I was reading along in Kathryn Schulz’s (absolutely fascinating) New Yorker piece “When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas” (archived) when I was taken aback by the following:
There was Israel Zangwill, a name that I, like Cockerell, had never heard before, even though he was once the most famous Jew in the Anglophone world—a novelist whose popularity was frequently compared with that of Dickens, until the craft of fiction became less important to him than the cause of Zionism.
Zangwill forgotten? I mean, I knew he wasn’t famous any more — not up there with Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer — but I would have thought he had lingered at least faintly in cultural memory. But I read him in the ’60s, when he did still linger, and the world has moved on. And yet Abraham Caplan could write in 1918 in The American Jewish Chronicle (Vol. 4, p. 728) “Zangwill’s name was a name that somehow thrilled.”
Zangwill’s name… What the hell kind of a name is Zangwill, anyway? It wasn’t in any of my reference books, and Wikipedia says only “His father, Moses Zangwill, was from what is now Latvia.” I was briefly excited to find a reference to “The Name Zangwill: A Study in Lexicography” (American Hebrew, March 16, 1900, p. 577), but it’s described as “Satirical,” so it probably wouldn’t be much help even if I could find it online, which I can’t. However, I did find this Google Groups discussion about “how Shmuel becomes Zanvil in Yiddish,” wherein George Jochnowitz writes:
I assume the surname of Israel Zangwill is related to Zanvil. I have heard
the pronuciations Zanvil and Zaynvil (YIVO spelling), reflecting the
familiar dialect variations in Yiddish.
And Dr. Avraham Ben-Rahamiėl Qanaļ responds: “The name Zangwill is probably derived from Zanwil with confusion with the Hebrew/Aramaic word Zangevil [ginger].” Which I guess is plausible, but I’m wondering if any Hatters have further information.
Is Zwingli relevant here? Probably not but I thought I’d raise it.
FWIW, (i) he’s fairly known in Israel (and is studied in high school, and has streets named after him); (ii) zangvil (spelled and pronounced the same – זנגויל) is Hebrew for ginger (the root).
Zangwill’s name rings a quite dim yet audible bell in my memory although I couldn’t really place him more specifically in terms of naming a title of something he wrote or giving good estimates of years of birth/death. It looks like Ms. Schulz is nine years younger than me, so perhaps I was in some transitional cohort where he was just completing a slide into never-heard-of-him obscurity, although it’s probably also true that neither myself nor Ms. Schulz are the median members of our year-of-birth cohorts in terms of having heard of stuff.
Is Zwingli relevant here?
Not to the nomenclatural issue; the surname is probably from Middle High German zwingel ‘citadel’.
The evidence in that google discussion for Shmuel -> Zanwil is convincing. Is confusion with Zangewil needed to get the g or are there other routes? I wonder when and where it would have been fixed as a last name. The citations in the google discussion are seemingly for Zanwil as given name or in a patronymic, and they’re centuries earlier.
Another poster at that thread says Zanwil was a name before Zangwell became a Hebrew word. This doesn’t seem to be as dispositive as he thinks, since it’s also not clear when the g arrived in the name.
I learn from wikipedia that Ms. Schulz’s spouse is named Casey Cep, which raises the separate question of what kind of a name is “Cep” and is it pronounced with an initial /s/ or /k/ or some third possibility? The answer (based on someone giving an introduction on youtube and not immediately being contradicted …) seems to be /s/, and googling suggests that it’s a “something-Balkans-adjacent” name ancestrally (Czechia, Croatia, and Romania all in the running) and that it’s likely that the /s/ is an Americanized pronunciation and that the spelling may likewise be Americanized (via loss of diacritical mark).
Huh. I’d have bet the name was Swiss German (no relation to Zwingli, though).
For a long time there was (on again, off again) an Austrian politician named Josef Cap, pronounced Čap.
Casey Cep
tseysi tsep?
zangwill doesn’t seem to have written enough in yiddish to make it into the Leksikon, which i was hoping would at least have a little folk etymology to offer. there’s nobody else in there with a similar name, either.
also, wow! is that a thread of fascinating people – george jochnowitz and alexis manaster ramer (and probably sarah bunin benor) have come up here before, but check out avraham ben-raḥamiël qanaï! you don’t hear of a wobbly karaite phililogist every day, even in albany!
Why the *m > n? In the discussion thread, Qanaï writes, “The M before a consonant changes to an N like Yom Tov becomes Yontif”, but that is an assimilation to a dental, not applicable here.
I had a long conversation with Andrew Zangwill a couple weeks ago, since he is the author of this textbook, the only graduate electrodynamics book that has had any success in competing with Jackson’s. I didn’t ask him about his name though.
Why the *m > n? In the discussion thread, Qanaï writes, “The M before a consonant changes to an N like Yom Tov becomes Yontif”, but that is an assimilation to a dental, not applicable here.
I had the same question. I had thought the -nt- in יום־טובֿ yontif was simple place assimilation.
