| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Mikhailova
PickupHockey All-Star
USA
2918 Posts |
 Posted - 07/09/2007 : 19:26:59
|
When I say "history" I mean the days before the NHL existed. More like "prehistoric" hockey. I'm talking about the earliest days of the game and its invention. Actually hockey wasn't really invented, it sort of evolved. I've heard many theories concerning its beginnings, and I thought I'd make a topic to discuss them all. The ancient Egyptians played a hockey-like game, and so you could say they were the first to play a sport resembling hockey. The Dutch played hockey on frozen lakes in the 18th or 19th century, though players did not have named and organized positions like forward or defense, they were sort of just everywhere, except for the goalie, and their game was lacking the detailed rules of today. I've heard that they invented the game on ice, but I've also heard a different story: The Irish played a game called hurley, which was played on a field, and when Irish settlers came to Canada the Canadians picked the game up and played it on ice. The name evolved from ice hurley to ice hockey. The Canadians of course invented the rules and positions and played it quite often and developed the game into what it is today, but the game has origins preceding that.
I've also heard several theories on where hockey got its name. The first is that it comes from the Breton word hoquet, meaning "to hit." Another is that it is a corruption of the word hurley, the Irish name for a similar sport. And the final one I've heard is that the Native Americans played a hockey-like game and when they were hit with sticks they would say "ho ghee", meaning "that hurts." The French settlers supposedly misunderstood them and started calling the sport hockey. Hockey is odd in the sense that it has no clear origin the way basketball or baseball or football does; they were made up by individuals not long ago and given simple names. Hockey is quite different (and thus more interesting  ). If you've heard anything else about the origins of hockey or its name, go ahead and post...
|
Edited by - Mikhailova on 07/09/2007 19:31:31
|
|
|
Guest4024
( )
|
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 21:12:18
|
| the first ice skates were made by mistake when some guy slipped on a bone and started sliding across the frozen ice |
 |
|
|
stastnysforever
PickupHockey Pro
Canada
301 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2007 : 21:37:02
|
Thats hi;arious
avs are gonna win the cup this year |
|
|
|
I´m also Cånädiön
Rookie
Sweden
217 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2007 : 02:38:45
|
What I´ve heard is that hockey evolved out of bandy. British soldiers that where stationed in Canada started playing bandy on the lakes of Halifax in an organized form in 1860. Students with the Mcgill university got interested and developed hockey from it.
History of Bandy: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/2049/English/Bandyhistory.html |
|
|
|
Mikhailova
PickupHockey All-Star
USA
2918 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2007 : 06:59:26
|
| I've heard stuff similar to that, that bandy, which is normally played on the floor, began being played on ice and it evolved into hockey. |
|
|
|
PuckNuts
PickupHockey Veteran
Canada
2414 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2007 : 08:34:54
|
CHAPTER 1 The Origins of "Hockey"
Behind the Dictionary Definition by Gerald Owen
Scanned from the Book TOTAL HOCKEY
EXAMINING THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD "HOCKEY" and the
origin of the sport itself can make for a fascinating experience.
In the Germanic languages, there is a very old root word: hok or hak. This root goes back even further, to the Indo-European keg. The meaning-a bent or curved piece of wood or metal- is still evident in the English word "hook." From the wider language family, Russian has the word kogot, meaning "iron claw" or "hook."
Though French mainly comes from Latin, France is named after a Germanic people, the Franks, and there are a.
great many words of Frankish origin in the modern language. Hoquet is an old French word that comes from the same root as hook: it means "curved stick" or, more specifically, "shepherd's crook."
It is possible hoquet could merely be a cousin, not a grandfather, of the word "hockey," which could just as well come from Old English, one of the Scandinavian languages or even Dutch - all Germanic languages that draw upon the same hok- or hak- root. However, an enormous number of French words passed into English and lowland Scots because of the Norman Conquest. This mayor may not explain the earliest recorded appearance of "hockey sticks" in English.
