The rehabilitation of <i>tuhar</i>

Lembit Vaba

doi:https://doi.org/10.54013/kk823a3

Keywords: Estonian vocabulary, etymology, history of the written language

This article examines the etymology of the South Estonian dialect word tuhar : tuhara ‘the paired posterior part of the body formed by muscles and fat pads extending from the iliac bone and attached to the femur; buttock, posterior’ and traces its path into written Estonian. In contemporary Estonian, tuhar is a neutral anatomical term that is widely known and used throughout the standard language.

The origin of the word has been repeatedly discussed in the etymological literature, but no convincing explanation has emerged. Among the proposed hypotheses, the one that deserves particular attention is that of the Estonian etymologist Julius Mägiste, who suggested that tuhar is derived from tuha, itself possibly a verbal noun formed from the onomatopoetic verb tuhama = tuhisema ‘to produce a dull, monotonous sound (of fire or a strong current of air); to move, travel, or glide rapidly’. Alongside tuhar, both Standard Estonian and the dialects contain other body-part names formed with the suffix -r, or words otherwise closely related to the same semantic group, such as näbar : näbara, nägar : nägara, and sakar : sagara.

I argue that Mägiste’s proposed etymology is supported by an analogous derivational pattern in Latvian. Latvian dialects and colloquial speech provide clear examples in which a verb denoting a sound serves as the base for a word meaning ‘buttocks’ (Lat. podex): Latvian dùkt, -cu, -cu ‘to hum, drone, roar, hiss, whoosh’ ⇒ dùcamais, dūkamais ‘buttocks’.

Early Estonian health and medical literature employed vernacular vocabulary, including words and expressions that gradually came to be regarded as vulgar (among them terms for the buttocks) and were subsequently replaced in written usage by more neutral alternatives. Efforts to develop Estonian medical terminology began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. One of the most significant contributors to this undertaking was the physician Peeter Hellat (1857–1912). In creating new technical terms, Hellat relied primarily on dialect words, often favouring those from South Estonian. The South Estonian word tuhar appears in his work Terwise õpetus (1894), both in the plural form tuharad and as a component of compounds such as tuharluu (‘pelvic bone’) and tuharlihased (‘gluteal muscles’). In 1918, the word tuhar entered general dictionaries of Standard Estonian with the publication of the Dictionary of Estonian Orthography (Eesti keele õigekirjutuse-sõnaraamat).

Lembit Vaba (b. 1945), PhD, Foreign Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, phorest45@gmail.com

The rehabilitation of tuhar

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