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Oren Cohen Roman’s “When Yiddish Was Written in Latin Letters” (Journal of Jewish Languages, 30 Apr 2024) covers a lot of bases; the abstract reads:

Although Yiddish was traditionally written in Hebrew letters, texts in this language were also recorded using Latin characters in various circumstances, times, and places. These texts offer valuable information regarding pronunciation traditions and shed light on the processes of cultural history and sociolinguistics that acted as catalysts to their preparation. Various studies have discussed this phenomenon, yet they usually focus on one specific reason for using the Latin alphabet, such as ideological Romanization or linguistic adequacy. The following article offers for the first time a descriptive survey of the entire corpus, from the Early Modern Era to the present day. Paying close attention to the orthography used and the variety recorded, this article discerns within the studied corpus distinct categories reflecting the religious, linguistic, and ideological backgrounds of the texts’ authors and intended readers as well as technical factors pertaining to print. It also highlights the crucial role of the Hebrew alphabet in Yiddish culture.

A particularly interesting section is 2.2 “Jews Literate Only (or Primarily) in Latin Letters,” which begins:

The second category of Yiddish transliterations also originated in the German-speaking realm, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. The standardization of the German language and the general shift to the new standard, coupled with the maskilic struggle for emancipation and their campaign against Yiddish, served as the frame for the collapse of western Yiddish. Ashkenazi Jews in Western and Central Europe shifted to using German and other European languages, such as Dutch and French (Shmeruk 1978:147–175). Trends of linguistic assimilation also occurred in Eastern Europe but were never complete, and prior to the Holocaust Yiddish (written in Hebrew characters) was still the mother tongue and daily vernacular used by millions of Jews there.

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I am aware of the currently popular slang meaning of brat, but on its own it wouldn’t have inspired a post. However, Len Pennie (see this LH post from last year) has a charming Instagram video in which she produces a Scots equivalent: clipmalabor /ˈklipməˌlabəɾ/ “A senseless, silly talker, applied to a thoughtless country wench”; “a girl who does as little work as possible.” She thinks this should be revived as a positive description of “my girlies,” and I can’t disagree — it’s a great word. Thanks, Sven!

Stephen Bruce has been a reader and sometime commenter at the Hattery for over a decade; a couple of years ago he wrote me that my post on Veltman’s novel Странник [The Wanderer] inspired him to do a translation, and he now informs me that it is scheduled for publication next year from Northwestern University Press. As I told him, I am wildly excited about the news, and I will of course promote the translation vigorously when it appears. He had some questions he thought the assembled Hattery might be able to help with, and I reproduce them below:

1. Chapter XXX: “держитесь за перилы! не глядите вниз, иначе голова закружится, и вы, избави бог, отправитесь к источнику сил, как говорит г. Сочинитель Метамеханики.”

I assume this is a self-reference, but I may have missed something. My note: Metamechanics: apparently an invention of the author, who in the short story “Erotida” says metamechanics is concerned with “the laws of spiritual movements in nature.”

2. Chapter XLVII: “Как тиринтиец, я лопнул со смеха, когда увидел, как две водовозные клячи…”

I translate this as “Tirynthian” and at one point came up with these two possibilities: “Possibly Hercules, from Tiryns; but perhaps instead one of the Tarentines who laughed at the dress of the Roman ambassadors.”

3. Chapter XCI: “по границе бывшей Турецкой империи, или все равно, по бывшей границе Турецкой империи. Перестановка слов ничего не значит; впрочем, Кромвель и запятой воспользовался…”

Perhaps I am missing something in the reference to Cromwell. Here’s my current note: “Cromwell. . .: possibly alluding to a story in Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicles (c. 1356) about a message sent to the keepers of the castle where King Edward II was imprisoned: “Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est.” Depending on where the punctuation is placed, it can mean either “Do not fear to kill Edward—it is good” or “Do not kill Edward—it is good to fear.” Oliver Cromwell was involved in the execution of a different king, Charles I, in 1649.”

