Bohemian words have not been adopted to any appreciable extent. Premyslide, an adjective derived from the name of a Bohemian ruler, Přemysl, is sometimes used in referring to the dynasty founded by him. Hussite, as everybody knows, comes from the name of the Bohemian reformer, Hus. Taborites also is known to historians as the Anglicized name of a Hussite sect whose fortified stronghold