An Egyptian Novelist Writes About How Learning Hebrew "Teaches Us Something About Ourselves"

Egyptian novelist Nael El Toukhy, who reads and translates Hebrew,  has written a series of five articles on "How Hebrew Teaches us Something About Ourselves." It appeared in five parts in Arabic earlier this year on MadaMasr, and is now appearing in English. Thee first three parts have now appeared in English at the MadaMasr site: Part I; Part II; Part III. Each English article also carries a link to the original Arabic. You can already find the Arabic versions of Part IV and Part V, and I assume those parts will soon appear in English as well.

It's worth a read for anyone interested in either or both languages.

Linguistic Notes I: Skolnik on "Hebrew Slang"

Language warning: this post on Arabic slang in Hebrew includes strong NSFW language some readers will find offensive. Please proceed only if very strong language (though in a scholarly context) does not offend.

During my slow blogging while recovering from surgery I've let a lot of bloggable material go by. Tonight I'll comment on a couple of linguistic topics.

The first is a piece by Fred Skolnik, Editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, at the Ilanot Review, entitled simply "Hebrew Slang." It deals with the multiple origins of slang in Modern Israeli Hebrew (Hebrew itself, Yiddish, Arabic, English, Russian, etc.). My own knowledge of Hebrew is far too rudimentary to comment linguistically (though others have done so, particularly on  the role of Russian slang in Israeli Hebrew). I am, however, going to cite his comments on Arabic slang in  Hebrew, a subject of interest to me. Any Arabist spending time among Hebrew speakers (at least outside  a synagogue, and most especially in an Army camp) will have noted many Arabic cusswords in Hebrew.

It's impossible to discuss the subject without quoting Skolnik and discussing his comments, which requires one of my rare Not Safe for Work language warnings. The easily offended should proceed at their own risk. I am not kidding here. It does, however, allow me to comment in a normally taboo area.

Skolnik writes:

Chronologically, it may be said that the early settlers brought the Yiddish with them from Eastern Europe, picked up the Arabic from the Arabs here, and got the English first from the British during the Mandate period and then from the Americans through their films (which furnished the ubiquitous “happy end” – “heppy end” – of Hebrew speech, the -ing getting lost somewhere between Hollywood and Tel Aviv) and other cultural imports. Sometimes, too, Israelis were too provincial, or ignorant, to recognize the force of the foreign words they adopted. Kus (rhymes with puss) for cunt, adopted from the Arabic, is not only used in the street but heard regularly in the sitcoms and soap operas, not to mention the less dignified talk shows, and now we have kus’-eet too, referring to a woman as such, even affectionately, as has occurred with the word nigger (or “nigga”) among American blacks. In actual fact, despite the Arabic origin of the Hebrew word, it is precisely the English “cunt” or “pussy” that is the real inspiration, as Arabs do not habitually talk about women the way Westerners do. Also “fuck,” which becomes fack (rhymes with sock), is regularly exclaimed without any real sense of what is being said, though focking is perceived as somewhat strong even if one does not grasp the full force or resonance of the word. At the same time, a word like manyak with its independent Arabic (cocksucker) and English (maniac) origins became totally confused in Hebrew speech and has been used in both senses, sometimes with the (inexplicable) force that the British “bloody” had fifty years ago and therefore not heard in polite society, and sometimes with far less sting for someone acting in a crazy or outrageous way. I would guess that the word was first used in the Arabic sense by Oriental Jews and then picked up by Ashkenazi Jews in the mistaken belief that it derived from the English word.

The supposed conflation in Hebrew between relatively mild English "maniac" and obscene Arabic manyak is intriguing, though I can't testify  to the Hebrew usage. Translating manyak as "cocksucker" is at best arguable,  Manyak (منيك) is a dialectal variant of the more standard manyuk, (منيوك), which literally translates as "fucked," and is indeed used to refer to a homosexual taking the passive role, while the feminine form manyuka is one of Arabic's several words for "whore," also giving rise to ibn manyuka (son of a whore) addressed to males. Though Skolnik's article doesn't seem to accept comment, the linguistics blog Language Hat linked to the post and has a vigorous comments thread now up to 34, many dealing with the manyak/maniac conflation.

I also have to take exception, despite it involving even more offensive language, to Skolnik's comment:

In actual fact, despite the Arabic origin of the Hebrew word, it is precisely the English “cunt” or “pussy” that is the real inspiration, as Arabs do not habitually talk about women the way Westerners do.

