this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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In Italian and French they are caled "Vasistas", from the German "Was ist das?" (What's that?), it's said they called it that way because the first German tourists who saw those windows in France were confused and kept asking for clarifications on how they worked.
In France, a vasistas is a velux roof window. The windows in the picture have been our regular every day windows for a few decades.
Oh really? My bad then. We call those windows from the pic "vasistas" in Italian, and I was always told we copied that word from the French. I just checked whether such a word existed in French, saw that it did, and didn't ask any further questions.
I had to check and apparently a vasistas is originally a transom windows and I’ve one on my house front door. It’s the window panel there is on some doors with worked iron on the other side that you can open but won’t allow people from outside to go in. Historically, people didn’t open the full door when people came to their house, just the window part and German would say was ist das?. And when modern velux windows become popular, they were also nicknamed vasistas by older people for some reason? None of this makes sense.
AFAIK we also call them velux windows in the UK.
I want this want this to be real and will not investigate further.
It sounds so real!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas
its real, though not necessarily the type of window that you described. also exists in Turkish. i have a Turkish colleague who was very proud to explain the origin of that word to us in Germany :D .
Interesting. Like I said in another comment in Italian it means exactly what I said. From the first line on the topic on Italian wikipedia:
But apparently, after reading the French wikipedia page they use that word for something else. So it appears that we did steal the word from them, but used it to describe something different.