Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/491

was given the proper name Tábor. This word tábor is the common Czech word for camp. Its etymology has been connected with Mount Tabor in Palestine. Whether or not there is any connection, tábor was used by the Taborites to designate their open-air camp-meetings; later, when the sect became literally a church militant, the name was applied to their fortified camps. Both Webster and the Standard Dictionary recognize tabor as a common noun in certain military senses, but it has made practically no headway in the American vocabulary. Tabor, thus borrowed from the Czech, must be distinguished from a better known dictionary word spelled the same way (and also tabour,) which has been brought into English from the Persian, through Old French. The latter means a kind of drum, a timbrel; whence also there is the diminutive, taboret (tabouret,) meaning either a small tabor, or a small table resembling a tabor in shape. American vendors of articles designed for use in Roman Catholic church services have given the name tabor to a stand intended to be placed under the monstrance on certain occasions. I fail to see any particular logic in this application of the term, though it is evidently an abbreviation of taboret.

Then there is dumka. This is Bohemian for elegy. It is mentioned in American dictionaries as meaning, in music, a lament, a musical composition of a melancholy character; but, excepting the composer of a dumka, it is unlikely that one American musician in a thousand could answer the question “What is a dumka?” As for non-musicians, perhaps one in ten thousand has ever heard of the word.

Mr. Ladislav Urban, in his booklet “The Music of Bohemia,” ^[1] states that the well known dance, the polka, (which, by the way, can hardly be said to be well known in these days of jazz,) is of Czech origin, and that it made its way to Prague, the Bohemian metropolis, in 1835, where it received the name polka, “probably on account of the half-step occurring in the dance.” Půlka, as Mr. Urban explains, is the Bohemian noun for half; but I am inclined to doubt the suggested evolution into polka. Polka means, in Bohemian as well as in Polish, a Polish woman; and I am of the opinion that the dance was so called because of a mistaken impression that it originated in Poland. The French, who contributed largely to making the dance known, could very easily have made the mistake. Another Czech folk-dance is the furiant, which, says Mr. Urban, means “a boasting farmer.” The composers Dvořák and Smetana so popular-