This royally misses the point. The fact that "Arabs do not habitually talk that way" means that when they do, watch out. Kuss ummak, or in Palestinian and Hebrew pronunciation, Kuss immak (كس أمك) and its variants are the strongest Arabic obscenity, at least in general use. (I warned you the language was strong.)  If "your mother's cunt" is  coarse and offensive in English, it is vastly more so in Arabic, intentionally so, and makes "fuck you" sound tame and limp, though it fills a similar semantic role. But it is a native Arabic usage of long standing, and intended to be as obscene a possible. (Hebrew has other equivalents to "fuck you," including the purely [or impurely?] Hebrew lech li-hizdayen, also noted by Skolnik, which is literally "go fuck yourself.") (Hizdayen and its cognates are another story, and produced a wondrously funny Menachem Begin anecdote from Amos Oz, but that's a tale for another day.)

The taboo doesn't originate in English, as Skolnik suggests, and while it certainly is equivalent  to "cunt" and stronger than "pussy," (speaking in American terms; Brits use the "c-word" more liberally and apply it to males), it's a Classical Arabic (and I think is used in the 1001 Nights though I can't find it just now, though I think etymologically Persian in origin) word. Skolnik is way off base here. Patriarchal societies consider attacking one's mother far more offensive than attacking the individual. Both Spanish (Iberian and American, though using multiple different verbs) and Chinese consider "Fuck your Mother" the standard insult, as Arabic does with the Kuss insults. (It has even gotten to the point where some Arabs simply use Kuss umm as equivalent to English "fuck," leading to phrases like Kuss umm al-hukuma, essentially "Fuck the Government," though the government presumably lacks a vagina.) If that isn't intense enough, other female relatives starting with your sister, grandmother, etc. can be used for escalation. But at least given the weakening of taboos and ubiquity of "fuck" in English media, kuss ummak is far more offensive. Hebrew has, if anything, defined the term down from its Arabic offensiveness. (The American "motherfucker," originally black, has also become common if  taboo, and is somewhere in the same semantic register.)

Actress Natalie Portman once used Kuss immak  on US TV, calling it "a curse word that is also humorous. That is priceless." Israelis may find it humorous. (And "vagina" is a euphemism, but it was TV.) Arabs will find it fighting words.

Pope Corrects Bibi on Jesus' Language

From the Pope's meeting with Prime minister Netanyahu: when Netanyahu says that Jesus lived yhere and spoke Hebrew, the Pope corrects him by saying he spoke Aramaic, but knew Hebrew.

In the video, Netanyahu is speaking Hebrew, and the Pope (though a native Spanish speaker) is speaking Italian.

Metalworking Shopkeepers in Cairo Suqs Using Hebrew words in a Private Language?

Here's a wild and wonderful story if it can be borne out:  Jacky Hugy for Al-Monitor's Israel Pulse writing on "The Secret Language Of Cairo's Jewelry Merchants," quoting research by Hebrew University Professor Gabriel M. Rosenbaum on a secret language used by jewelry merchants in the Khan al-Khalili and other jewelry suqs in Egyptian cities. He thought he recognized a few Hebrew terms when they were speaking in a private patois among themselves (and he's a Professor of Arabic so he wouldn't be fooled by cognates), and claims to have traced it back to the Middle Ages, when most of the metalworkers were Karaite Jews, and apparently used Hebrew jargon as a secret language. Some of the evidence cited:

Thus, for example, in market jargon the word yaffet means "good" or "nice," similar to its meaning in modern Hebrew. The merchants use it to share information about clients who look wealthy or give their opinion of a good product. “The opposite of yaffet is ashfoor,” says Rosenbaum, “a word whose root is unknown, and which does not suggest a Hebrew parallel.”

Some of the merchants use the word zahub, whose origin is the Hebrew word zahav for gold, to refer to one Egyptian lira. When they want to hint to a colleague that he better get rid of a customer, the merchants tell him halakh, or ahalakh, which sounds like halah, the word for "go" in modern Hebrew. Others use the word admoon. It means an "old tool," or a piece of jewelry that was repaired, and that the merchant polished up and shows in his display window as if new. Its origin is in the Hebrew word kadmon, which means "ancient" or "old." In colloquial Egyptian Arabic, the Hebrew letter kof (k) is pronounced as an alef (a silent letter), and thus kadmon became the term admon among Egyptian merchants. The possessive word they use, shal, is also taken from Hebrew. Shali means "in my possession" or "with me," while shalakh means "in your possession" or "with you." But the greatest influence is in the realm of numbers. The merchants and metalsmiths in Egypt’s marketplaces actually count in Hebrew: echad (1), shnayin (2), shlosha (3), shloshin (30), shishin (60), shefin (70), shmonin (80) and so on.