4. Chapter XCVIII: “Туда, как в Керамин… мудрецы мои! сбираетесь вы судить и рядить, пить и плясать.”

Akutin [the not-always-reliable annotator of the Soviet edition] has Keram, but the first edition has Keramin. My note: “perhaps Ceramicus, a district of northwest Athens, or Abel-keramim or “plain of the vineyards,” ancient town in what is now Jordan (mentioned in Judges 11:33).” But am I missing anything?

5. Chapter CCXXII: “Но натуральный термин..”

I assume that the “lunar disease” here is menstruation (?), but I don’t know what “natural term” the medic is referring to.

The full context of the line in 5 (the Wanderer is discussing a squadron of Amazons with a doctor):
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We’ve discussed Wittgenstein a fair amount over the years (I quoted him as early as 2002), but I couldn’t resist posting A.W. Moore’s LRB review (1 August 2024; archived) of three new English translations of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — it’s too full of good things to resist. He starts off with half a dozen paragraphs providing a basic summary of what the book deals with:

Part of the aim of the book is to indicate what it is about the world that makes it possible for us to represent it, in thought or in language. Wittgenstein is led to a vision of crystalline purity. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs, each of which is independent of every other, are configurations of objects. These objects would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been configured differently, not because there had been different objects. Representation itself consists of facts. Thus a thought or a statement is a fact, determined by a configuration of ‘signs’. In the most elementary case the signs stand for objects, and the fact that they are configured in the way they are represents that the corresponding objects are configured in the same way. The thought or statement in question thereby serves as a ‘picture’ of the corresponding fact. It is true if the objects are configured in that way, and it is false if they are not. In a less elementary case, for example in the case of a conjunction of two statements, truth or falsity is determined by the truth or falsity of its constituents: a conjunction of two statements is true if both its constituents are true, false otherwise.

He continues:

The first English translation appeared in 1922, alongside the original German and again with Russell’s introduction, slightly revised. This was for a series edited by C.K. Ogden, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. The translation appeared under Ogden’s name, though it was mainly undertaken by Frank Ramsey, then still just a precocious mathematics undergraduate. It also included some modifications by Wittgenstein himself. A revised edition, with further modifications by him, appeared in 1933.

Wittgenstein’s changes were prompted by what struck him as excessive faithfulness to the original German. They were designed to preserve, as he put it in a letter to Ogden, ‘the sense (not the words)’. We do well to remind ourselves, however, that Wittgenstein was not a native English speaker. Even with his modifications, the translation is often clunky. Its chief drawback, as Wittgenstein’s remark to Ogden intimates, and as Michael Morris has marvellously put it, is that it is ‘dog-literal’. Moreover, it is insensitive to some philosophically critical features of the German. A well-known example is its failure to heed the distinction that Wittgenstein draws between what is unsinnig (‘nonsensical’) and what is sin[n]los (‘senseless’) – where an empty tautology such as ‘What will be will be’ counts as the latter but not as the former. Brian McGuinness, in his 1988 biography of Wittgenstein, wrote that a ‘whole generation of English-speaking philosophers came to know the [Tractatus] through a translation which seems to have been … shackled by the presence of the German on the opposite page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’

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As a follow-up to Sino-Japanese from Dutch, here’s Alex Tabarrok’s Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolut[i]on:

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.

Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this. […]

Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words. […] Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy. […]

The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.

There’s much more at the link, including “an interesting biography of a translator”; Jack Morava, who sent me the link, says “I have reservations about the George Mason school of economics but this blog does turn up interesting stuff.” Thanks, Jack!

Also, I realized at the last minute that today marks the 22nd anniversary of this blog’s beginnings. Happy birthday, LH!

