It will have happened to any of you at least once in your life to open a “vasistas”: it is that type of window or frame which, instead of opening wide to the side, tilts obliquely towards the inside of the room. In fact, the door rotates on hinges located on the lower side, opening at the top, to let just a little air pass through. It is used in stairwells, in attics, but also in other rooms of the home and office. The hinged door is not to be confused with the flap door: the first allows inclination only towards the inside, while the second allows, in addition to the hinged style opening, also the complete “hinged” opening and has a handle. The name sounds Latin or purely technical, but it is not: it originates from a question. Vasistas was born, literally, from German «Was ist das?»which simply means “What is this?”, a question that comes from Germany and the custom of looking out the door or window to ask “Who is it?”.
The origin from a question in German passed from French
Vasistas is a masculine noun that actually comes to us from French, which in turn traced it from the German phrase «Was ist das?»translatable as “what is it?”, literally “what is this?”, and described as “the question of those who look out”. In practice, an entire sentence has been packaged into a single block. We cannot know exactly how it happened: two hypotheses are circulating, both plausible:
- the first, more spectacular, imagines the amazement at a technological novelty that spread across Europe at the end of the eighteenth century: people seeing this strange tilting door for the first time and pointing to it exclaiming “But what is that?”;
- the second, considered more sober and more accredited, focuses instead on the concrete use of the object: that small opening was the point from which one looked out to ask “who is it?” before opening the door to a stranger.
In both cases, the word retains a gesture: someone who looks and asks.
In German the word «vasistas» does not exist
The word comes from an existing German phrase, and yet in Germany that type of window is not called that. For the Germans the tilting door is a Kippfenster (from kippen“tilt, tilt”), while the fixed glass type above the door is a Kämpferfenster.
Our Vasistas, for a German speaker, only has one question left: “what is it?”. Linguists therefore call it a “false Germanism”, a word borrowed from a language that does not, in that sense, use that word.
The French lexicographer Alain Rey The first known attestation in French dates back to 1776with a still immature handwriting (wass-ist-dass) used by the doctor Jean François Clément Morand in a technical treatise dedicated to fuels. Just over twenty years later, in 1798the word appears in the fifth edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie française and it becomes “official”. Finally, from French, the term slips into Italian like other nineteenth-century foreignisms, and continues to this day.
And in Italy? The Vasistas, the Vasistas and its cousins
In Italian there are still some uncertainties relating to the word. The first concerns the type: according to Treccani vasistas is masculine, but many speakers use it in the feminine, almost certainly because they imply “(the window) a vasistas”.
The second uncertainty is terminological: various names coexist alongside vasistas, often used as synonyms but not always rightly. Carpenters talk about folding door (or oscillator), today the most widespread term in the trade: thanks to the handle, this can be opened either as a hinged door, using the side hinges, or as a bottom-hinged one, i.e. with an upward opening; then there are more generic and technically different terms such as balanced (with zips at half height) o tilting (the typical mechanism of garage doors), which describe other systems and should not be confused. Finally, when the door is set above a door, it is called transom fanlight.