It's credible enough; I know some folks in the market will use various code words, or Nubian, or in one case I heard of Swahili, to talk without their customers' understanding. I rather doubt that today's mostly Muslim and Christian shopkeepers are aware they're using Hebrew words and numbers, though.

Karaite Jews were a sect of Judaism, still found in Israel and a few pockets elsewhere, who accepted the Torah but rejected the Talmud and were once highly prominent in many Middle Eastern societies.

Chris Eccel's Sembase Project

Dr. Arthur Chris Eccel's Sembase Project is a highly ambitious database effort undertaken over some decades now by one of my oldest friends. I haven't mentioned it before because it's unfinished and the material available online is still limited, but the Ancient World Online  website linked to it a few weeks ago, so even if it isn't quite ready for prime time, I thought I would link too. This is about an old friend, so I'm hardly an unbiased observer here.

Chris' Ph.D. is in sociology, and he's a former Professor at AUB, but his education is much more eclectic than that. He has quite a command of ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages. He gives his c.v. here; you'll note that he completed doctoral coursework for a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at Harvard, specializing in Arabic and Hebrew ("Taught myself Geez and Aramaic during this period," he notes), before going on to a doctorate in sociology at Chicago. (The year in law school at UCLA doesn't count, but the undergraduate majors in Greek and Arabic and minors in Latin and Hebrew and at least two MAs probably do.) Back in the days before the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was available online, and before it was complete, you could find a set on his shelves. And it would be dog-eared.

After his time at AUB Chris (fluent in several varieties of Arabic) served as Public Affairs Officer at several US embassies in the Arab world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia [Jidda consulate], Bahrain, Yemen, and Algeria among them). His last posting was Damascus.

To say that Chris is an interesting conversationalist is an understatement. People meeting him for the first time tend to either consider him utterly mad or a total genius. Like some madmen and all geniuses, he's a bit of both.

Now retired and living in Hawaii, he continues to pursue a hugely ambitious project he's dabbled with for decades: a database of all the roots for all the Semitic languages, for comparative purposes.

Chris explains the origins of his project:

In Cairo in the seventies and eighties, students, professors and researchers met in each other's apartments without notice, scouted out Egyptian bars prized for the fact that no tourists would ever be found there (including an interesting bouza dive), and broke the crust together at various restaurants, often the old Cafe Riche (the Filfila being then only a few tables in an alleyway). Sipping Stella beer, our conversation ranged from politics to our research, to the gossip of the academic expat community. It was then that I began calling to my friends' attention various Arabic roots that seemed related. The Stella encouraged some creativity in drawing these "relationships." At some point a friend asked if I was recording my observations. I was not. Another objected that with no controls, one can make anything into anything. This stimulus, and a bit more Stella, prompted the ultimate fantasy: what if there were a tool that would quickly search all essential lexical sources of all Semitic languages and display all information that might be relevant to evaluating a proposed relationship?

[Full disclosure: I was usually one of those friends at the table, including the "interesting bouza dive," which was behind the fire station in Midan ‘Ataba.] Also, that may not be everyone's definition of an "ultimate fantasy." He continues:

On a trip to Kharga Oasis, I took with me pages of typing paper cut into fourths and began recording "xliterals" (triliterals, biliterals, etc.) by assigning them to semantic categories. It occurred to me that although not all roots in a category would be related (far from it), the roots that are related should fall within the same semantic category. By recording only roots, and using sufficiently broad categories, I hoped to arrive at groups that would be amenable to human inspection, to facilitate the identification of root pairs or groups that might be related. Eventually, I went through several Arabic dictionaries, and arrived at about 34,000 records. Then I began doing the same for Hebrew. 

