Almost a year ago I posted about the revival of Polyglot Vegetarian, which had been dormant since 2012; now MMcM has had another burst of activity, making five consecutive posts about versions of the Lord’s Prayer in many, many languages. The first begins:
A post in the autumn of an election year sixteen years ago covered the chapter mottoes in The Gilded Age. These were supplied to Twain and Warner by James Hammond Trumbull, friend and neighbor of the former. Trumbull has appeared here before and since, most recently in connection with Maize.
Of specific interest to this blog, a paper by Trumbull, published in 1872, with “Notes on Forty Versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Algonkin Languages,” remarked:
Bread was not the staff of life to an Indian, and his little corn-cake, baked in hot ashes, was perhaps about the last thing he would remember to pray for. So, on “daily bread,” translators were left to a large discretion. The diversity of judgment manifested in the selection of a corresponding Indian word is noticeable.
There are several possible high-level approaches.
(I wrote about that epigraphs post here.) The post ends with a long list of polyglot collections of Pater Noster versions and the questions:
What do these collections say about the faith or obsessions of the collectors, or the power of their backers, or about the languages, or the glyphs used to record them, or about the speakers themselves? Is the Lord’s Prayer a particularly good choice for a canonical text to compare?
There follow posts 2, 3, 4, and 5; just scrolling down the posts I quail at the thought of the time and labor that went into them. Pauca sed matura, that’s MMcM’s motto! (And yes, Kusaal shows up, in Post 5.)
Also, John Costello wrote me about the Endangered Alphabets Calligraphy kickstarter, which has only a few days left to run; if you want to help it meet its goal, you know what to do.
And yes, Kusaal shows up
Hey, I get a footnote reference in Michael Wandusim’s book! Fame at last!
(He actually contacted me to ask about it. I was a bit surprised to be cited by a theologian, but professed myself honoured.)
Kusaal diib is straightforwardly “food”, incidentally. “Bread” is an exotic foreign food in those parts, of course. Real People eat (millet) porridge.
Assuming ἐπιούσιον means what it is usually supposed to mean, the Agolle Kusaal version is actually a mistranslation (a thing I never actually noticed before.) Literally, it’s “(and) give us today’s food, like you give to us every day.” It is essentially unchanged from the 1976 New Testament, and I imagine that it’s got hallowed by usage, so the revisers left it alone.
The 2023 Toende Kusaal version is more accurate:
Tɩme tɩɩ tɩ daa woo dɩɩpa zĩna.
“Give us every-day’s food today.”
The Mooré version is much the same:
Kõ-y tõnd d daar o daar dɩɩbã dũndã.
“Give (pl) us our day-to-day food today.”
(Mooré has the 2nd person plural honorific for singular thing, like French. It never caught on among the bolshy Kusaasi. They’re not into that king/chief/nobility stuff.)
Give us this day our onion naan.
Today there are many kinds of bread available in Europe alone. A lot of them are versions of “traditional recipes”, as the advertisements claim, but I surmise that they have been gussied up for modern palates. The older confections must already have been quite different from each other, since they were of necessity based on grains available locally,
Could it be that many Americans think of daily bread as “white sandwich bread”, and wonder why there is no request for peanut butter to go with it ?
Give us this day our onion naan
That will be in the version made by the Mission to the Claytons. Bible translators are much more culturally aware these days.
Perhaps ἐπιούσιον was intended to have the sense of “basic nourishment”, so that’s why [insert Ancient Greek word for “bread”] was not used by itself. Readers could understand by that “bread”, “fish” or whatever they were accustomed to. A clever move. (I don’t think “suprasubstantial” helps here).
Today we might pray “give us this day what floats our boat”.
Nah, the word for “bread” is there in the Greek too. ʾEπιούσιον (whatever it means) is an adjective in agreement with it. Some kinda bread. Naan bread has not hitherto been suggested AFAIK, but I am no New Testament scholar.
In Semtic, possibly the chain of meanings of *laḥm and its reflexes was ‘meat’ > ‘food’ > ‘bread’ > ‘food’.
The Mampruli version has
Tim ti zuna ti beoo kam bundirigu
“Give us today our daily edible thing.”
which seems to cover all the bases.
(Beoo kam looks funny from a Kusaal viewpoint, as it looks like it ought to mean “every morning”, but it does indeed seem to be the usual Mampruli idiom for “every day.” So the Mamprussi are not in fact just praying for reliable breakfasts.)
@Y, is the direction of shift based on hypothetical herding > farming historical shift or there are linguistic/philological arguments for it?
@Y, is the direction based on hypothetical herding > farming historical shift or there are linguistic/philological arguments for it?
Moba just has
Te’ti dinne yaa jied.
“Give us food today.”
They don’t beat about the bush, those Moba. Straight to the point. You have to respect that. (I may have missed some nuances here …)
Nawdm has the somewhat dull but unexeptionable
Si-t jana t goor diit.
“Give us today our day’s food.”
[Actually, it’s not so dull. I didn’t know si- “give”, which turns out to be a defective verb that only appears in the perfective aspect. It looks related to the Kusaal ti- “give”, via a somewhat perplexing but well-attested sporadic alternation between initial alveolars and palatals in proto-Oti-Volta (Nawdm s is regularly from POV *c.)]
The cultural practices and symbolic understandings of the times and places in which the Scriptures first appeared were often quite different from those of modern Western societies, and there is plenty of Biblical imagery that at first glance is kinda baffling. Take the simile in Ps. 132/133 “It is like the precious oil upon the head, that ran down unto the beard, * even unto Aaron’s beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing.” Modern Westerners, even the most pious, generally do not have positive associations with the idea of having some sort of olive oil dumped on their head in sufficient quantity that it drips down through the beard and onto their clothes, but it’s clearly intended as a positive image and the modern (Western) Psalm-hearer/reader is expected to just roll with that, hopefully with the help of competent exegesis. And there are many less dramatic examples as when modern Westernizers think they have an understanding of farming or sheepherding from children’s books or what have you that is in fact a romanticized illusion at quite dramatic variance with the grubby realities of those modes of making a life such that they can easily miss the point of a lot of agricultural/pastoral imagery.
