Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/50

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s i. JAN. is,

commune entirely enclosed by French territory, and that it is only a village without importance.

" This Spanish ground,' ' he says, " in our territory is the result of a fantastical (bizarre) limitation of frontiers made at the time of the famous treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659. By one of the clauses of this treaty the French communes which surround Livia ought, every two years, to leave their lands uncultivated, so as to allow the passage of the cattle which the people of Livia take to the mountain. But this|clause is never respected ; our peasants naturally take care not to lose one year in two ; and obstinately refuse to allow the oxen, goats, and sheep of their neighbours to pass into their fields when the harvest is a-foot ; whence occur armed conflicts, which have to be allayed in any way possible. Finally, Livia being joined to Spain by a narrow, neutral road, where no soldier, gendarme, or custom-house officer of either of the two nations is allowed to circulate, this commune is the refuge of all the smugglers of the region."

As to the spelling, Llivia or Livia, perhaps the latter is the modern French form. In the ' Dictionnaire General des Villes, Bourgs, Villages et Hameaux de la France,' &c., par X)uclos, 1836, there are seven names beginning with LI, all in the department of Pyrenees-Orientales. Neither Llivia nor Livia is given, I suppose because of its being Spanish territory. Saillagouse appears as in Pyrenees-Orientales, arrondissement Prades, canton Saillagouse, 505 inhabitants.

Perhaps some other correspondent of tions republics. ROBERT PIERPOINT.
 * N. & Q.' can add to my little list of suppositi-

" BINNACLE " : " TABERNACLE " : "BARNACLES."

THE first of these words was originally " bittacle," the English form of It. abitacolo, Proy. abitade, Fr. habitade, bitacle. Skeat's dictionary says it " seems to have been originally a sheltered place for the steers- man," and assumes that the word was " a singular corruption of the older form ' bit- tacle,' due to confusion with 'bin,' a chest." The ' N.E.D.' ascribes the earlier form to Sp. or Pg. bitaculo, and considers " a direct adoption of Fr. habitade and shortening to bittade in English as phonetically less probable. The seventeenth-century biddikil appears to be a transitional form."

There are errors in both these explanations. The bittacle was indeed a sheltered place, but it was certainly not for the steersman, and there is no evidence of any influence from "bin." Also Fr. habitade has lost its first syllable in seamen's speech, and probably lost it very long ago ; while there

is reason to believe that the change to binnacle " may be due to a related word used both in French and English ships.

Fr. habitade, originally a hut or sleeping- closet, came to mean a shrine, as in Littre's sixteenth-century quotation : " Au Louvre, ancien temple et habitade des roys de France." In ships it was the shrine of the tutelary saint, and its original place was in front of the steersman. . On the advent of the compass this was probably placed in, or close to, the habitade, to have at night the benefit of the lamp burning in the shrine. In the two ' N.E.D.' quotations from Marryat, the first, 1836, gives the usual " binnacle," the other, 1839 ('Phantom Ship'), reverts to ' bittacle," for the good reason that here it refers to " the shrine of the saint at the bittacle," 'Philip Vanderdecken being then in a 300-ton Portuguese ship under the protection of St. Antonio. But in the ships of non-Catholic countries the saint had been turned out, and in Dutch ships the shrine had become the kompashuisje, the ompass-hut. In Southern ships the shrine became displaced by the It. bussola della calamita, Fr. boussole du compas, now la boussole ; the shrine was moved aside and became the bitade, the closet containing the ship's clock, the match-tub, Fr. marmotte, and other gear. A retired engineer of the French navy, for a long time in small ships of war, told me that he had often heard the officer of the watch, wanting a light for his pipe, call to the boy : Vas au bitade me diercher la marmotte ; and that the bitade was a closet on the after part of the deck, near the wheel. When I mentioned to my friend the change from " bittacle " to " binnacle," he at once connected the latter word with tabernade. Why, he could not explain, but the w^ord was connected in his reminiscences with bitade. This put me on a scent which I followed up, and I find that there is a relation between the words, due perhaps to naval humour. On the old galleys of France the habitade was in front of the steersman ; and not far from it, near the poop, was the tabernade, a broad plank five feet long raised rbove the deck, on which the captain stood when giving orders. Littre gives a quotation for it ; a captain is praised for standing calmly on the tabernacle through the whole of a violent gale. Why it was so named I cannot say ; probably from its being near the shrine. I may here remark that " plank " is post in Provencal, the language of the French galleys, and that the captain's post, dignified by the name of tabernacle, may have given