 So where is he now? As he notes:

Although the basic structure of the database is in place, it will need some editing. Since its inception, the 340 major semantic categories have been reduced to only around 135, and the subcategories are approaching 2,000. Even the fields for sorting are not final; I will modify the sort orders (alphabetical and phonological) when I have more languages in the table, to profit from what I have learned. At present, it has all of Biblical Hebrew and Geez. It has an aleph-through-ya' data set from several principal Arabic dictionaries, but Arabic will be comprehensively revisited when all other target languages are done. At that time, a protocol will be followed to glean from currently spoken dialects, with an emphasis on those in areas where a Semitic language was spoken at the time of the rise of Islam (the Arab conquests). The modern Semitic languages of Ethiopia will be done only as found useful. Note that the entries summarized below do not just represent the number of roots and words. Any given root or word can be entered into more than one semantic category, depending on its semantic extension.

For the detailed current status, see here. I'm pretty well-informed on languages (or so I tell myself), and while I was familiar with Harari and Mehri (well, I've at least heard of them), I had to look up Gurage. It's an Ethiopian language.

It is, to say the least, an ambitious project. I wish we could tap into his database online, but hopefully that day will come.

Claudius Labib: A Would-Be Coptic Ben-Yehuda

Claudius Labib

During my pre-vacation blogging last summer I did a three-part report on the question of why Coptic died out except as a liturgical language, while Aramaic survived in isolated pockets as a spoken (if threatened) language today: you can find that series here: Parts 1 , 2, and 3.

In Part 3 I remarked towards the end, referring to Coptic:

While there have been attempts to revive it as a spoken language, like most other such attempts at revival for national or religious reasons (Welsh among non-native speakers, Irish outside the Gaeltacht), has had only limited success. People already speak Arabic, the language needed for daily life. The great exception in the history of language revival, Hebrew in Israel, remains exceptional because there was no other common language to turn to.

Today I want to talk about the man behind the main effort to revive Coptic, Claudius Labib. I've previously posted about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who almost single-handedly forged modern Hebrew (few towns in Israel lack a Ben-Yehuda street) an restored an ancient language. As I noted in the quote above, he had the advantage that the Jewish diaspora returning to Palestine had no single language in common.

Labib dreamed of reviving Coptic, but faced a huge problem; every Egyptian Copt already spoke Arabic, so he faced the problem that those seeking to revive dead (Manx, Cornish) or shrinking (Irish, many Native American languages) face: competing with the dominant tongue essential to daily life. Most Copts knew no Coptic, save for some liturgical responses or hymns; Jewish males had to learn at least enough Hebrew for prayers and their bar mitzvah reading. It's still something of a miracle that Ben-Yehuda succeeded; it's little surprise that Labib failed.

But as I started to write about Labib I was struck by the parallels with Ben-Yehuda: they were nearly exact contemporaries, for one: Ben-Yehuda 1858-1922, Labib 1868-1918. Both were lexicographers, providing important dictionaries of the languages they sought to revive. Both sought to persuade or compel their own families to speak only the chosen language, though in Ben-Yehuda's case this caused serious problems.

There's not a lot in English on Labib: this post of a short biography and bibliography is most of it, and the source of the photo above. More links in Arabic can be found here. You can find at the first link many of his publication, including online versions of the five extant parts of his never completed Coptic-Arabic lexicon, grammars of Coptic (he favored his own variant now sometimes called the "Claudian" dialect), works on Coptic words surviving in Arabic, etc. He wrote mostly in Arabic or (naturally) Coptic, but some of his works are in French. I refer you particularly to the first link for the fullest information on the man.

Ironically his son, Pahor Labib, has a Wikipedia English entry while Claudius does not. Pahor was a prominent Egyptologist and Coptologist who ran Cairo's Coptic Museum from 1951 to 1965.

"Pillar of Defense" or "Pillar of Cloud"?

Others have already commented on the fact that though Israel's operation in Gaza is called, in Hebrew, Operation Amud Anan (עמוד ענן) or "Pillar of Cloud" — a clearly Biblical reference that should be familiar to Jews, Christians, and anyone who has seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments — but, for whatever reason, the IDF is referring to in English as "Pillar of Defense."

Some comments have seemingly suggested that "Pillar of Cloud" might not evoke the same resonance in English that it does in Hebrew, and that "Pillar of Defense" makes the idea clearer. But does it? A pillar is not usually a defensive structure, while the imagery from the Biblical account is a fairly familiar part of the Western tradition. Or at least it is to me.