It is only when it comes to translations for so-called Primitive Peoples that the assumption suddenly becomes that the poor dears don’t share our cultural understanding of bread so we’d best paraphrase the text into something else that won’t be so confusing for them.
@drasvi, from what I can tell, it’s a handwavy guess. The only language with the ‘meat’ meaning is Arabic. So you could say that Bedouins have continuously preserved the reliance on hunting, and retained the original meaning. Maybe? I also saw a suggestion to support the original ‘meat’ meaning by equating the root to the identical root *lḥm ‘to fight’, connecting it somehow with hunting.
Equally plausibly IMO, ‘food’ > ‘bread’ and ‘food’ > ‘meat’ independently.
@JWB:
Some of the more hip and happening modern English versions do paraphrase such things away pretty freely. But Aaron’s beard does get oiled in all the versions I can see, albeit sometimes with added background material inserted.
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Psalm%20133%3A2
Even the Welsh online Beibl.net, which is not designed for traditionalists at all (so to speak) just goes with it literally:
Mind you, this version seems to be something of a one-man show, and I get the impression that extensive paraphrasing in aid of understanding by the completely uninitiated got to be too much for him sometimes.
Separately I am pleased to learn from MMcM’s post of the supposed one-time existence of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artotyrite heresy. So many drearier heresies have been revived (sometimes unconsciously by independent reinvention of the key error) in modern times it seems a pity that this one isn’t out there and evangelizing.
@Y:
Well. there’s Hausa nama “meat” …
(Actually, that’s usually taken to be a loan from Volta-Congo. Cf Buli lam “meat” … but that way the Ruhlen madness lies … aargh, make it stop …)
On semantic shifts in “food” words: Gulmancema dibu, undoubtedly an exact cognate of Kusaal diib “food”, means “millet” (the plant itself, not food made from it); it’s the same throughout the Gurma subgroup.
There’s no doubt that Kusaal preserves the original sense: it’s from the “eat” root *dɪ, which appears everywhere from Côte d’Ivoire to South Africa. (I even saw what looks enticingly like a reflex of it in one of the lesser-known Dogon languages, Toro Tegu, whuch seems to be something of an outlier within Dogon.)
See also Magnus Pharao Hansen’s post on Uto-Aztecan bighorn sheep / meat / beans / nopales.
Yes. Interesting and apposite.
Ethiopic lahm means “cow”, but it’s got the wrong middle consonant to go with bread/meat. A bridge too far …
SED sez, “Gez. lāhm ‘ox, bulľ and Soq lʼéḥim ‘big fish, shark’ are definitely unrelated to this root. The meaning shift from ‘bread’ to ‘meat’ represents a comparatively late innovation in Arabic (Fronazroli 1972:615).” Kogan’s book, the predecessor to SED, is more diplomatic: “One is tempted to agree with P. Fronzaroli (1972:615), who believes that the meaning shift from ‘bread’ to ‘meat’ represents a comparatively late innovation in Arabic.”
I haven’t seen Fronzaroli’s article (Studi sul lessico comune semitico. VII. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti lincei. Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche VIII/XXVI/7, 12:603–643), so I don’t know his arguments.
“There were women prophesying at Carthage, and prophecy was considered a genuine charism” (from WP: Montanism from WP:Artotyrite)
Some news about my favorite region (not Carthage specifically, just North Africa) and gender.
And yes “bread and cheesers” sounds good. “…or perhaps baked bread with cheese. Khachapuri-ers then (not sure how do you say -ers in Georgian). Or pizzaioli.
Seems to me this is just a standing invitation to schism.
Emmentalers against Wensleydalers, Gruyerites against Jarlsbergers … it’s going to get nasty very soon.
I think a მეხაჭაპურე mexač̣apure (pl. მეხაჭაპურეები mexač̣apureebi) is someone who makes khachapuri. See here for the circumfix.
Emmentalers against Wensleydalers, Gruyerites against Jarlsbergers … it’s going to get nasty very soon.
Stinking Bishops…
(P.S. Wallace and Gromit reportedly saved both Wensleydale and Stinking Bishop from oblivion.)
my favorite region (not Carthage specifically, just North Africa)
You will be interested in my posts about the Circumcellions: 2007, 2015.
The Artotyrites were just pointing the way towards American midwestern Christians enjoying grilled cheese sandwiches. Now if you substitute Campbell‘s Tomato Soup as the blood of Christ, it becomes clear that the American Lutheranism is clearly the fulfillment of the Artotyrite mission.
Wallace and Gromit reportedly saved both Wensleydale and Stinking Bishop from oblivion.
Wensleydale was never anywhere near oblivion — in Yorkshire. Stinking Bishop was always teetering on the edge of oblivion — fewer than a hundred of the Old Gloucester breed.
I, too, would have been surprised to hear that Wensleydale had been seriously threatened.
WP says as much; though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wensleydale_cheese
Citations and everything.
“Stinking Bishop” obviously needs a rebrand. “Fragrant Prelate”?
David E.’s concern about the factionalism and fissiparousness of cheese snobs seems well-placed, yet I will note that ex ante you might have predicted the very same about wine snobs, yet most churches seem to have successfully gotten away with using lowest-common-denominator vin ordinaire (often sweeter than a snobbish palate would prefer in other settings) as the relevant ingredient for confecting the Eucharist and have avoided schisms driven by rival advocates of particular varietals or AOC’s. Whether a worldwide artotyrite movement would have successfully held the line on the position that only sheep’s-milk cheese was proper for the context (what with sheep having a rather different symbolic valence in the Gospel narratives than cows or goats do …) is perhaps an interesting question.
“invitation to schism”
🙁
I heard (from an ex-member) of an independent church that literally split over the issue of communion wine, though not for oenophile reasons but over whether it should be alcoholic. At communion, the Abstainers sat on one side of the aisle, and the Imbibers on the other.
I gather that eventually this compromise proved insufficient for the diehards, and the congregations separated altogether.
