Last November, Larry Yudelson at the Jewish Standard reported on an interesting find:
Back in 2005, Avihai Shivtiel, a researcher in the Cairo Genizah archives at Cambridge University, published an account of a page found in the Genizah with a list of words written in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Romance — the latter being the language once known as Latin as it evolved toward some dialect of what we now call Spanish, but written in Hebrew letters. The list includes word pairs such as “lachem” — Arabic for meat — and “carne,” Spanish for meat. […]
Recently, José Martínez Delgado of the University of Granada looked at the Judeo-Romance word list. He realized, as he told the Genizah Fragments blog, “I had seen this handwriting before.” He sent the image to a friend, who confirmed his impression: “We were looking at Maimonides’ handwriting. “We were able to confirm this by gathering other examples of Maimonides writing the same words that appear in this fragment, and it’s clear that it’s him.”
So does that mean Maimonides spoke Spanish? First, he said, “We cannot be sure it’s Spanish – it is some sort of Romance dialect, but from where? Aragon? Valencia? Catalonia? We don’t know yet. And second, if anything, this is an indication that Maimonides did not speak a Romance dialect. The words are simple – bread, water, meat, egg. These are basic words, and it seems like he was trying to acquire them. He wrote out his list of words and then filled them underneath as he learned the translation. Some categories of terms are not fully translated.”
There’s an interview with Martínez Delgado at the Genizah Fragments blog with more details (and close-up photos). Thanks, RC!
Really interesting. Could it have been Lingua Franca?
I haven’t found a good-quality photo yet (some kind of imaging to elucidate the stained parts would be really nice.) A transcript was published in 2007.
Martínez Delgado is giving a talk about it, on zoom, this Thursday (See https://www.facebook.com/CambridgeGRU/).
The main link is to the wrong article.
Dammit, I usually check the links before posting! Fixed, thanks.
Moishele Moishele
Moses Maimonides
piously mutt’ring
Baruch Adonai
picked up the telephone
anachronistically
ordered pastrami, with mustard,
on rye.
[with sincerest apologies to all]
Not accepted. More!
@Hat: When is the selected works from Language & hIs hattery due?
@ Trond Engen,
Not due to me, should have credited Hecht & Hollander, apologies for going off-topic, see
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl
cf also
Higgledy Piggledy
Clemens von Metternich
said to Chateubriand
over their drinks,
`Schnitzels around here are
not what they used to be;
Abendlanduntergang,
Everything stinks!’
Y, it is not a Lingua Franca. It i s more or less some kind of mind game.
Thank you for sharing
@jack morava: Oh, so from the original collection? I have to admit I only know the ones I’ve seen quoted or made for the occasion on the ‘Net.
Anyway, here’s one for the occasion. It’s been baking in the back of my head today.
And one for the lectern:
No, make that “History, mystery, Proto-Dravidian”
it is not a Lingua Franca. It is more or less some kind of mind game.
What do you mean?
“Higamous, hogamous,
verse is monotonous.
Say it in prose or don’t
say it at all.”
So wrote the pedant in
verse he’d been editin’ –
preaching a wisdom quite
empty and small.
Meanwhile this comparison of student and AI efforts at writing is interesting. No one seems to have realised that the student’s text is itself lifted in its entirety from encyclopedia.com. Neither the presenter nor any commenter is onto it – as I write, and unless I have missed something.
That was certainly the nature of student writing in my day: I don’t see why it should have changed.
That was certainly the nature of student writing in my day: I don’t see why it should have changed.
Sure, but in the context of examining a student’s “effort” versus ChatGPT output, it’d be handy to know that the student didn’t do anything beyond the simplest lifting of material from an online source.
returning to the original topic of the thread, with apologies for derailment:
… The words are simple – bread, water, meat, egg. These are basic words, and it seems like he was trying to acquire them. He wrote out his list of words and then filled them underneath as he learned the translation. Some categories of terms are not fully translated…
brought to mind Walter Miller’s `A Canticle for Leibowitz’:
… The book’s first novella, “Fiat Homo” (“Let there be Man”), is set at a monastery in the Utah desert some six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust … The war caused a backlash against learning and knowledge, called the Simplification, which wiped out almost all traces of civilization… The monks … are devoted to honoring the memory of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist at Los Alamos who was martyred for his efforts to safeguard scientific knowledge in the aftermath of the conflict. They collect and transcribe the “Leibowitz Memorabilia,” including {\bf shopping lists}, technical documents, and circuit diagrams that they cannot even begin to understand…
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/science-fiction-classic-still-smolders
If you actually want boldface here, use HTML <b>like this</b>.
I beg indulgence for illiteracy – I know some pidgin LaTeX but \dots
Also, no need to do the ` as an opening quote. Regular straight quotes will get curlified for you.