On the other hand, perhaps they were worried that some will misunderstand the Biblical allusion, as this article at Gawker seems to,  as a symbol of "an all-powerful, vengeful God seeking to demonstrate the primacy of his chosen people," not, presumably the PR image the IDF was aiming for. But that is not really the implication of "Pillar of Cloud" in Exodus, for as this article on the Tablet Jewish site notes that the midrash on the Biblical text describes the pillar as defending Israel against the pursuing Egyptians (and not, as smiting them):

The midrash on this section—which is cited by Rashi, the most famous Jewish biblical commentator, and taught in many Hebrew schools—elaborates:

They [the Egyptians] shot arrows and catapult stones at them, but the angel and cloud caught them.

In fact, as this article notes, the Talmud adds a layer of interpretation that may even contradict the image the IDF was presumably looking for:

According to the Talmud, the Pillar of Cloud was a special gift conferred upon the Israelites because of the merit of Aaron, Moses’s brother. And Aaron’s quintessential quality—the quality that would have earned him this gift—was that he was, well, a peacenik. The Talmud teaches in Pirkei Avot that Rabbi Hillel said, “Be among the disciples of Aaron—a lover of peace and a pursuer of peace; a lover of all people, bringing them closer to the Torah.” Another rabbinic text, Avot d’Rabbi Natan, makes clear that this attitude should be extended not just to Jews, but to all nations: “The phrase teaches us that a person should be a pursuer of peace among people, between each and every one.”

I can’t speak for the entire Israeli public, but when I think “Pillar of Cloud,” this—Aaron’s legacy of peacemaking, and the rabbinic injunction to follow in his footsteps—is what springs to mind. So perhaps next time the IDF wants to exploit Israelis’ semantic field to sell them on a new military operation, they should do their homework first—or hire some good yeshiva students to do it for them.

Whichever meaning was intended by the IDF in choosing the name, I still think that "Pillar of Defense" is an awkward choice in English: at worst, it may suggest they're trying to conceal the Biblical reference, as some have inferred.

Personally, I long for the days when military "codenames" really were code, not public relations tools (World War II operations like Torch and Overlord tell you nothing at all, which used to the intention of a codename.)

How Hava Nagila Became So Universal

Of course I've heard Hava Nagila played at Jewish weddings, but I've also heard it at Polish Catholic weddings and, well, anytime people are happy and want to dance. This article's almost two weeks old, from The Forward, but it addresses the question of "How 'Hava Nagila' Became a Global Hit."  Better late than never.

Though the tune originated in Ukraine, there's a distinctly Middle Eastern link to its becoming famous:

According to an article by music scholar James Loeffler on the song’s “long, strange trip,” “Hava Nagila” became an overnight hit among Jews of the Yishuv after it was played in a 1918 concert celebrating the defeat of the Ottoman Turks by British forces in World War I. It quickly became a staple of Zionist culture in pre-state Israel, and traveled across the ocean to enter the folk song repertoire of American Jewry. Referred to simply as a “Palestinian” or “Hebrew” folk song, it appeared in children’s songbooks and was recorded by cantors and folk music performers. By the 1940s it could be heard at almost every bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding.

I'd like to know mode about that 1918 concert. The article deals with a film on the song, and maybe that would shed some light.

By now, a lot of you (perhaps not in the Arab world so much) probably are already doomed to go through the day with Hava Nagila running through your heads. If you aren't there yet, how about this venerable video from the Forward website of Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte (whose version helped popularize in the US, at least among Gentiles):


And, though the singer Dalida was born in Egypt of Italian parents and spent much of her career in France, she enjoyed great popularity in the Arab world (and was once Miss Egypt), so her version may be appropriate:



Okay, now get it out of your head. And be happy. Ba-lev sameach!

UPDATE: Okay, they keep coming in. First, via a commenter, a Bollywood version:


Then, a Texas version. Don't be deterred by the beginning; the fiddling in the hoedown version begins well into the piece:

The Problems of Publishing Arabic Literature in Hebrew

Yael Lerer at Jadaliyya has an intriguing post about the failure of Andalus Publishing, which sought to publish Arabic literature in Hebrew in Israel. The article is an interesting reflection on the  divisions within Israel today; even though significant numbers of Israeli Jews come from origins in the Arab world and there is, of course, a substantial Arab minority as well, interest in Arabic literature remains tiny and the translation efforts rare. It's an interesting piece.