For Zanvil, on the other hand, I am reminded of Yiddish פֿינעף finef ‘five’, Luxembourgish fënnef, etc., with a real [n] after epenthesis from -nf, presumably, from earlier -mf in Old High German fimf (cf. Gothic fimf, Old Norse fimm). Compare the clusters in German Vernunft beside vernehmen; Zukunft beside zukommen; Zunft beside ziemen; Brunft beside Middle High German bremen, ‘growl, grumble, roar’, etc. Was there similar dissimilation of earlier /mv/ (however one wants to take the phonetics of that precisely) to /nv/?
And then, after m > n, influence from the ginger word (זנגבילא zangḇīlā, etc.)?
Short comment because I am on holiday.
I know that I’ve read something by Zangwill but can’t remember what. My guess is that when people come across his name today, it is most often as the coiner of the phrase “the melting pot”. What I read was a novel, not his play of that name.
And looking at a list of his works, what I read was Children of the Ghetto. Not terribly memorable.
I knew him from “melting pot” and as a presumably innocent bystander in a prank on Kipling (which led to one of the anti-Semitic moments that mar Something of Myself). I’m afraid I’ve never read anything by him, though I just looked at some lively and humorous bits of Without Prejudice.
Zangwill wasn’t the first to use “melting pot”; the metaphor of melting goes back much further, and the exact phrase was used in a frequently-quoted magazine article from 1875: “the individuality of the immigrant, almost even his traits of race and religion, fuse down in the democratic alembic like chips of brass thrown into the melting pot.” But his play popularized it: the Google ngram shows the phrase taking a big step up in frequency starting in 1908, and from then on the figurative sense is predominant.
But his play popularized it
I just knew I had encountered the name somewhere ! I once ordered a reprint of The Melting Pot, which put me to sleep after a few pages.
He was by no means a great writer, but as I remember his stories contained some very affecting descriptions of Jewish life.
If the w was still /w/ at the relevant point (i.e. a labial-velar), /mw/ > /ŋ͡mw/ > /ŋw/ would be less of a stretch.
Presumably the w must have at least passed through a stage of being /w/ from its origin as /u/.
When did Yiddish change /w/ > /v/ in general?
Zangwill is not forgotten in the OED, with 412 citations. About half of them are from Children of the Ghetto, which is credited with quite a few earliest citations, e.g. gefilte fish, schmuck, nosh v., nu, oy, and interestingly, typo for ‘typographical error’. That sense is relatively new: it wasn’t in the original OED in 1916, it was added in the 1986 Supplement. The entry hasn’t been revised since 1986, but I couldn’t antedate Zangwill in Google Books; hits in the late 19th century are flooded with the older sense, as a job title, short for “typographer” (“spec. a compositor”). That seems to have been the predominant meaning of typo well into the 20th century.
Still [mf] in Austria, BTW; most of us don’t do [ɱ] at all and restrict [nf] to transparent loans like Konferenz.
I bet it was somewhere in the wide [ʋ] range from the medieval start. Alas, the one claim I’ve ever seen on when [w] > [ʋ] happened in German – 12th/13th century or so – was in a popular magazine, didn’t mention any evidence and didn’t cite any sources.
Zamvel, Zanvel, Zavel, Zevel, Zovel are all Yiddish forms of Shmuel. Zamuel -> Zamvel seems to be the path. The surname Зангвиль is attested in Dinaburg, then of Vitebsk Governorate, now Daugavpils in Latvia. Occasionally it is used as a given name too. So I strongly suspect that it is derived from a given name … but it’s possible to ask Alexander Beider, who lists this surname in his famous dictionary.
So, “Samuel” reinterpreted as “ginger”. I’m reminded of the Russian monsters of east-central Siberia (“Russian”, spreading from the west as a Wanderwort, and “rakṣa”, spreading from China, ended up identical, and their referents merged).
Regarding the pronunciation of Zangwill in English (though probably of little relevance to its etymology), the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1983, 2nd edition) gives [ˈzæŋwɪl], while the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary gives [ˈzæŋ wɪl, -wəl, -ɡwɪl, -ɡwəl]. The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary gives [ˈzæŋ.ɡwɪl] as the British pronunciation and [-ɡwɪl, -wɪl] as the American pronunciation. So there is some disagreement on whether it is usual to pronounce the [ɡ] in English for this name.
OED has typo (error) from Zangwill in 1892.
Merriam Webster claims the first known use in 1878. Do they refer to typo-tyro in google books?
American Bibliopolist v.4 iss. 37 Jan. 1872 p.21 makes a semi-related doubtful claim that the Eastern Argus typesetter rendered “a noble old burgher, proudly loving his native state” as “a nobby old burglar prowling around in a naked state.”
Why not look it up in the standard MHG grammar. The 25th edition of Hermann Paul’s Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik has (§ L 84):
Nix Genaues weiß man nicht. Thought so.