When I was in Nigeria, the local ECWA church used “Malta” instead of communion wine. This is a sort of non-alcoholic version of Guinness, and may quite possibly be the most unpleasant thing I have ever drunk more than once.
Plenty of American fundies insist on hilariously anachronistic grape juice.
In Ugaritic, the verb lḥm just means “eat”.
I suppose that you actually could make an argument for using beer instead of wine in communion in the savanna zone of West Africa, beer being the familiar local alcoholic drink and wine being pretty much unknown traditionally (and prohibitively expensive nowadays, too.) Nearest thing culturally. Millet porridge instead of bread, presumably, too. Bread and wine certainly do bring home the alienness of Christianity to that part of the world. For at least some locals, that’s a feature rather than a bug, though.
There is a stratum of folklore, “semi-miraculous stories associated with church/religion”. Not stories about serious miracles: the teller of this particular story is an energetic fighter with/critic of what they call “magism”, that is certain forms of folk religion**. So the guy, as a paraecclesiarch, was helping a priest to choose appropriate wine for the Eucharist. The priest drank a gulp from this bottle then that bottle than… and so on, and of course he did Not spate out anything. I think at that point the wine was already considered not quite just “wine”.*
And the miraculous detail was that he was not getting drunk.
(as a contrast the Old Irish story about a sidhe woman – a Christian sidhe woman by the way – who was repeating Christ’s miracles using her magical powers: she turned water into [what it was that the Old Irish drank – I’m not sure if it was whiskey] and everyone got drunk)
*So maybe I simplified it and he did not just “tried” it but also drank everything that was not needed?
** Somehow, while in Russian Christianity grumbling at magism is what certain progressive and educated believers do, in Islam it is the job of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – educated, but hardly progressive.
The Wiktionary page on Arabic لحم is a right old mess. It falsely states that the Ethiopic lahm means “food” (while also blithely ignoring the consonant mismatch) and makes up an imaginary proto-Afro-Asiatic form “food” for the Arabic to be derived from.
I was looking at it to see if the “bread” meaning is actually seen anywhere outside NW Semitic. Given the Ugaritic verb, I wonder if the “bread” sense is actually just a NW thing? If it’s only one subbranch of the tree, then Arabic seems to have just as good a claim to preserving an original sense. The NW forms would not be independent innovations, but all inherited from proto-NW.
Plenty of American fundies insist on hilariously anachronistic grape juice.
I grew up in such a church. It was fun to watch strict literalists go into contortions over it.
I also believed as a small Sunday-school boy that in Bible times, when they made you a king they poured oil on your head to annoy you. Made perfect sense to me.
From the cutting room floor. This is from an entry in Lindsay‘s Pentecontaglossal Paternoster. Since it hasn’t been digitized, it wouldn’t have worked to give a snippet and link to the rest.
These language notes are quite miscellaneous. The Chinese one talks about magnets.
@RogerC:
I once read an earnest tract dedicated to showing that Jesus turned the water into non-alcoholic wine at Cana. (That’s why everybody remarked that it was better than the wine served at the beginning, you see. It’s all there in the text once you know …)
@MMcM:
Old Welsh orthography basically “solved” the problem by not marking the mutations at all. Presumably that is what is being confusedly alluded to.
An actual Welsh speaker, of course, knows where and which mutations occur. and so can unpick them in order to look unfamiliar words up in the dictionary, There are a few cases where different initials have same mutation, so you may guess wrong the first time. It’s not a big problem in practice.
Admittedly it’s a nuisance for a learner. Should we revise our orthography for the benefit of the English learner? Couldn’t the English put their own house in order first?
Jesus turned the water into non-alcoholic wine at Cana
If he was able to produce a non-alcoholic wine that was actually palatable, that would truly have been a miracle of the highest order.
Good point.
In fact, that proves it must have been non-alcoholic. John’s whole point is evidently that the wedding guests praised the wine despite it being non-alcoholic!
I’ve been so blind …
When I google for “Semitic” I get WP: Semitic people.
Then maps.
Then questions.
(And only the third link if I scroll it down is “WP:Semitic” beginning with “Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages…“)
So I click Semitic people in hope to click “languages” there.
Не тут-то было!
“Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians.”
And a warning that “ancient groups who spoke Semitic languages,” are now called “ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.”
Oh and in WP:Semitic,
– Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
– Semitic people, an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group who speak or spoke the Semitic languages
____
Why all these complaints (same for Meinhof and Co): yes, I understand, there is racism and there is anti-semitism and what not. I don’t understand why people start doing everything через жопу when they feel the need to comment on racism, anti-semitism and what not. If these things should be countered, doing everything other than через жопу becomes even more important…
The choice of non-wine over wine is not a schism (by definition it’s not over what sort of wine to use …), it’s an extremely grave heresy, one that gives greater weight to crackpot 19th century moralistic reformism than to the Gospel. I guess the only silver lining is that it seems only to exist among those who don’t understand the Eucharist in the first place so they don’t mistakenly think they are consuming the Blood of Christ in any sense other than perhaps the merely and trivially symbolic. You might as well drink Tang and eat potato chips.
There are of course ancient and sometimes bitter disputes over whether the bread to use should be leavened or unleavened, which is perhaps one thing that makes the lack of a comparably ancient divide over what sort of wine to use striking.
One might note that the Irish liked their beer quite a bit and St. Brigid famously had the charism of being able to miraculously turn water into beer (not merely as a conjuring stunt, but for pious purposes, of course), yet Irish churchmen stuck to wine when confecting the Bl. Sacrament.
The WP page on Semitic languages doesn’t seem all that coherent. It’s rather as if the page on Romance languages was really all about Latin. All that comparative stuff is fine, but belongs on its own separate page.
There should be much more about the modern Semitic languages, and their amazing diversity. Instead, you get things like this: “All Semitic languages show two quite distinct styles of morphology used for conjugating verbs. ” (They mean, prefix and suffix conjugations.) Oh, no they don’t … the Neo-Aramaic languages don’t, for example (except for modern Mandaic.)