I recently got the Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Kathleen Collins’ wonderful 1982 film Losing Ground (which, shamefully, didn’t have a theatrical release, and was basically unknown until it was screened at Lincoln Center in 2015), and one of the extra features was Ronald K. Gray’s “celebrated lost student film” Transmagnifican Dambamuality (7 min.). The film was nothing special, but I was struck by the mysterious title, and googling soon turned up this page by Dennis Doros, which explains that Gray’s father had sung a song by that name; Doros provides a clip of Billy Murray singing the song, “Trans-Mag-Ni-Fi-Can-Bam-Dam-U-Ality or (C-A-T Spells ‘Cat’),” and then writes:

But that’s not all! The song goes back to 1909, but the word goes back even farther. Thanks to Dan [Streible], here’s an article showing an appearance of the term dating to at least April 13, 1875, found in the Daily Record of the Times, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania!

The article, under the heading “Phunnygraphs,” begins:

Words for Spelling Bees, both male and female:
Transmagnificanbandanjuality.

(It continues with a labored explanation of how to spell it by breaking it down into syllables; I will note here, for those who didn’t listen to the song, that “Ni-Fi-Can” rhymes with “if I can.”) So it’s yet another example of what I called in 2020 “the rumbustious grandiloquence that has always appealed to the American soul.”

Since this seems to be Italian week at LH — I’ve posted about manco and muers — I thought I’d pass along a couple of interesting lexical items I’ve run into lately.

1) Watching Il generale Della Rovere, probably my favorite Rossellini movie (I’m not a big fan in general, and I especially think his later ambition to educate people via television was misguided), I was annoyed when at a crucial moment a bunch of prisoners are upset to hear that “il federale” has been killed, and the subtitle calls him “the party secretary.” I had no idea what that meant (my main association with the English phrase involves the Communist Party, but that seemed unlikely in the context), and my dictionaries were no help: they had federale only as an adjective meaning ‘federal.’ Finally, persistent googling turned up the entry in the Grande Dizionario Italiano: “B s.m. Nel periodo fascista, segretario di una federazione di fasci di combattimento.” So it’s some kind of fascist official, and the subtitle should have made that clear.

2) I came across the word pieve ‘parish’ and discovered it’s descended from Latin plēbem (acc.) ‘plebeian class,’ which makes it a doublet of the borrowed plebe. That kind of thing is my idea of fun.

A reader sent me this story in Italian by Isaia Invernizzi from Il Post, which she calls “an online Italian newspaper that often has surprising little pieces like this,” and provided her own “hasty translation,” which I will share here; it’s an awful situation that reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (see this 2010 post):

Transcribing an intercepted conversation in dialect between a murder trial defendant and his mother appeared to be a simple enough task that would lead to a rapid verdict. Instead, a court in Udine ran up against an unexpected problem last year: when the court-appointed Foggian dialect interpreter began listening to the conversations, he realized he could understand almost nothing. The defendant and his mother were from San Severo, a town in the province of Foggia in Puglia, so they were speaking the dialect of San Severo, a more local one that differs from Foggian. The interpreter was forced to give up and the court had to look for an expert in Sanseverese, which took quite a while.

Still, when trials involve dialect, delays are the least serious of all possible consequences. There can be worse, including the worst kind of all: taking dialect too lightly can lead at times to tremendous miscarriages of justice.

Dialect is part of a more general problem related to wiretaps, which have been at the heart of many investigations in the last few years and have served as a basis for many convictions. The most significant overlooked risk in the use of wiretapping has to do with the accuracy with which recorded conversations are transcribed, because there are no uniform standards or official guidelines in Italy.

Each person entrusted with the job does it their own way: some will transcribe everything word for word, some just the most interesting exchanges, some will underline certain parts. There isn’t even a specific professional figure. Transcriptions are sometimes handled by the judicial police, sometimes by forensic transcribers who may have had very different kinds of training, sometimes by experts hired by the parties.