English Under Fire in Both Israel and Egypt

This blog is written in English, so obviously I am part of the sinister plot by the English-speaking world, or American imperialism, or whoever (Illuminati? Freemasons?) to destroy the cultures of the non-English speaking world. It's a known threat (you could ask the French), and this week the creeping English menace came under fire from Israelis and Egyptians both: the Hebrew Language Academy on the one hand and a Salafi Member of Parliament on the other, which shows the pervasiveness of the threat that such diverse folks agree on it.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Here's Ha'aretz' report on "Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language Declares War — on English." Admittedly the headline and lead paragraph are a bit strong: the Academy wants the Education Ministry to make sure Hebrew is used as a teaching medium in all universities and schools. (Ah, but look: I've cited Ha'aretz' English-language website!) Of course, the growing dominance of English lectures and textbooks in some professional fields (medicine, computing, the sciences, etc.) raises concerns in many countries seeking to protect their own language.

Naturally, the Egyptian Salafi is more willing to spot plots where they lurk. An MP from the Al-Nour Party, which continues to lend credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood's claims of moderation since it allows the Brothers to point to Al-Nour to show you what extremism is, one Mohamed El-Kurdi, has discovered that a USAID grant aims to help Egyptian schools to start teaching English in the second grade instead of the fourth. (The horror!) Ahram Online quotes him as telling Parliament that "We have to be aware that they want our children to be culturally westernised.” (And yes, I'm quoting Ahram Online's English web portal.)

Now, I have no standing to lampoon this Salafi for opposing education in a week when a major candidate for my own country's Presidency called the incumbent President a "snob" for suggesting that everyone who wanted to go to college or vocational school should have that opportunity. But somehow I never saw all those little kids who come up to you in the street and proudly say "What time is it now?" to show off their English as the vanguard of US cultural imperialism, and I have trouble picturing second graders in Egyptian villages listening to rap and dressing Goth in the near future, which is to say the next few millennia.

Not everybody agrees:

"We definitely should not neglect our mother tongue but I would remind Mr Kurdi that learning foreign languages was advised by Prophet Mohamed," said Amina Nosseir, professor of Islamic Philosophy at Al-Azhar University, to Ahram Online. "Communication is essential, especially after the world became like one street. Such opinions [as Mr Kurdi's] are not supportive in building our nation."

"I hate the discourse that we're targeted by the West all the time. Are we [Egyptians] so naïve and dim-witted to be so easily manipulated or influenced?" Nosseir exclaimed.

Of course, I'm not sure what Mr. El-Kurdi (who of course is on Parliament's Education Committee) may think of women professors like Prof. Nosseir, either. As for her final question, I don't think Egyptians are that susceptible or, as she puts it, "dim-witted," though Mr. El-Kurdi does perhaps constitute a counter-example.

Arab MK Ahmed Tibi's Voting Suspended After Lampoon, Bilingual Double Entendre

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Israeli Knesset, had his privileges suspended for a day for a poem he recited on the floor of the Knesset. He was lampooning a member from the rightwing Yisrael Beitenu  Party who had spilled water on another member. Ha'aretz provides an English translation of Tibi's rather forced poem, which he recited in Hebrew. The objection is that, after considerable and labored effort, he manages to conclude with the Hebrew words "a glass of madness," Kos Amok. As anyone who knows Arabic knows, that sounds almost identical to the most obscene (and arguably the most common) Arabic insult, involving one's mother's anatomy. Since the Arabic obscenity is also well-known (and often used) in Israeli Hebrew, the double entendre stirred up a fuss. Someday I may work up the courage to discuss the remarkably versatile vocabulary of cursing and obscenity in Arabic, but for now I will merely point out what this otherwise perhaps opaque controversy is really all about. Tibi reading his poem in Hebrew follows (remember, those last two words are Hebrew, not Arabic, which would be offensive.)

Aramaic Part 1: Aramaic and Syriac Over the Millennia

I'm on vacation this week. Lest my loyal readers waste away or be driven to watching reality television, I've prepared, ahead of time, a series of rather lengthy posts on historical and cultural subjects unlikely to be overtaken by events, one or more of which will automatically go up daily. Should something really earth-shattering happen (Mubarak's hair turns gray), I may check in live, but otherwise I hope these posts entertain and inform.