Given that the most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic is actually Amharic, presenting Arabic as the typical Semitic language is pretty misleading. They need to get clear on the difference between historical linguistics and describing a contemporary language family.
I think there has been a fair bit of politically motivated editing of the various WP articles on Semitic languages, drasvi. (At one point the Arabic one had an astonishingly mealy-mouthed statement to the effect that “some” scholars held that it was related to Hebrew.) I think adopting more passive approach to things like the racist misuse of the term “Semitic” would probably lead to trouble. You yourself are admirably free of racism, but (alas) not everyone is like you.
OK, I didn’t read Kogan thoroughly enough. Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic: the Lexical Isoglosses, p. 193, reads, “PCS *laḥm- ‘food’ is probably derived from the verbal root *lḥm ‘to eat, to taste,’ attested in Akk. lêmu ‘to take food or drink’ (CAD L 126, AHw. 543), Ugr. lḥm ‘to eat’ (DUL 495) and Hbr. lḥm ‘to eat, to taste’ (HALOT 454).” A footnote adds, “For Fronzaroli (1972:616), *laḥm- is a PS archaism lost in Akkadian.” I don’t understand why that connection is omitted from the online SED, which contains both meanings as separate roots.
(The Akkadian references are the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, and von Soden’s Akkadisches Handwörterbuch.)
через жопу
ass-backwards (не так, как надо) ?
@Y:
Looks pretty convincing. “Food” it is, then.
Though naturally I am immediately reminded of Kusaal lɛm “taste”, proto-Oti-Volta *lèm- … presumably related in some fashion to POV *lém-fʊ́ “tongue”, which seems to go back all the way to proto-Volta-Congo, though I am wary of assuming too much with such suspiciously phonaesthetic-looking words. The ghost of Merritt Ruhlen stirs ominously once again …
ass-backwards (не так, как надо) ?
I believe so, but I’ll await drasvi’s verdict.
There are presumably few people who try to learn Welsh without knowing English first, but if you mean to imply that mutations only confuse native English speakers, I am doubtful.
Of course, the Gaelic solution of having a special letter used only to mark changes makes it easier to look things up in the dictionary, but harder to pronounce them – in the sense that there is no real reason (for example) why ‘bh’ should make a ‘v’ sound, except that a changed ‘b’ does make a ‘v’ sound and the ‘h’ just signals ‘make the appropriate change for this letter’. I think.
I am suddenly confused by the fact that ‘ph’ makes an ‘f’ sound both in Gaelic and in (Greek words in) English.
To be exact, ph is /f/ in any English word, as long as it stays within a morpheme (so not hophead). Most ph words are Greek, but e.g. phish and philibeg are not.
Although philibeg is Gaelic (although spelt with an f there!) and phish is deliberately odd – /f/ in English is not normally ph.
But what I was really wondering about was the connection between the p and f sounds – it’s not just a borrowing of an English spelling convention, because the p sound really does change to an f sound in something like piuthar/a phiuthar.
It turns out that Welsh also changes m and b into v (despite writing it as f) – but none of the other changes seem to match up.
The lenition of voiced stops actually did match in Old Welsh and Old Irish, but Welsh has kept ð unchanged and lost ɣ, while the two fell together as ɣ in Irish.
The lenition of unvoiced stops was different all along, of course: voiced in Welsh, fricativised in Irish.
Old Welsh orthography just ignored lenition, including word-internally. Irish scribes adopted the Brit conventions, which is how Old Irish ended up with its wonderful rococo spelling conventions, like cét “hundred” with t for [d].
Middle Welsh orthography mostly wrote lenition word-internally, but generally not initially or finally. You could make a goodish argument that the change from Old Welsh to (early) Middle Welsh was actually largely a matter of new spelling conventions. There was a period when scribes knew both sets of conventions, but they quite often made mistakes in transposing to the new one. Sometimes you can actually deduce that a Middle Welsh text was based on an Old Welsh original from the mistakes.
And now Gaelic has ceud with d pronounced as t…
‘things like the racist misuse of the term “Semitic” would’
@DE, do you mean “Ethiopian vs other (black) African” kind of racism – one that treats Semites as more or less comparable to Europeans?
(I can’t seriously think of something like “I better let my Aryan dautgher marry the first Afghan guy or gal she meets on the street than racially inferiour Maltese scum!” )
The way they do it in WP is somewhat farcical. And inconvenient.
I’m definitely not against anti-rasist propaganda (by “propaganda” I mean e.g. UEFA anti-racism campaign etc., not a swear word “politicised bullshit pretending to be news”) and though I don’t think scientific truth can make us morally better, I am still all for careful use of such classifications.
But surely this second thing (careful use) can be done in ways that I don’t find farcical:-(
The first thing too, but it usually IS done in ways I don’t find so:)
I mean, as in “antisemitic” (i.e. hatred of Jews on “racial” grounds.)
As part of the complexity of language, the word “antisemitic” is not itself antisemitic; but “Semitic” as a label for a group of people most certainly is. It’s used in that way nowadays pretty much exclusively by Jew-haters.
You may say that that’s irrational, and I would agree. But it’s a fact about modern English usage however we feel about it. It may be different in Russian, though I suspect not.
The only neutral use of the word in English is now to describe the language group – which of course largely comprises languages spoken by people who have never been the target of antisemitism (though often enough targeted by other forms of bigotry) and spoken by some people who are themselves highly antisemitic.
Secondarily, I myself object to the term “Semitic” to describe any group of people anyway, on the grounds of it being devoid of any genuine scientific content, right up there with “Hamitic” and “Japhetic.” But that is a minor issue, comparatively.
I get cross whenever people confuse language and genetics, and plan on continuing to do so. There are no “Bantu races.” There are no “Indo-European peoples.” America has millions of exclusively Indo-European speakers whose forebears mainly came from Africa. It annoys me that it is even necessary to say this nowadays. By all means let people play at correlating ancient gene flows with hypothesised language history: so long as they stay the hell out of politics.
I mean, as in “antisemitic” (i.e. hatred of Jews on “racial” grounds.)