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I haven’t seen the book, but just judging from the description at the publisher’s page I thought Multilingualism and History, edited by Aneta Pavlenko, was worth a post:

We often hear that our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’, but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millennia-long history of multilingualism as a social, institutional and demographic phenomenon. Its fifteen chapters, written in clear, accessible language by prominent historians, classicists, and sociolinguists, span the period from the third century BC to the present day, and range from ancient Rome and Egypt to medieval London and Jerusalem, from Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires to modern Norway, Ukraine, and Spain. Going against the grain of traditional language histories, these thought-provoking case studies challenge stereotypical beliefs, foreground historic normativity of institutional multilingualism and language mixing, examine the transformation of polyglot societies into monolingual ones, and bring out the cognitive and affective dissonance in present-day orientations to multilingualism, where ‘celebrations of linguistic diversity’ coexist uneasily with creation of ‘language police’.

Some of the chapters of most interest to me: 2 – “Greek Meets Egyptian at the Temple Gate: Bilingual Papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Third Century BCE–Fourth Century CE),” 6 – “Multilingualism and the Attitude toward French in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” 9 – “Language Ideology and Observation: Nineteenth-Century Scholars in Northwestern Siberia,” and 11 – “Multilingualism and the End of the Ottoman Empire: Language, Script, and the Quest for the ‘Modern’.” If anyone has actual experience with the book, I’ll be glad to hear about it.

An interesting tidbit at Nathan Hopson’s LLog post:

I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). […] The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.

Hilary wrote that she had circumstantial evidence from some extant texts that, like a lot of other technical vocabulary, this word was coined in Japan to translate a European term in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That language, she suspected, was German. In German, the word is Eiweiß, which breaks down to Ei (egg) weiß (white). This is a perfect match for the Sino-Japanese term’s first two characters; the third means “stuff” or “substance.”

Hilary asked if I could confirm the German origin and comment on the date of coinage in Japanese. […] The standard answer to the origins of 蛋白質 in Japanese is provided by the Nihongo daijiten (“Great Japanese Dictionary” 日本国語大辞典), last edited in 1995. The dictionary cites Shiba Ryōkai’s (司馬凌海 1839-1879) 1862 七新藥 (Shichi shin’yaku, “Seven new medicines”) as the oldest extant use of the term 蛋白質. […]

In digging just a little further I came across an article by Shiba Tetsuo (芝哲夫) that uncovers evidence of the term used a year earlier, in 1861, by Kawakami Kōmin (川本幸民 1810-1871). Kawakami was the translator to Japanese of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s (1809-1886) Die Schule der Chemie (“School of Chemistry”), a highly influential text first published in 1846. It went through over twenty editions and was widely translated. Thus far, the German origins hypothesis for 蛋白質 was holding up well, though the date of origin was pushed back far beyond not just the texts Hilary had access to, but even a year past its canonical coinage.

However, Kawakami was not working directly from German. Japan had centuries of skill and knowledge working from Dutch texts (via Rangaku 蘭学, or “Dutch learning”), and Kawakami was a veteran scholar of the Dutch learning. He therefore turned to an existing Dutch expanded translation by Jan Willem Gunning, De scheikunde van het onbewerktuigde en bewerktuigde rijk: bevattelijk voorgesteld en met eenvoudige proeven opgehelderd: derde Nederduitsche uitgave van Stöckhardt’s Schule der chemie (“The chemistry of the organized and unorganized kingdom… 3rd. ed. of Stöckhardt’s Die Schule der Chemie”). Kawakami’s multi-volume translation was published as 化学新書 (Kagaku shinsho, “New book of chemistry”). Therein, he used the term 蛋白質 to translate the Dutch “eiwit,” which is structurally identical to the German Eiweiß.

That Rangaku link was eye-opening; I hadn’t realized that the Japanese, like the Russians, borrowed so much from Dutch (though of course it’s not at all surprising when you think of the history of Western contacts with Japan). And it’s very satisfying to me to see examples of the benefits of dogged research; to quote Robert Caro’s Newsday boss Alan Hathway: “Just remember one thing: Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”