![]() ![]() "Types of farm implements used in Tanzania". ^ Björn Mothander, Finn Kjærby & Kjell J.Christmas Trees for Pleasure and Profit (4th ed.). Lightly on the Land: the SCA Trail-building and Maintenance Manual (2nd ed.). While the noun mattock is attested from Old English onwards, the transitive verb "to mattock" or "to mattock up" first appeared in the mid-17th century. Although used to prepare whale blubber, which the Inuit call " mattaq", no such connection is known. Forms such as mathooke, motthook and mathook were produced by folk etymology. ![]() The New English Dictionary of 1906 interpreted mattock as a diminutive, but there is no root to derive it from, and no semantic reason for the diminutive formation. It may be cognate to or derived from the unattested Vulgar Latin matteūca, meaning club or cudgel. However, there are proposed cognates in Old High German and Middle High German, and more speculatively with words in Balto-Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic motyga and Lithuanian matikas, and even Sanskrit. Welsh: matog, Irish: matóg, Scottish Gaelic: màdog). There are no clear cognates in other Germanic languages, and similar words in various Celtic languages are borrowings from the English (e.g. The word mattock is of unclear origin one theory traces it from Proto-Germanic, from Proto-Indo-European. ![]() Look up mattock in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Mattocks made of whalebone were used for tasks including flensing – stripping blubber from the carcass of a whale – by the broch people of Scotland and by the Inuit. They were probably used chiefly for digging, and may have been related to the rise of agriculture. Mattocks made from antlers first appear in the British Isles in the Late Mesolithic. Mattocks ( Greek: μάκελλα) are the most commonly depicted tool in Byzantine manuscripts of Hesiod's Works and Days. ![]() According to Sumerian mythology, the mattock was invented by the god Enlil. Their shape was already established by the Bronze Age in Asia Minor and ancient Greece. History Īs a simple but effective tool, mattocks have a long history. Ĭutter mattocks ( Swahili: jembe-shoka) are used in rural Africa for removing stumps from fields, including unwanted banana suckers. The adze of a mattock is useful for digging or hoeing, especially in hard soil. The use of a mattock can be tiring because of the effort needed to drive the blade into the ground, and the amount of bending and stooping involved. They can also be used to dig holes for planting into, and are particularly useful where there is a thick layer of matted sod. They can be used to chop into the ground with the adze and pull the soil towards the user, opening a slit to plant into. Mattocks are "the most versatile of hand-planting tools".
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