@DE, ah. But this is not really hatred of Semites.
The initial version of my comment was:
“There is “Semitic” as in “anti-Semitic” where it means “Jewish”. This (mis)use is not specifically racist, I encounter it in the word “anti-Semitic” much more often.
And there is anti-Semitism (directed at Jews) and Islamopoby.
Semites are also sometimes mentioned in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict (the idea is that maybe they should stop fighting and remember that both are Semites) and when Jewishness is discussed – both by normal people and by anti-Semites.
But I don’t know anyone (literally) who has any specific sentiment towards Semitic peoples. Some Arabic speakers are curious about similarity of Arabic and Amharic, that’s all. ”
Then I thouht that you mean “Ethiopians vs. other Africans” and deleted it. I post it again because for me it is different. Maybe because its use in Russian is different, I don’t know.
I do hear this word in the context of Jews in Russian but not from anti-Semites. Just from anyone who wants to discuss their pre-European (also pre-Bukharan, etc.) cultural connections or historical connections (holistically but wihtout racist overtones). Russian anti-Semites must use it too because why not – but I can’t remember hearing it from them.
Or maybe they even have a reason to avoid it (e.g. because Semites also include our allies the Arabs:)).
Maybe it is different in English.
But:
Does it contribute into the sentiment anyhow?
Do they hate Jews “because” those are racially alien and do they think Jews are racially alien “because” they’re “like Arabs and Ethiopians” and not just because they’re “Jews’?
@jen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition
“An example of historical lenition in the Germanic languages is evidenced by Latin-English cognates such as pater, tenuis, cornu vs. father, thin, horn. ”
I think this is also happened with PIE p in Proto-Celtic (the Middle Irish p is a later introduction).
So f may be a natural lenition pathway for p, maybe especially if you realise the p without bringing the lips together and then apart.
re ceud, am faclair beag only seems to have distinct initial t, even port and alt are realised as d, and there are some doublets where the (non-initial) consonant can appear as either t or d.
I think if I heard it from one (the word “Semites” from an anti-Semite) I would have assumed that she simply is doing same thing as other users of the word…
Then if from this she managed to derive some flaw in Jews, I’d again think that that’s because Jews must be somehow flawed and any fact about them must somehow confirm it. Unless of course I have a reason to think she (assuming she’s Christian) is also hostile to Christian Arabs.
And if she speaks about “Semitic race” – even then I will just think “racists love books from 19th century and language used there”.
But it’s just langauge from me.
I don’t think we achieve anything by replacing one word with another.
All of this because all anti-Semites I know are focused on Jews. Anti-Semitism – yes, Islamophoby – yes, but no sing of hatred to any sort of “Semitic race”.
“I better let my Aryan dautgher marry the first Afghan guy”
Once I was googling for a photo in a Russian geographical magazine and found it … on a forum of lovers of Nazi-style racial theory.
One of them particularly memorable: he wrote he is “Baltic” and thus emotionally unstable but he married a German woman and their daughter is perfectly “Nordic” and thanks God there are no signs of emotional instability.
“Character [i.e. personality]: Nordic” was a source of many jokes in USSR when the series about SS-Standartenfüher Stierlitz (form his personal file) so I suppose this then-little blonde girl thinks with the voice* of the guy who voiced Stierlitz’s thoughs and seldom awards the world with a strained smile (my apologies to Trond and other geographically nordic people here, I don’t think so about them).
*in her head or on another plane of reality. Or maybe a parallel universe where she’s a popular character of some series …I don’t know.
If you see a character in a prewar British source described as having “Semitic” features, it means that the amiable author wants you to think he looks stereotypically Jewish. Not Arab (and certainly not Elamite, even though Elam was a son of Shem.) It’s not always actually meant as a slur, though it can be hard to be sure in works from an age where low-level antisemitism was just a sort of background radiation. You see it even in George Orwell, though he is honest about its irrationality, at least, and clearly working his own way out of it even then.
Nowadays, if a Brit says “Semitic”, of a person, they mean “Jew.” If they claim that “really” it means Arabs too (such people have rarely heard of any other “Semites”) they’re doing the extreme-right obfuscation thing. It means nothing. They almost certainly hate Arabs too, but they still actually mean “Jew” when they say “Semite.”
They don’t hate Jews because they think they are related to Arabs or Ethiopians (hardly any of them would actually know that many Ethiopians speak “Semitic” languages, and they hate Ethiopians for being black, not “Semitic.”) They hate Jews for all the drearily familiar reasons that European gentiles have been hating Jews for two millennia. They certainly imagine that Jews are a “different race”; the old “theological” reasons for hating Jews don’t have much traction these days, unless you’re Mel Gibson.
@DE, thanks!
I know “Semites” in the sense “Jews” (as in “anti-Semites”) and maybe this prewar usage is comparable to our “Slavic features” which means “Russian, or at least not Caucasian/Central Asian or otherwise ‘black’ anyway!” but is thought to be less direct.
Here it is not a slur of course : it is how Russians write about Russians when trying to sound more acceptable for a context where discrimination based on ethnicity is considered not quite appropriate.
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But is there a reason to fight against this word? If it is just “Jews” and all implied racism if any (I think racist component is possible but not necessary) is anti-Jewish racism….
Of course we may dislike it (just as any other element of the langauge of anti-Semites) and Jews may also find it offensive – but I thought you mean that there is some grand racial theory (about Ethiopians, Arabs etc.) that somehow contributes into anti-Jewish ideas.
So f may be a natural lenition pathway for p
Absolutely. You see it in Arabic and in Classical Ethiopic, which have f throughout for proto-Semitic *p; and many West African languages have f and no *p, including Hausa, Manding and Yoruba (the written p in Yoruba actually represents /k͡p/.)
The Oti-Volta language Nawdm likewise has f throughout for proto-Oti-Voilta *p, e.g. fɔ́gá “wife” = Yom pɔ̄ɣā; fúúgú “belly” = Gulmancema pùògū.