On November 5, 1785, William Cowper, one of the leading 18th-century English poets, said in a letter, "The boys at Olney [a market town in Buckinghamshire where he lived for 19 years] have likewise a very entertaining sport, which commences annually upon this day; they call it Hockey; and it consists in dashing each other with mud, and the windows also." This, too, is rather mysterious: Cowper does not actually mention sticks or balls, but surely mere mud throwing would have been too chaotic to form a regular game, with a season.
By the 1830s and 1840s, hockey or hawkey suddenly starts to appear quite often in the whole English-speaking world, with reasonably clear meanings. In my opinion, the quotations strongly suggest that the word meant primarily "curved or bent stick" and only secondarily "a game played with a curved or bent stick." In 1857, an English source (Chambers 'Information for the People, Vol. 11, page 703) says of sports and games in a clear, downright fashion, "Shinty in Scotland, Hockey in England, and Hurling in Ireland seem to be very much the same out-of-door sport." Previously, a traveler in India in 1842 had explained polo in this striking way: "At Shighur I first saw the game of the Chaughan ... It is in fact hockey on horseback ... The ball is called in Tibiti pulu." (Godfrey. Vigne, Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo, Vol. 11, page 289.) The writer speaks of the game "hockey" as if it was already well known - feeling free to use the term to liken something to it. For us in North America, and in Canada in particular, it is hard to think of hockey as meaning field hockey-or rather as a wide range of local games with various rules, played on a field and perhaps sometimes on ice. But in the 18th and early 19th centuries, there were not yet two distinct games, internationally known and standardized. Then, it was simply the curved or bent stick that conferred its name on a set of games.
As early as 1838, William Holloway, in A Dictionary of Provincialisms, gives Hawkey as a word from the western part of the English county of Sussex: "The name of a game played by several boys on each side with sticks, called hawkey-bats, and a ball." Thackeray, in his novel Pendennis (chapter 3), mentions a "hockey-stick' as something with which one schoolboy might hit another. The book came out in 1849, but the school passages were influenced by his, own memories from the 1820s. In 1839, an American writer, Jacob Abbott, has a chapter called "The Hawkies" in his book Caleb in Town: "Now, a hawkey is a small, round stick, about as long as a man's cane, with a crook in the lower end, so that a boy can hit balls and little stones with it, when lying upon the ground. A good hawkey is a great prize to a Boston boy." Two more New England quotations from the 1860s reflect earlier memories from youth, one, a Harvard reminiscence: "I remember him as yesterday, full of fun and courage, with his hockey in hand." The other, from Little Women, Book I, Chapter 8, at least has to do with ice-but here a boy is rescuing, by means of a stick, a girl who has ventured out onto the ice: "Laurie lying flat [on the ice] held Amy up by his arm and hockey." Similarly, Dr. A. J. Young of Dalhousie University, in A Sport History of Nova Scotia, Vol. 11, page 12, says, "The initial use of the word 'hockey' came in early Nova Scotian newspapers which would refer to the boys and men playing with their 'hockies.' "
J.W. "Bill" Fitsell, of the Society for International Hockey Research and the Kingston Whig-Standard, has uncovered an earlier Canadian reference than the dictionaries I have consulted. This reference is to an army officer playing "hockey on the ice" in Kingston, Ontario, in 1843, followed by similar English references from 1846 and 1853. When he says this was field hockey, I take it he means that the players did not wear skates or use a puck. His earlier references from 1829 to "idlers with skates on feet and hurly in hand" playing "break shins" in Nova Scotia seem to establish Nova Scotia priority for the roots of the game of hockey - but not yet under that name-especially when combined with a still earlier mention of Hurley on ice at Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1810. Thomas Chandler Halliburton (best known for his satirical novel The Clockmaker and its character Sam Slick), writing about his boyhood in Nova Scotia, mentions playing Hurley on the ice a few years after his birth in 1796. This was in an English magazine called Attache from 1844, a reference provided by C. Bruce Ferguson, a Nova Scotia archivist, to. Dr. Young, who. has similar quotations about hurley on ice from 1831 and 1833 and later ones referring back to. the 1820s, 1830s and 184Os. The Boston Evening Gazette reported of Nova Scotia in 1859 that "cricket" was played on ice: "Each cricketer is provided with a hurley (or hockey as it is termed here}."
