Language Hash

Gregor von Rezzori again--and what kind of name is von Rezzori, anyway? Remarkably, there is an answer to that: Evidently his father was a Sicilian aristo who washed up in the Austrian Empire, and the name was originally d'Arrezo [though, come to think of it, Arrezo is nowhere near Sicily, so maybe there is even more to be said].

Now this marvel of linguistic hash on the nanny at the family home in Bukovina:

We were never able to determine her nationality with any degree of certainty. Most probably she was a Huzule--that is, a daughter of the Ruthenian-speaking tribe of mountain Gorals, who, it is said, are the purest-bred descendants of the Davians who fled before the Roman invaders into the impenetrable fastness of the forests. Yet Cassandra just as wlel could have been a Romannian--that is, a product of all those innumerable populations who coursed through my country during the dark centuries of the decaying Roman dominion. She spoke both Romanian and Ruthenian, both equally badly--which is not at all unusual in the Bukovina--intermixing the two languages and larding both the with bits from a dozen other idioms. The result was that absurd lingua franca, understood only by myself and scantily by those who, like her, had to express themselves in a similarly motley verbal hodgepodge. ... [T]here can be no doubt that linguistically I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in Bukovina--so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian.

--Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear 43-4 (1989).

Von Rezzori's Wiki says that he himself was fluent in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, French and English, and that he lived some of his life as a "stateless person"--so the habit of deracination apparently stuck with him.

Cassandra? Cassandra? Indeed. von Rezzori says he has no idea where that came from.

Update: A Google search for "Huzule" turns up about as near to nothing as a Google search will ever yield: web pages in German and Dutch, mostly about a horse.