Bless him: Is that his subtle of saying to his bosses, he would like a holiday? A double-bill here, from today's and yesterday's News At One. Thanks once again to Terratec for kindly uploading the following
Meanwhile, I've been thinking about Tomasz's groovy surname. Now I'm aware it's Austrian, but I wonder what it means? I recall from my German A-level that Schafer (or rather "Schäfer") is the German for shepherd, from Schaf which is a sheep. However "naker" is proving more of a puzzle, I presume it's an Austrian dialect word?
The nearest formal German words are "Nacken" (nape of one's neck); or "nackt", which means "naked". I remember that the noun suffix "-er", has much the much the same function as English, a person/agent that performs the proceeding action: So in English we have cook(er), bowl(er), speak(er) and so on.
My educated guess would be that Schafernaker either literally translates as "sheep nakeder"-- thus a sheep-shearer. Or perhaps more grimly a "sheep necker", somebody slaughters sheep by breaking the necks of sheep. I think I prefer the former...
Unless it's some other shepherd's activity involving sheep {i}, perhaps one of my Teutonic-tongued readers has the answer? Or the good man himself of course [thumbs up]. Interesting to note how many Teutonic names survive, from when Gdansk was "Danzig".
Bis bald.
{i} I would hope not *that* sort of activity!!!
