For almost a decade I’ve had a copy of Jacek Hugo-Bader’s White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia hiding in the depths of the to-be-read pile to the left of my desk; it recently rose to the top, and I thought “I should read that,” so that’s what I’m doing, with great pleasure. Hugo-Bader hangs out with old hippies and the like, and has a whole section called “a small and impractical Russian-English dictionary of hippy slang,” most of which is probably long out of use (he visited Russia in late 2007). At one point he mentions “blatna music, in other words criminal, bandit, jail or prison camp music” (the book is translated from Polish, hence Polish forms like blatna rather than the Russian blatnaya), and goes on to write:
The word blatny probably comes from Yiddish, into which it passed either from the German word ‘Blut’, meaning blood, or ‘Blatt’ meaning a page, a sheet of paper, because whenever the bandits in Odessa came to rob the stores of an old Jew or a German, they stuck a revolver barrel in his face and said it was their ‘Blatt’, in other words their receipt or goods delivery document. Thus bandits came to be called blatniye in Russian.
I figured that was probably all nonsense, but it seems the Blatt idea is taken seriously, though via Yiddish rather than German; Wiktionary has “From Polish blat or Yiddish בלאַט (blat).” But the Russian version has different suggestions — they reference Yiddish blat ‘trusted,’ originally ‘illegal,’ “possibly stemming from an Old Hebrew etymon — pāliṭ “fugitive,” pālaṭ “he fled”), cf. German slang Platt ‘new member of a gang of thieves,’ platt ‘one of us, trustworthy.’” I have no idea how seriously to take any of that.
pālaṭ does not and never did mean “he fled”, and Hebrew p does not become Yiddish b.
Actually, блат has two distinct meanings. One is “connections”. Someone who has blat can do things outside of the ordinary procedure (or even do something that otherwise is prohibited). The other meaning comes from the adjectival form блатной, which means “criminal”. It was also reanalyzed as noun and as a noun блатной means “a criminal”. Whether two words are etymologically connected, I cannot say. It seems probable if блат originally meant “criminal connections” and then extended to all sorts of useful connections. Or maybe originally блат meant “stolen goods” then anything obtained by shady methods and finally included all sorts of connections that allowed someone to get hard to get stuff.
Anyway, блатная музыка is not music, it’s (one of the names of) criminal argot. There is no “criminal music” as such, but prison camp songs (and songs written in that vein) are called блатные песни.
P.S. While typing this comment, it occurred to me that former FIFA boss Sepp Blatter had a “speaking name” (idiomatic English expression for this is not easy to pin down. charactonym seems to be the closest one. Or maybe type name).
German slang where, and how did it get into Yiddish from there? All I know is that I didn’t know either meaning, but the second seems close enough to northwestern platt “simple”, whence (placename +) Platt for whatever the local dialect is (Low or Central German – the one of Aachen is Öcher Platt, I learned on Wikipedia) and of course Plattdeutsch generally. I guess the less strictly northwestern platt “completely flat” could have been confused with Blatt “leaf, sheet”, especially in the area of Inderior German Gonsonant Weagening, and passed on to Yiddish from there, but speculation is easy…
Oh, perfect.
D. O. — indeed I can’t think of an English equivalent for говорящее имя. I would probably just say: his name is very fitting.
New Scientist has long run examples of what they call “nominative determinism,” e.g., Dr Starr the astrophysicist.
those yiddish sources seem pretty implausible to me, cute just-so story notwithstanding. but here’s a quick lexicographical look:
harkavy (1910; nyc) only knows “blat” to mean leaf, blade (of grass), layer/stratum (of clay, stone, etc), paper/newspaper/journal, sheet (with “a blat lokshen” defined as “a sheet of dough for maccaroni”). he’s got nothing more informal than “ungezetslikh” for “illegal”, and nothing relevent under “crime” and its derivatives.
refoyl (representing the descriptivist tradition), aside from the main leaf/page/newspaper entry (with many subheads), has “blat” as an adjective meaning “illegal, underworld”, “blatnik” [perfectly predictably “organized criminal”] (citing sholem-aleykhem as his source – so before 1916, but likely significantly earlier), and “shlogn blat mit” [“join up with”]*.
and the online Comprehensive (representing the neologizing branch of the standardizing tradition) has “ill-gotten” and “illegal” as core meanings alongside leaf/page, but also gets wider-ranging. it has “shlisn blat mit” [lock-“blat”-with]** as well as “shlogn…” for “make common cause with”, and for “to conspire” (without the “shlogn” version). and it claims “dos blat–loshn” [“blat”-glove-language] for “thieves’ cant”***.
i don’t see anything in there that couldn’t as easily be a russian-to-yiddish loan as the other way around, or anything to suggest a path from “leaf/page” to “illegal”.
but the “shlogn/shlisn blat mit” idiom seems to me to place “blat” as meaning something like “efforts” / “forces” or “arrangement” / “deal”. does that suggest any possibilities to our russophones and german-speakers?