Perhaps the most intriguing quotation I came across though hardly of significance to the word's history is from the next decade. Elisa Kent Kane was an American physician and explorer who took part in two expeditions to the Arctic to search for the ill-fated Sir John Franklin. He led the second one, passing through Smith's Sound between Baffin Island, and Greenland into what is now called the Kane Basin, and spent two winters in those parts, from 1853 to. 1855. In 1865, another writer (Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, As Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modem Savages, xiv, 1869, page 498) said: "Kane saw the children in Smith's sound playing hockey on the ice." It is not clear if this reference comes from Kane's own book, The Second Grinnell Expedition (1856). It is clear, however, that these are Inuit children playing a game like hockey. And according to Dr. Young, oral history reports that the Micmac played hockey in the early days of Nova Scotia.
It is obvious from references quoted by Dr. Young that by the 1860s the word "hockey" had attached itself to the game on ice, as in "a match game called hockey" (Halifax Reporter, February 10, 1867). Dictionary references for "ice hockey" are not usually this early, but do point to Canada.
So the history, or prehistory, of hockey in what is now Canada may be much older than we sometimes think. Let me restate all this in relation to what Dr. Garth Vaughan says about the origins of the word hockey in The Puck Starts Here, his book about the origins of hockey in Windsor, Nova Scotia. He is right that hockey is an old English word. His suggestion that the word is connected to things called hockcarts or to a harvest-home festival called hockey in August o.r September seems unlikely to me-though perhaps the poet Cowper's letter, dated on another festival, Guy Fawkes Day, is a clue in favor of some such link.
Dr. Vaughan quite reasonably says, "It is quite possible that the English family name 'Hockey' was influential in changing the name of the game" - from hurley to hockey, that is. There is evidence of Hockey’s in early Nova Scotia, and there is some tradition that the game was named after one of them, a Colonel Hockey. That tradition sounds like an exaggeration; the association of curved or bent sticks with the word hockey is too widespread in the English speaking world for one man's name to have been decisive, even in the province that played a decisive part in the early history .f the game. But yes, the surname could well have been an influence-a pun-like coincidence that may have delighted people if Colonel Hockey himself played, or watched, hurley / bandy / shinty / randy / ricket / wicket / break-shins / hockey.
The association of "hurling" and hockey sticks does go. back at least to Galway, in Connaught on the west coast of Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII-strangely solitary though that piece of evidence is.
As for hoquet, Dr. Vaughan is again right when he says in his book that early 19th-century Nova Scotians could hardly have named the game after an archaic French word, especially as the Acadians had' already been deported. But I don't think that any scholar has alleged a direct derivation from French in the 19th century. Some, like Dr. Vaughan, doubt that there is any such connection at all.
To me, it seems likely that hockey does belong to the same family as hook, hackle, hake, hoquet, and many there words in Germanic or partly Germanic languages. Still word historians have not fared very well with game names. Bandy, shinty, shinny, cricket, hockey - many such words may be untraceable, being as hard to make sense of as nicknames that originate in chance associations or private jokes. But it's striking that cricket is another game word apparently derived from the same root as crook-much the same idea as "hook". Linguists and lexicographers (dictionary makers, that is) approach words differently from those who care about the history of a particular subject, such as a sport. They are interested in how sounds and meanings change, and they collect specimens-quotations-from wherever they can. Sometimes they come upon evidence in places where others might not look, so. I hope that people interested in the history of hockey will enjoy this essay.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
- - Marshall McLuhan
|
Edited by - PuckNuts on 07/10/2007 09:29:02 |
|
|
|
Mikhailova
PickupHockey All-Star
USA
2918 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2007 : 11:23:30
|
quote:
From the wider language family, Russian has the word kogot, meaning "iron claw" or "hook."
That probably should be khogot, since words starting with kh are prounced like an H.
Interesting post PuckNuts...which reminded me; hoquet was the word for "curved stick", for some reason I forgot and was thinking it was "to hit." |
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
The History of Hockey 