Per n-grams, “Semitic gentleman” was slightly in vogue in the 1900s in British English, for a moment as much as “Hebrew gentleman”, which by then was far past its Victorian heyday. “Hebrew” was used on both sides of the Atlantic; “Semitic” only in the UK.
What you told also explains those articles in WP. I did not know that anyone can potentially find “Semites” offensive…
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Still the concept is similar to “Celts” and “Berbers”.
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I also was confused because Semites were discussed as a race in 19th century.
And I think for many of those who wrote about it (racists and not) the Bedouins would be pure proto-Semites, not Jews. Jews (1) don’t all “have same face” (2) more likely to have undergone mixing in historical times, based on documented history.
“Semitic” only in the UK
Huh. Wonder why that was?
I think Dickens describes a boy as being of the “Hebrew persuasion” somewhere, which was another common sniggery way of saying “Jewish.”
Dickens, of course, famously got better and made amends in Our Mutual Friend (though Mr Riah is a bit over the top in his all-round saintliness, you can’t say Dickens wasn’t at least trying.)
And back to the approach to the racist misuse: if “misuse” is reserving it for Jews, then I’m not sure how warning me against applying it to Akkadian speakers (and they did not even consider Arabs and Ethiopians) helps.
I thought you mean that there is some grand racial theory (about Ethiopians, Arabs etc.) that somehow contributes into anti-Jewish ideas.
i would say there absolutely is, as DE mentioned earlier: the bible-as-race-science classification of peoples into “hamitic” (black, cursèd, and inferior), “semitic” (christ-killers and their cousins – including arabs and sometimes people from the horn of africa), and “japhet[hit]ic” (white folks), which is the direct source of these words as linguistic terminology.
that’s also the source out of which the mid-19thC anti-jewish political movement named itself “antisemitic”. this was an innovative movement, that transformed existing forms of european christian anti-jewish bigotry into something new, closely articulated to the newly devised integral nationalist ideologies. i feel quite strongly that we should reserve “antisemitism” for that specific ideology: letting it become a synonym for “anti-jewish” is an active obstacle to combatting that ideology’s ongoing presence and influence, because it allows it to be treated as a matter of either individual psychology or structural social dynamics, rather than a political ideology to be addressed as such.
I’m not sure how warning me against applying it to Akkadian speakers (and they did not even consider Arabs and Ethiopians) helps
The language is Semitic. There are no “Semitic peoples.” Calling the Akkadians “Semites” is not racist (and perfectly respectable sources actually do); but it’s incoherent and unscientific (if you ask me. Few do.)
The term “Semitic” for the language group is pretty unsatisfactory itself. In Genesis, Shem is the ancestor of the Hebrews, Aramaeans and Assyrians, but also of the Elamites, and very much not the ancestor of the Canaanites, who can thus be handily dispossessed despite the fact that they ended up speaking languages every bit as much “Semitic” as the Hebrews and rather more so than the Elamites.
Far too late to do anything about it now, though.
“Bantu” is also partly skunked by the Apartheid misuse of the term as “racial” category, but again there’s no real help for it now. At least the term has an actual sensible rationale of its own.
i feel quite strongly that we should reserve “antisemitism” for that specific ideology: letting it become a synonym for “anti-jewish” is an active obstacle to combatting that ideology’s ongoing presence and influence, because it allows it to be treated as a matter of either individual psychology or structural social dynamics, rather than a political ideology to be addressed as such
Interesting. I’m all for bashing ethnonationalism, and certainly agree that we’re up against an ideology, and that treating it as a sort of individual psychopathology is buying into the neoliberal every-man-is-an-island story.
But surely it still is specifically anti-Jewish?
You evidently know more (and have thought more) about this than me, though. What difference does it make in what we should actually be doing?
no sing of hatred to any sort of “Semitic race”.
I remember reading a travelogue by Hilaire Belloc, recounting a trip through North Africa, in which he is copiously and unmistakably anti-Semitic against Phoenicians. I was expecting him to extend it to Arabs as well, but as it happened he ended up finding a different way to be racist against them; maybe he felt it would be boring to repeat the same stereotypes for two different ethnicities in the same book.
Now I think about it, though, Ernest Renan is probably the poster child for academic anti-Semitism in the sense of an animus against speakers of Semitic languages in general. It’s an unusual position, especially today, but it is attested.
A Wikipedia page on Renan, which reads more like an essay, states (if I can make heads or tails of it) that Renan believed in Semitic race, but didn’t include European Jews in it (they were Khazars for him). Which makes him a very interesting sort of anti-Semite. The aforementioned Wiki page has a quote that can be plagiarized by JD Vance (google him, or better not) without anyone noticing: “The tolerated alien can be useful to a country, but only on condition that the country does not allow itself to be invaded by him. It is not fair to claim family rights in a house which one has not built, like those birds which come and take up their quarters in a nest which does not belong to them, or like the crustaceans which steal the shell of another species.”
@DE:
absolutely, Antisemitism (i’m capitalizing to mark it as a proper name) is quite specifically anti-jewish!
but it and other forms of anti-jewish bigotry operate differently from each other, and need to be combatted differently. i’ll try to be briefish, and necessarily incomplete, because organizing strategy is a bit more of a digression than usual. i also can’t claim true expertise: my larger framing is somewhat original, but the tactical side is drawn from friends directly involved in street-level antifascist work, and histories of the successful past militant antifascist campaigns of the 1980s whose work we’re now having to re-do (AFA in the u.k., ARA in the u.s., etc).
traditional christian anti-jewishness, to the extent it still exists as a disentangleable thing, can be dismantled in its immediate forms by/through a specific set of institutional structures – christian denominations and churches – because it’s a matter of what happens in educational, liturgical, and theological spaces under their direct control. but, importantly, in the u.s. and europe (and other places, in differently-inflected ways), fully addressing it has to include the larger societal transformations required to deal with the very real structural force of christian supremacism. but while traditional christian anti-jewishness was central to that force’s emergence and to its operation in the past, its primary targets have for quite a few decades been muslims, not jews, which means it can’t be successfully dealt with through a narrow focus on anti-jewishness.