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* [hit-“blat”-with], but “shlogn” shows up in some far-ranging idioms – e.g. “shlogn kapores”, as noun or verb, for ritually transferring ones sins to a scape-fowl, which is not done by hitting the bird (or letting it escape).
** “shlisn” turns up in similar constructions about making friends and making deals.
*** i’ve never encountered anything but “ganovem-loshn”, myself. harkavy has “ganovem-shprakh”, among other things, for “cant”; the Comprehensive has “hentshke-loshn” and “ganovem-shprakh” under “thieves’ argot”. i dunno where the gloves come into it all, though i could make up stories.
I thought “speaking name” *was* already the English term, but maybe I just got that impression from seeing it in comments here (e.g., recently). Or Cratylic Names, if you like.
Russian блат ‘connections’ (with derivatives) comes from the Eastern Yidish adverb בלאַט (blat) ‘illegal, underworldly’ — as in אויף בלאַט (af blat) ‘illegally, under the counter, without a permit’ and שלאָגן בלאַט מיט (עמעצן) (shlogn blat mit [emetsn] ‘make common cause with [someone] [originally and maybe still, with an implication of secrecy]’— comes from the Hebrew adverb בלאט (balat) ‘clandestinely’, which consists of the Hebrew preposition ב (b) and the Hebrew verb לאט (laat) ‘cover, conceal, hide’ (the earliest evidence for which is in 2 Samuel 19:5).
That entire etymology, long known in Yidish linguistics and not original with me, is straightforward semantically, phonologically, and situationally (by “situationally” I mean: Hebrew influence on Yidish and Yidish influence on Russian underworld slang are too well-known to raise any doubts here).
Words (in whatever language) meaning ‘leaf ‘ or ‘page’ are irrelevant.
German is entirely irrelevant.
Regarding “i’ve never encountered anything but “ganovem-loshn…” the traditional Eastern Yidish for ‘cryptolect’ is hentshke-loshn, literally ‘glove language’, the implication being that just as a glove hides a hand so does cryptolect hide from outsiders the meaning of an utterance.
@ktschwarz: I though I’d seen “speaking name” too. Here is George Saintsbury using it (with quotation marks).
“Aptronym” is another one, more about real people, I think.
P. S. “Anyway, блатная музыка is not music, it’s (one of the names of) criminal argot.”
Quite true. the purpose of mentioning music is to make that entire two-word noun phrase fully unintelligible to outsiders .
Nitpicking: בַּלָּאט appears in Judges 4:21, and בַּלָּט in 1Sam18:22, earlier than the quoted form of the verb לוט.
Anyway, how would you explain the loss of the first vowel in bālaṭ? Are there other examples of such a development? Wouldn’t it in Yiddish get penultimate stress and become balət?
(bālaṭ s/b ballāʾṭ/ballāṭ.)
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thanks, David!
Platt is simply the language spoken in “das platte/flache Land”, i.e. the Norddeutsche Tiefebene, the absolutely flat area north of the Mittelgebirge. Linguistically, these are mostly Low German dialects, the exception being the Köln-Aachener Bucht, thus Öcher Platt (or, close by, Eischwieler Platt).
@D.O.
In this case it could come from shortening/corruption of bławat in its second meaning. Concealing the meaning of “stolen goods” via word for silk fabric seems to be quite feasible strategy for a criminal argot.
Wiktionary sv “aptonym” lists synonyms
aptronym, euonym, attributive name, characterizing name, character-revealing name, charactonym, characternym, label name, ticket name, type name
For “blat” in the sense of “Soviet system of connections and social relationships; one’s social or business network (in Russian or Soviet society),” wiktionary sez “Russian блат (blat), from Polish blat (“cover, umbrella”) or Yiddish בלאַט (blat, “leaf, list”). Doublet of blade.” The metaphorical umbrella of shady underworld connections is an interesting potential semantic pathway …
i don’t see anything in there that couldn’t as easily be a russian-to-yiddish loan as the other way around
What an interesting group of words! Rozele’s comment suggests the approach taken by Gerd Hentschel (1999), “Zur Komplexität deutsch-„jiddisch“-slavischer Lehnkontakte: Über ein deutsches oder auch nicht-deutsches Lehnwort im Polnischen und Russischen: blat ”, available on academia.edu here. Hentschel has a thorough discussion of the group of Polish blat, Russian блат, Rotwelsch platt ‘trusted, safe, reliable; belonging to or associated with the underworld, crooked’, etc., with further bibliography even if one does not accept all his conclusions. See p. 109 for the Hebrew etymon בלאט ⟨blʾṭ⟩, בלט ⟨blṭ⟩, ‘secretly, in secret,’ and especially the chart on p. 111 for a summary. I would like to know where this etymology originates, though.
