The sound of the guns

Whether the then mayor Rudolf Brun really fled from a treacherous attack on the roof of Zurich’s town hall on the night of February 23 to 24, 1350, can no longer be verified historically. In any case, we find this account of the events of the “Murder Night in Zurich” in the chronicle of Benedikt Tschachtlan from Bern. In photos and text, the chronicler described the night-time penetration of conspirators into the city on the Limmat to assassinate the mayor and his followers, and the suppression of the uprising.

Interesting is the picture in the so-called «Tschachtlanchronik», made in 1470. You can see the mayor on the roof of the town hall, with outstretched arms, loudly warning the city about the “conspirators” who have invaded and who are already beginning to shout on the street kill. The marginal note immediately above the illustration, though incomplete, reads:

So Mayor Brun alerted the city’s populace by shouting from the roof of City Hall, that is, causing a “murder scream” or “murder scream” to draw attention to the attack and seek help. It has similar warning calls Swiss idiot iconthe dictionary of the Swiss-German language, also in case of fire, namely the call for help or the alarm «Fürio!».

The fact that the term “noise”, as mayor Brun allegedly caused on the night of the assassination in Zurich, is also associated with war and strife in its origins is something many people may not be aware of.

If one follows the Etymological Dictionary of German, “Lärm” goes back to an exclamation already used in this article, namely “Alarm”. This warning and wake-up call was borrowed in the 15th century from Italian military slang with “all’arme” (“to arms!”) or “all’armi” (“to arms!”). The French “alarme” also comes from this call to arms.

But how did the Italian warning signal “all’arme” turn into the German “noise”? In Early New High German, a period in German language history dating back to between 1350 and 1650, we find the Germanized term «Al(l)erma» or «Al(l)erm». Dropping the original sound seen in written and printed sources from the 16th century gave rise to “Lermen”, “Lerman”, and later “Lärm”. In addition to meaning a warning signal, “Lerman” could also be understood as a riot or riot.

From a linguistic-historical point of view, present-day German-speaking Switzerland played a kind of special role in this era, as a written official language based on Alemannic Late Middle High German emerged here until the 16th century. However, a similar etymological development can also be seen here. The Swiss idiot icon shows that in the 16th century the term “Lermen”, “Lerman” or “Lärma” was introduced in connection with the warning or call to war. For example, in a song text from the first half of the 16th century before the Battle of Novara in 1513, we find the following stanza:

Jacob Ruoff, a Zurich surgeon, not only treated ailments and wrote medical treatises, but also wrote poetry and plays. In one of his plays from 1539/40, Ruoff has warships shouting:

The theologian and pedagogue Johannes Fries (1505-1565), in his German-Latin dictionary of 1541, gives another example of “noise” or “noise” in connection with a call to arms. There he translated the Latin phrase “Bellicum canere” (after the blow attack) with «blow the lermen».

Heinrich Bullinger, Huldrych Zwingli’s successor in Reformed Zurich, described several times in his History of the Reformation of 1564 how the so-called Kappeler Wars raised the alarm among the Catholic and Reformed troops:

Instruments used to sound the alarm were also associated with the “war sound”. In the sources we find the «Lärmenhorn», the «Lärmenttrumpet» or the «Lärmenttrommen» (alarm drum) with which the «Lärmenstreich» was struck.

The places where the alarmed population had to gather were also called ‘noise places’. These were to be determined by the officials and visited at a fixed signal, as a source from 1599 tells us:

So the next time you find yourself annoyed or stressed by “noise,” remember that it had a very different emphasis in the 15th and 16th centuries.