Names With Zing

[Landau, James]

 Jonathan Lighter wrote:

"Anyway, at the seance, [Attila the Hun] jumped around on the table,
yelled, screamed in Hunnish, and got rude toward the ladies."

Pity the article didn't go into more detail, specifically about the
Hunnish language.  Historians and philologists are still debating just
what language the Huns spoke (an important historical question, since
the answer would go a long way towards explaining who the Huns were,
where they came from, and what happened to them after Attila's death.
There is, for example, a tenuous chain of evidence that the Ashkenazic
Jews of the Pale of Settlement were descended from the Huns).

"Attila", I am told, is German for "little father" and may be a title
rather than his name.

Pity the writer of the Matilda the Nun story didn't know that Attila had
a court jester who did dialect jokes.

    - Jim Landau  (the other JL)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org