Strangely, Anikin does not take notice of the possible Hebrew etymon בלאט ⟨blʾt⟩, or Hentschel’s study, in fascicle no. 3 (2009) of his Russian etymological dictionary (p. 241), although he lists other etymological possibilites fairly exhaustively. I wonder, have there been any further studies treating this word since Hentschel’s, with more Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew data, as from Dovid Katz (I hope I hope)?
Anyway, how would you explain the loss of the first vowel in ballāṭ?
If it is a relatively recent borrowing from Ashkenazic Hebrew into for purpose of disguised speech, perhaps the stress takes care of itself? And for the b(e)- and the stress, assimilated to forms with b(e)- as in בנאמנות benemones ‘honestly’ (its opposite in some circumstances?) and orאף בנאמנות af benemones ‘just between us’ (semantically proximate), for example?
I was familiar with aptronym, but none of the other neologisms mollympoly listed. (“Characterizing name” and “character-revealing name” just look like compositional noun phrases.) However, I was reminded of a related Internet meme. When someone posts something (say, in blog comment thread) that seems particularly apt given the handle they are using, it is common for someone else to reply with: “Nym checks out.”
Xerîb: Thanks, I figured you’d have some good ideas and links! And David L. Gold too, of course.
@J.W. Brewer
Which version of Wiktionary? I have never heard anyone using blat with meaning of cover or umbrella, only “tabletop” or from time to time for a layer of cake, similarly to this definition.
(Not layer in geology, though; that’s warstwa.)
No. (The verbs, on the other hand, are fairly unremarkable.) Hebrew looks good to me…
Thanks, Xerîb. Hentschel suggests a direct borrowing from Hebrew into Rotwelsch, without Yiddish as an intermediary. He quotes Wexler (“Hebräische und aramäische Elemente in den slavischen Sprachen: Wege, Chronologien und Diffusionsgebiete”, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 43(2), 229, 1983), pp. 241–245, in support of that path. That in itself is weak. Wexler lists seven Hebrew words ultimately serving as sources for Slavic ones (originally meaning Sabbath, Haman, perfume, tax), two Aramaic ones (synagogue, bowl), and one which could be either (father). Those indicate slight contact, with borrowings of nouns and one name of cultural significance; that does not seem a promising path for borrowing an uncommon adverb.
As to the stress, I don’t see how one could get around it. Either ballāṭ acts normal*, in which case its stress becomes penult and the final vowel is reduced, as in חַזָּן ḥazzān, Y. kházen~khazn; or, if for some reason which I cannot imagine the stress stays final, the final vowel will end up as unreduced o or oi or such in Yiddish. Either way, I see no phonological path to blat.
As to פָּלִיט pālîṭ ‘refugee’, from √plt ‘eject; escape’, Hentschel gives its Yiddish form correctly, I think, as polit or polet, but that can’t be reconciled with blat.
Wexler (ibid. p. 266) makes the same error (§16a), but then (§16b) shows a correct descendant of √plt: plēṭâ (erroneously given as plîṭâ) ‘the escaped (collective); remainder’, via Yiddish pleyte ‘escape’ and Rotwelsch to German Pleite ‘bankruptcy’.
All of which doesn’t get close to explaining blat.
* The so called quiescent aleph of בַּלָאט would be quiescent in Ashkenazi pronunciation as well: cf. מְלָאכָה melókhe ‘craft’, בְּרֵאשִׁית beréishis ‘Genesis’, רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה rosh-hasháne ‘New Year’s Day’, all pronounced as if the aleph wasn’t there. Likewise the two variants בַּלָּאט and בַּלָּט would be pronounced the same.
Also pleite “bankrupt, broke” (predicative only, therefore never declined).
…and, with the French suffix pronounced à la française, Pleitier “Bankier or entrepreneur who has famously gone bankrupt”.
Ok, I may have found something useful. Polish Wiktionary gives three further dated definitions of blat: ‘ruble’, ‘deal with police’ and ‘bribe’. And then in Witold Doroszewski’s dictionary there is a following meaning for blat, number 6: ‘a paper assignat of greater value, ruble, Austro-Hungarian gulden etc’.
if for some reason which I cannot imagine the stress stays final, the final vowel will end up as unreduced o or oi or such in Yiddish.
