Hannah wrote to us asking for help with a German rhyme. Here’s her email:
I am looking for the nursery rhyme my grandfather used to sing to me. It’s a knee/lap rhyme that you are bounced along to and I believe it to be German – passed to him by his grandfather. We do have relatives from current day Austria/Switzerland so potentially this may be something from there?
It’s supposedly about a white horse, galloping through the woods. I don’t think it’s the Hopp, Hopp, Hopp/Hoppe, Hoppe, Reiter song as it doesn’t quite have the same beat either. The way we said it is most likely nonsensical sounding as it was passed down through the family quite a bit, but the phonetic sounding version I still recall would have been something along the lines of:
Otza Botza Mopa Decke
Squanda Labya
Quandi Pecke
Ota, ota, ota
If anyone could help me in finding this it would mean the world- everyone on that side of my family has passed and I don’t want to let this little game/tradition die as well.
Thank you so much,
Hannah
If anyone can help, please comment below. Thanks! -Mama Lisa
This article was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2022 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Children's Songs, Countries & Cultures, German, German Children's Songs, Germany, Languages, Questions, Readers Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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