Who “invented” Krambambuli and its name? On the winding path of the word and a rarely noticed word formation proces

Abstract

The contribution is about the history of a designation for a liqueur that was first produced by a distillery founded by the Dutch in Danzig at the end of the sixteenth century. However, the liqueur’s name Krambambuli only first appeared in German in the mid-eighteenth century and somewhat later in a similar form in Polish, Russian and Dutch. Today, some consider the liqueur typically Belarusian. Evidence shows that the name made a career for itself in student fraternities at German universities during the nineteenth century and was simultaneously expanded to become a designation for various kinds of alcoholic beverages. The etymology of the word has only been partially solved satisfactorily: to kram-. It will be shown how the emergence of the word can be explained with a “poetic” rule for word formation that has been known for decades but rarely heeded. German-Polish language contact might have played a role from the very beginning, but this becomes opaque along the word’s later winding path: from German into Russian back into Polish and then, from the latter into Belarusian.