On the vocalism and stress of the Yiddish forms בלאַט blat and אויף בלאַט af blat (< Hebrew בלאט) that David L. Gold brought to our attention above… Isn’t the standard view nowadays that the outcome of qameṣ gadol in a closed syllable is Yiddish /a/? See for example S. A. Birnbaum (1979) Yiddish: A Survery and Grammar, p. 63; Dovid Katz (1993) ‘The Phonology of Ashkenazi’, , p. 53ff., in L. Glinert, ed. Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, and especially Alexander Beider (2015) The Origins of Yiddish, p. 282f., along with the discussion in M. Weinreich (1980) History of the Yiddish Language, vol. 2, p. 389–391, §7.16.4 and p. 356–358, §7.4.1, with many examples of this development.
The following is Beider’s discussion of Weinreich’s view that the regular Yiddish reflex of qameṣ in a closed syllable was /o/ (edited to remove references and cross-references confusing out of context; apologies for text capture errors; note the Western forms that Beider gives, especially for our purposes in relation to Rotwelsch; WphY = Westphalian Yiddish; EGY = Yiddish in eastern Germany; CzY = Czech Yiddish):
On the stress pattern of blat, I noted Dovid Katz’s treatment of stress in Ashkenazic Hebrew under the headings ‘Definite Articles’ and ‘Prepositions’ on his website here. Are there any two-syllable words in the Hebrew component of Yiddish (among the adverbs, similar to blat, for instance) in which the Hebrew combination preposition + article + noun ended up being stressed in Yiddish on part reflecting the Hebrew preposition + article (ba-, ka-, la-)? Unfortunately I don’t have time to look into this question at the moment.
i don’t know enough to have any opinion on whether “blat” can be derived from a hebrew source. and the timing seems to me the big question in the relationships among the yiddish, polish, and russian versions of the paper/banknote/bribe/illegality semantic tangle.
but i do need to point out that paul wexler is, to put it very mildly, an unreliable source for damn near anything. leaving aside the rather well-known diciness of his linguistic arguments (“relexified sorbian”??) and the historical arguments that prop them up*, there’s his well-documented venture into straight-up professional fraud (genus: sock-puppetry; species: rather badly executed). dovid katz’s A Late Twentieth Century Case of Katoves has all the details, presented far more equably than most people targeted with such kak-handed malice would be able to manage, treating the situation as “a humorous footnote in the history of Yiddish studies”.
wexler’s writing on yiddish can be fun – in much the same way that work by the better writers among the neo-rosicrucians and neo-maoists can be – but he’s deeply untrustworthy.
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* and i’m saying this as someone mildly obessed with the lack of any solid explanation for the size of the 19thC yiddish-speaking jewish population, and more open than most to hypotheses involving pre-existing non-yiddish-speaking jewish communities in the region.
BTW, per an earlier question my source for alleged Polish blat-as-umbrella was here (under “Etymology 2” in the “English” part): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blat Admittedly when you scroll down to the “Polish” part of the same page it doesn’t confirm that …
In the meantime I’m holding out for Paleo-Rosicrucian sources on etymology. Can’t trust the neo-‘s.
That’s very interesting. I should read up on that. However: a number of the examples Beider gives look to me like parts of compounds where the forms given are in the construct case. For example, skhar looks like the construct in the common expression שְׂכַר טִרְחָה śḵar ṭirḥâ ‘charge for labor’, rather than the absolute שָׂכָר śāḵār ‘earnings’. That of course doesn’t apply to proper names like dān or to the expression nāʿ wānād. Some disentanglement is in order, but perhaps someone has already done it.
(My grandmother, who spoke broken Hebrew all her own, abbreviated פֵּרוּרֵי לֶחֶם peruréi lékhem ‘bread crumbs’ as pruréi, rather than פֵּרוּרִים perurím ‘crumbs’. Her native languages were Swiss and German.)
Are there any two-syllable words in the Hebrew component of Yiddish (among the adverbs, similar to blat, for instance) in which the Hebrew combination preposition + article + noun ended up being stressed in Yiddish on part reflecting the Hebrew preposition + article (ba-, ka-, la-)?
Looking in Weinreich, I do see בפֿרט bifrát ‘particularly’ and בשעת beshás ‘during; whereas’. In the Hebrew, both of those have a hiriq (/i/) under the preposition. I note that they are analyzable in Hebrew, while ballāṭ is fossilized.
There also remains the issue that בלאט in its original meaning, ‘surreptitiously’, does not appear in the dictionaries. Absence of evidence etc., but that is one argument against it having ever been assimilated into Yiddish.
