the word "contra"

[Denys Proteau]

I'm sure this must have been discussed earlier, but I don't remember the
outcome:

Does the word "contra" in "contra dance" come from the English "country"
as in "country dance", the French "contre" as in "contre danse", or
both, or neither, or is there no definitive evidence either way?
Denys

[Jim Saxe]

In article <EhCk8vW00...@andrew.cmu.edu> Denys Proteau

I think the best guess is that "contradance" comes from the French
"_contredanse_," which in turn coumes from the English "country
dance."

In the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) under "contra-dance,"
we find: "a corruption of COUNTRY-DANCE: see CONTRE-DANCE." Under
"contre-dance," it says, among other things,
,
Littre's theory, that there was already in 17th c. a French _contre-
danse_ with which the English word was confused and ran together,
is not tenable; no trace of the word has been found in French
before its appearance as an adaptation of the English.

It also gives an example of an English source from 1758 making the
erroneous (according the OED) claim that "country-dance" was a
corruption of "_contre-danse_."

The earliest citation the OED gives for "country-dance" is from 1579.
In the front matter to Margaret Dean-Smith's annotated facsimile
of the first edition of Playford (Margaret Dean-Smith, _Playford's
English Dancing Master 1651_, Schott & Co., Ltd, London, 1957), there
is a quotation from a play published in (I think) 1560, in which
some characters are trying to choose a country dance, and mention
several titles that occur in early editions of Playford. Since
there are no descriptions of the actual dances, we cannot tell whether
they were the same in 1560 as in Playford's time.

The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ micropaedia article on "country dance"
includes the assertions

In England after 1550 the term country dancig referred to a dance
of the upper classes; similar dances, usually called traditional,
existed contemporaneously among country people and persisted
in popular tradition.

and

Courtly dances were also exported from England. Longways and
geometriical sets apppeared in Italy by the 15th century. The
18th century French contredanse was at first based on English
country dances and later evolved ... Although country dance
originated as a folk dance, the historical sources for its
figures and music are urban and courtly: Italian (15th-16th
century), English (16th-19th century), and French (18th century).

These 15th-century Italian dances would precede the first known
citation in English to "country dance." Unfortunately, the
_Britannica_ article doesn't supply a specific reference for the
above paragraph or tell us by what name said 15th-century Italian
dances were known.

A couple other random pieces of the puzzle:

1. In _The Country Dance Book_ (1937) by Beth Tolman and Ralph
Page, contra dances are referred to as "contry" dances. This
might reflect a closer relation to the word "country" or perhaps
some mingling of the French and English words, or perhaps is just
the printed embodiment of a local variation in the pronunciation
of "contre" or "contra". I don't know how common the spelling
"contry" was in New England fifty or more years ago. For
example that spelling is not used in the title of Elizabeth
Burchenal's book _American Country Dances, Volume 1: Twenty-eight
Contra-dances Largely from the New England States_ (G. Schirmer,
Inc., New York, 1918). Page's later books use the spelling
"contra."

2. The term "contra" (or its cognates) was not historically used
exclusively to refer to dances in the longways formation.
For example, Burchenal's _Folk Dances of Denmark_ (G. Schirmer,
New York, 1915) contains some dances in quadrille formation that
are referred to as contra dances (or some similar spelling--I
don't have the book with me now to check). This observation
may be taken to put the lie to the claimed etymology of contra/
contre as comming from the French for "opposite" and referring
to partners standing opposite each other in lines. On the
other hand, many of the old quadrille dance figures involved
opposite couples (just the heads or just the sides) dancing
together, so this argument against the French origin is not so
compelling as it may at first seem. However, the OED's point
about lack of any evidence for early French usage does seem
fairly compelling to me.

--Jim Saxe

[kurt d reisser]

I believe that Oliver North coined the term during the Regan years.
--
__________________________________________________________________
Regards - Kurt Reisser