Lost for words – trying to record the words for rare crafts in the
Wikiverse by Anne-Karoline Distel
Through my research on the fragments at Inistioge Priory (see WM category), I had become interested in chisel marks and the tools that made them. In England, studies have led to the ability to date buildings or building parts by their chisel marks.
When uploading photographs of architectural fragments (Q111280335) to Wikimedia, I wanted to be able to add those properties in the Structured data. The Wikidata items did not exist in English, so I created them for “vertical tooling” (Q135012825), “diagonal tooling” (Q135012699) and “claw chisel mark” (Q135267950). They might have already existed in other languages, but since I don’t know what any of them are called in other languages, I could not check. If anyone knows, please feel free to merge the items. They would likely have translations into all European languages where medieval masons worked. Please also add your country (P17), if those marks can be found there.
Luckily, I live in an area with plenty of medieval buildings and had taken many photos at Glasgow Cathedral, so I could provide photographs for the Wikidata items.
Vertical tool marks at Glasgow Cathedral A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Diagonal tool marks at Glasgow Cathedral: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_shaped_mason%27s_mark_3.jpg
- Claw tool marks at St John’s Priory (Kilkenny): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claw_tool_marks_Johns_Priory.jpg
The next step then was to find the stone mason tools. I can imagine that Wikidata entries for them in German exist, but again, even though I am a native speaker of German, I would not know their names in German, because this is very niche vocabulary. And your run-of-the-mill dictionary probably doesn’t know either. It does not help that some names in English are homonyms of other tools or things, whereas the name in German might be much longer, but more descriptive.
My plan for National Heritage Week 2025 was to go to events where they showed and demonstrated those tools to find out their names. I went to one event about traditional crafts at the Heritage Council in Kilkenny, where they had a thatcher, a stone mason, a blacksmith and a rope maker, amongst other people. I had covered thatching tools previously, when I worked with a thatcher for three days in 2022, so I skipped that stand. The lady stone mason was very helpful in giving me three names of tools (claw tool (Q143531), pitcher (Q135988918), punch (Q135855965) – see what I mean about homonyms). I think a punch is called a Pille in German, which contradicts my rant about the English language being full of homonyms, because that has a different meaning in German as well, but maybe the tool has a different grammatical gender than the medical pill in German, who knows. I cannot find it under the meaning of tool in Grimm’s Woerterbuch online, but the verb “pillen” means “to sharpen, to put a sharp tip on something” (like one does with a pencil), and that’s the shape of the stone mason’s punch. Anyways, I digress.
Claw Chisels, A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Images of punches (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punches.jpg), pitchers (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pitchers.jpg) and claw tool/ claw chisel (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claw_chisels.jpg)
I only had time to talk to one other crafts person, who happened to be the rope maker. She turned out to be German as well, so she was able to give me the name for her tool in English AND in German. The tool is called a jack in English (a jack-of-all-trades, badumm-dzz), but in German it’s called a Kammgeschirr. Now, to be honest, that still doesn’t tell you what it does, but I bet you can’t use a Kammgeschirr on your car. Again, that word with the meaning of that tool is not in Grimm’s Wörterbuch, which was written at a time when there were still a lot more rope makers than nowadays. According to the Grimms, it means the “entirety of all components of a weaving loom”.
Image of the jack or “Kammgeschirr” A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I really wanted to get a video of the tool in action, but she wanted someone else to work the jack, and I would have needed my hands free for filming, so sadly, that did not happen. If anyone in Ireland comes across her or any other crafts like this, please film it! We need records of these crafts!
I went to another event hosted by the Office of Public Works, which demonstrated stone cutting and carpentry, but I got distracted trying my hand at stone cutting (and nobody recorded it). They had the same tools as well, so there was not much point in photographing them again.
The whole point of this tedious (but educational) exercise is to create visibility for these crafts, tools and words online, because searching for these words or items online will often get no or the wrong results. It is a very niche topic, but it is a way to bring these words back into the vocabulary, if someone is nerdy enough to look for them.