BTW Wexler refers at a number of places to a book by Henryk Ułaszyn, Język złodziejski (Łódź 1951), which I’d like to look at, though I don’t know Polish.
BTW 2 I wrote rosh-hasháne instead of rosh-hashóne. Bad on me. I hope rozele or someone will correct any other errors I made.
@rozele: Totally agree about Wexler. I was certainly not going to use him as an authority. Just digging for ideas.
Aside: a recent book by Shalom Boguslavsky on the history of Jewish Eastern Europe in the last 500 years has gotten nothing but rave reviews (e.g. here, in English), and an English translation is to be published by Pushkin Press in London. The provisional title, “Ostjuden: The Forgotten Story” is less sparkly than the original, “The improbable and not-well-enough-remembered story of the rise and fall of Eastern European Jewry”. I have not read it but have seen it, and at a glance, it’s worthy of its accolades.
Not that far from “eastern Yiddish has a Czech substrate”. But Sorbian is a really strange choice (…also, Upper or Lower? They’re not terribly similar…), and I don’t think relexification actually happens except deliberately in cryptolects. Nobody learns the vocabulary of a language but none of its grammar.
the man loves relexification: for him ivrit is relexified yiddish which is relexified sorbian (which apparently gets to be its own language, army & navy notwithstanding).
i think (it’s been thirty years since i read his book) he goes for sorbian because he’s trying to find Something Slavic that can align with a single german source topolect for all yiddishes (which is a tendentious question already, even before getting into manaster ramer’s polygenesis-of-western-yiddish proposal).
but yeah, it’s exactly that jump from the varied relationships of early and later yiddishes to slavic languages* to One Single Answer that makes wexler the specific dude he is.
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* old czech (or/and “western knaanic”); various stages of polish; and whatever we’re calling older ukrainian (or/and “eastern knaanic”) in this context – and, maybe most relevant for “blat”, various slavic-world thieves’ cants (odesa’s in particular).
I don’t think relexification actually happens except deliberately in cryptolects
Seems to be good evidence for it happening to at least some extent in creoles (e.g. Saramaccan.)
Of course, Yiddish is no more a creole than English is. (Nor a “semicreole” either: the term seems merely to mean “a language having features which I have decided are diagnostic of creolisation, but with no other evidence that this has actually happened.”)
@Y: thanks for the link to review of boguslavsky’s book! i look forward to the english version, especially with spitzer’s recommendation (his rebuttals to several different myths about yiddish jewry are fantastically useful). it does sound like the 19thC section will be frustrating, which is sad given how much blindered writing on that period there already is. i could wish both israeli and u.s. historians of later yidishland (popular and academic) would center their work on (to swipe spitzer’s phrase) “the entire stew” in its eastern european pot, rather than make their home countries the point of the narrative.
A question to the native speakers of Russian here – does blat ever actually mean “protection”? In my experience, that’s rather krysha “roof”, and blat is more like “favour” or “system of favours”.
‘cryptolect’ is hentshke-loshn, literally ‘glove language’
just looping back to appreciatively note that the Comprehensive’s decisions make a lot more sense knowing that, given their general approach! of course they render “thieves’ cant” as “thieves’ [crypto]lect” (and though the semantic difference they imply between “cant” and “argot” escapes me, it is typical that they’d have one).
@Y: pālaṭ does not and never did mean “he fled”
I made a mistake there. In Mishnaic Hebrew there are some instances of the verb in the intransitive sense ‘to escape’. It’s very unusual for a Qal verb to double as an unaccusative. I blame Aramaic.
In any case I still think it’s a poor candidate for the origin of blat.
Hans, I think you’ve got it right. There is another expression in the same semantic area ruka (arm) or more elaborately volosataya ruka (hairy arm), which can include both favors and protection.
@Y
I have found it in the library, though it is only available in reading room and not for borrowing. It also does not seem to be a book on its own, but rather an extended article in a journal. It mentions blat in section describing the names of criminal argots used by criminals themselves:
Thanks a lot, Nachasz!
What I can figure out from the auto-translate seems careful and sensible — and inconclusive, unfortunately.
Rozele, thank you for the link to Dovid Katz’s ‘A Late Twentieth Century Case of Katoves’. The exposition of Elye Bokher’s etymology of katoves there is pure delight!
I must also thank you for turning me on to Dovid Katz’s website in a LH comment somewhere a while ago. So many useful and interesting things there!
I loved this book and am happy to see it getting some Hattic love. It paints a bleak picture but does so quite beautifully, and memorably – some of Hugo-Bader’s adventures have lingered long in my mind. I hope to read his Kolyma Diaries some day.