Antisemitism, on the other hand, can’t be effectively approached in those ways. it’s not the province of a single field of institutions, and while it’s certainly tied to and reinforced by christian supremacism and other structural forces, they pre-existed it by centuries and it is not central to them. because it is a political movement and ideology, addressing it starts with de-platforming its ideologues and the organizations they’re part of (emphatically including physical confrontation whenever it makes tactical sense), and actively counter-propagandizing against its messages and structures of thinking*. ridicule, marginalization, and critical/historical education (in catchy and easily graspable forms) all aimed at making it (and its ideologues and their organizations) immediately discrediting to be associated with, are as i see it some of the key elements, alongside continuous disruption.
unlike with traditional christian anti-jewishness, with Antisemitism there’s no positive role for corrective action by the organizations involved in spreading it; that, we know from experience, just gives its ideologues opportunities to rephrase their ideology in subtler forms. similarly, there isn’t a useful public role for turncoats – they can be invaluable sources of information to guide deplatforming and disruption, and their testimonies can be useful in counter-propaganda, but their active presence ends up publicizing their former commitments at least as much as their new ones.
instead of any of this, the individual-psychological model, as well as constantly centering “reformed” bigots (and often using their advice to shape its strategies), pursues a “cure” in ways that feed directly into Antisemitic structures of thinking, which have consistently presented the ideology as “the suppressed truth”, making efforts to depict it as an individual’s irrational or immoral thinking serve to reinforce a commitment to it. structural approaches tend to say there’s no point focusing on the actual people and organizations spreading the ideology, and so in practice allow it to proliferate. blends of the two, like the one spread widely in the u.s. NGO sphere by the scientology-split-off Reevaluation Counseling cult’s National Coalition Building Institute front, manage to follow both dead-end paths at once.
.
* particularly, to my mind, the core “anti-social child-killing conspiracy” package whose earlier history norman cohn traces in Europe’s Inner Demons. his focus is on its trajectory from a slander campaign used against rival roman political factions, through its use against rival christian denominations, to its wider circulation as the motor of the witch craze (occasionally targeting jews and roma along the way), but he nods at its quite recent deployment against jews (i can’t remember if he names the decisive turning point: the adaptation of a eugène sue villain monologue, after several intermediate steps, into the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). currently, the package is mainly used to target queer and trans folks (and, innovatively, arabs), although the parts of the u.s. right who don’t combine zionism with philosemitism are making a solid play for putting jews back on the list.
Thanks, rozele. That’s very helpful.
Still the concept is similar to “Celts” and “Berbers”
I’m here to confirm that there is indeed no “Celtic race” (and never was.)
I should know, what with not-belonging to the non-race myself. Cymru am byth! A’r Wladfa hefyd! (as the land of my fathers … some of them, anyhow.)
(Most of the genetic heritage of the English dates from before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. If there actually were any Celtic races, the English would have a better claim to belong to one than most. They’re just our cousins who didn’t pick up Welsh from their mothers.)
By the time Antisemitismus came into being in the later 19th century as a new self-conscious thing, the older Biblical taxonomy of Semite/Hamite/Japhethite as the highest-level division of mankind into subgroups had been abandoned by the progressive and scientifically-minded sorts of folks who became the first self-designated Antisemites. The new and non-Biblical high-level division was, at a minimum, Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongoloid, with some but not all taxonomizers using “Semite” as the label for one subset of Caucasoid. But there seems to have been considerable diversity of views as to just how many subsets of the Caucasoid group there were and where the boundaries between them lay, separate and apart from what labels should be used for them. It’s rather similar to the problem of how many “languages” an extensive dialect continuum should be partitioned into.
@jwb
You are being kind. The ultimate guarantors of hate are not theoreticians but very dynamic tactical thinkers. The theoreticians are ignored by the practitioners.
I don’t know. Pseudoscientific racism was ideologically important to the Nazis; and certainly modern far-right hatemongers treasure their “race scientist” collaborators. It seems to be very important to them to believe that non-racist “whites” are actually denying straightforward scientific “fact”, either because they are dupes or for sinister conspiratorial reasons. They, on the other hand, have taken the Red Pill and see reality clearly.
Even fascists share the general human desire to believe that what they are doing is morally right. Trump seems to be genuinely indifferent to questions of right and wrong, but I don’t think he is actually typical.
Lameen, oh, yes, Renan!
Though I don’t know if it is honest revulsion to Semitic cultures and individuals or just some combination of
(a) attempts to develop a theory of the fashionable concept of race
(b) a history of monotheism
with (c) generalised belief that “we” are the best, no matter how exactly we split humanity to produce “we” and “them”.
And of coruse shamelessness of French intellectuals of the time in expressing this (c).
I mean, I can be against my daughers’s marriage to one of “them”, or I can feel mistrust to individual them, or I can take them collectively as a “theat” – we know all these things as anti-… and …phoby.
(I even say that most Russians are Islamophobes in a different sense: we learn about “Muslim conquest” and various facts about excessive strictness of certain versions of Islam and as result there are simply no good associations (other than 1001 nights or – for me – names of stars. I like stars:) And well, Muslim/Arab golden age is known here). I keep reiterating it because this component is usually ignored. The 1001 nights point has to do with my disagreement with anti-Orienalism.
But it is a different story.)
Nothing of this follows from the belief that we’re the best, though – and even from theorising to explain why it is so. If there is more to it, there must be some traces in his books.
PS actually there are prozelithising believers in we-re-the-best (we’re the best, join us!)
Though I don’t know if it is honest revulsion to Semitic cultures
Well, given that “Semitic” cultures have nurtured child-sacrificing Carthaginians (seems like they really did), warrior Jihadis*, gentle Sufi mystics, Talmudic scholars, proudly atheist kibbutzniks, Maltese tour guides, African subsistence farmers, Syriac Christian writers of profound meditative hymns, Cordoban poets, ground-breaking grammarians and the Saatchi brothers, I think any “general revulsion to Semitic culture” can only really be parsed as a hatred of humanity in general.
* Usman ɗan Fodiyo was in fact a Sufi scholar, though not, I think, exactly a mystic (he had a more practical outlook.) Life is complicated.
Trump seems to be genuinely indifferent to questions of right and wrong, but I don’t think he is actually typical.
I can’t agree with you here. If by “questions of right and wrong” you mean “abstract discourse about right and wrong”, then Trump and a great many people are indifferent to them. I get the impression that in the USA and elsewhere these great many people no longer see much of a connection between what someone nominally espouses and what they will actually do. They think Trump is merely putting on a show, and is not really an unhinged dumb-ass.
I can be against my daughers’s marriage to one of “them”
From one of my favorite novels: “I have nothing against women, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.” [Don’t Point That Thing At Me]
“a trip through North Africa” – I think some French in colonial times could have disliked “Arabs” because Berbers are “local”, once Roman and often once Christian people and “Arabs” are Banu Hilal (wild hordes of invaders from alien Arabia) and before that the Muslim army.
It is not difficult to construct the system “Berbers good, Arabs bad”.
P.S. Stu, brilliant.
Stu, brilliant
Kyril Bonfiglioli is indeed worth reading. I second the recommendation.
“Readers are pretty much evenly divided between those who relish the books’ unflinching, un-PC meanness, and those who are appalled” says WP.
I can only say that the latter need to work on their appalledness tolerance, and perhaps move out of Tunbridge Wells while there is yet hope for them.
(Also, “unflinching, un-PC meanness” is a ludicrous misrepresentation of the books. You might as well say it of The Importance of Being Earnest. Though there is a bit more sex and violence …)
“Maltese tour guides”
Those are the worst. Must be the worst. Never met one. (I rememeber somewhere in Lombroso’s writings some serious flaw was attributed to some of.. Oh, I forgot, maybe those were Sicilians and not the Maltese? Based on Arab substratum but again I may have misrememebered)
Maybe Renan had a bad experience with a Maltese tour guide, and then generalised unwisely?
#NotAllMalteseTourGuides
Your more scientifically-minded 19th-to-early-20th-century taxonomizers were well aware that due to historical contingency language currently spoken did not always track actual blood ancestry. In order to determine who was or wasn’t a “Semite” in the racial sense you needed to approach the matter scientifically and measure their skulls rather than simply note whether the language they happened to speak was or wasn’t a Semitic one.
DE, is “Semites” worse than other such labels and concepts?
You object to “Celtic race”. But we are not talking about the word “race”, we’re talking about “Semites” – the label and the concept. WP uses “…people” vs. “…peopleS” but tha’ts just how WP tells bad “Semites” from good “Semites” (not to be confused with Semites). Renan has “les peuples sémitiques” alongside with “la race sémitique” and “les Sémites” (De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation)
@JWB:
True, true.
(The villain of one of John Buchan’s really rather good Richard Hannay novels is repeatedly described as having an “appallingly round head.” And he has an unEnglish name. I think we all know what to make of that.)
Renan has “les peuples sémitiques”
There aren’t any. Renan had been checking under his bed every night for nothing.
Interesting that Renan was from Brittany. I’d forgotten that. Though not Breton-speaking.
we’re talking about “Semites” – the label and the concept.
But the concept is wrong. The term can only be meaningfully applied to languages, as DE has been explaining.
It’s been said (? I don’t know by whom but it seems plausible) that of all Rome’s conquests it was the Jews who gave them the most persistent grief — and that this was a late stage of a struggle going back before Carthage between North and South Mediterranean cultures.
Somebody said something once about history being a nightmare from which we are all trying to wake . . .
@jack: Somebody said something once about history being a nightmare from which we are all trying to wake . . .
It was the character Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.
I have never taken that utterance to be as ominous and profound as you seem to do (and others as well). Ulysses is only a novel, the reader is free to think of Dedalus as an overwrought pussy.
I’m not convinced that there actually was any such great chasm between North and South Mediterranean cultures.
The Jews, for example, had already been profoundly affected by Hellenistic culture long before the Romans stuck their noses in. And there were plenty of Jews by the second century BCE who already needed to have their scriptures in Greek. A lot of this supposed culture clash had been taking place withiin Judaism for centuries. It was very far from exotic “oriental” Jews against “occidental” Romans. (Come to that; the Romans themselves were pretty damn exotic from our standpoint – a fact systematically downplayed in traditional “classical education.” They really weren’t much like us at all.)
Carthage was organised as an imperial oligarchic state remarkably like Rome in many ways. And it’s a very clear instance of history being written by the (genocidal) victors, who had every motive to represent the losers as incomprehensibly Other. (I don’t want to over-egg the pudding: apparently the archaeological evidence is clear that the Carthaginians really did practice systematic child sacrifice, for example. But Carthage didn’t die of natural causes. It was murdered.)
the reader is free to think of Dedalus as an overwrought pussy
I think there is abundant evidence that Joyce actually intended just that. Bloom, foolish as he is in many ways, is largely presented as much more grounded and sensible than Stephen. Stephen is very clever indeed, overwrought by recent bereavement, but above all young. Stephen, after all, is only Telemachus. It’s Bloom who is Ulysses.
“But the concept is wrong.”
But I did not ask whether it is wrong:/
I asked if it is worse than other names and concepts on which we rely all the time, from (modern) “Russians” to “Indo-Europeans” or merely one more point on the spectrum only different from others in dating.
WP says that “Mande languages” are spoken by “Mandé peoples” and this is a system. This is how WP is organised.
Yes. It’s a bad habit. Lots of languages are spoken as L1 by more than one (self proclaimed) ethnic group (Hausa is a familiar one in West Africa), and there are ethnic groups (identified as such by themselves) with more than one L1. The exotic Welsh, who live on an island off the remotest fringes of Eurasia, are an example (and their women wear funny hats, too.)
It’s not mere political correctness to say “X-speaking people” rather than “X people.” It’s a question of accuracy.
The unthinking equation of race and language is an artefact of modern ideological ethnonationalism. Even if that ideology had been entirely politically benign, it would still be objectionable on purely scientific grounds.