If you ask the average educated Westerner today what he/she knows about Aramaic, you might be told by a Christian that it's the language that Jesus spoke; a Jewish respondent might say that it's the language of the Talmud (both the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmuds) and also used in many Jewish prayers and rituals.  An educated secularist might know either, or both. Both statements are absolutely true. If you told them that the illustrations above and at left are bilingual inscriptions in Syriac (late Aramaic) and Chinese, found on a stele at the old Chinese capital at Xian and dating from 781 AD during the Tang Dynasty, you might get a little confusion. (Especially since the Syriac, in its Estrangelo alphabet, has been written top to bottom Chinese style, rather than right to left.) If you then showed them bilingual Akkadian/Aramaic inscriptions from the decline of the Assyrian Empire a millennium earlier, or the official correspondence of the Persian Court of Darius the Great (in Aramaic), or bilingual Egyptian/Aramaic inscriptions in Saqqara, Egypt, you might raise an eyebrow. So then pile on a bilingual Aramaic and Greek inscription erected in Kandahar, Afghanistan, by the Indian Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire, and you'd probably find even a well-informed person will be surprised.

Then introduce them to a native speaker of Aramaic today.

Recently I had a couple of  posts about Syriac,one ancient (the first question mark?) and one modern.

I noted then that I should post about the various modern survivals of Aramaic, small islands surrounded by a sea of Arabic (and Kurdish, Turkish, and Persian). That will be the "Aramaic Part Two" post, my vacation post for tomorrow. But first I need to emphasize how this near-forgotten language once was a lingua franca from Egypt to Afghanistan, and why a stele in China and a pillar erected by an Indian Emperor would use it. For over 1,000 years, this was an international language; for another 500 or so, an important spoken language of the Middle East. Today it is restricted to those small islands, though it is still the language of the liturgies of several Eastern Churches (Antiochian [Eastern] Orthodox, Oriental Syriac Orthodox, several Eastern Catholic rites, Assyrian Church of the East, and Indian Christians of Saint Thomas). It is also of course a necessary language for Talmudic scholars.

Aramaic originated as the language of the Aramaean people, who lived in Syria from Hittite times onward. They have walk-on parts in the Bible and other ancient sources, and the Hebrews seem to have considered them not just kin, but ancestors:  Deuteronomy 26:5 famously says "And you shall declare before the Lord your God, 'My father was a wandering Aramaean ...'" It's referring to Jacob and Joseph, for its says he "went down into Egypt," but by extension to the Patriarchs back to Abraham. The Old Aramaic Language is attested in some small inscriptions as early as he 900s BC (and it was doubtless spoken long before it was written); that Chinese/Aramaic bilingual inscription is from the 8th Century AD, (please substitute BCE and CE if you prefer), and Syriac (which is just late Christian Aramaic) was still a major literary language as late as the time of the Crusades. Since it is still spoken and written, it is sometimes claimed to have 3000 years of attested written evidence. Its prominence for so long can't (quite) challenge Ancient Egyptian or the many stages of Chinese for longevity, but it makes English and French look pretty puny. Its only rival in the region since the demise of Ancient Egyptian would have to be its close cousin, Hebrew.

What took Aramaic from being a local Syrian language, just one other Semitic tongue in a welter of them, was its adoption as the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire, though the Assyrians themselves spoke Akkadian. In the late or "Neo-Assyrian" Empire it was the lingua franca, 

In 2 Kings18: 26-27, the role of Aramaic in the Assyrian Empire is captured during the siege by Sennacherib of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah {when, in Byron's words, "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold/And his cohorts sere gleaming in purple and gold"), this conversation reportedly occurred (and I guess I should say "Language Warning," even though it's Holy Scripture). In the King James version it reads:

26. Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna, and Joah, unto Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian language; for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews' language in the ears of the people that are on the wall.

27. But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

Tough negoiator. Isaiah 36: 11 tells the same story in the same words. what the King James Version translates as "the Syrian Language" is aramit (Aramaic), while "Hebrew" is yehudit (the language of the Jews). A century or two later, the "men which sit upon the wall" would be speaking Aramaic, but at this time, apparently not.

When the Neo-Babylonians or Chaldeans replaced the Assyrians, Aramaic remained the administrative language, and the Judaeans carried off into exile by the "waters of Babylon" soon learned Aramaic. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and sent the Jews home, Aramaic went with them. Though the books of Ezra and Nehemia are mostly in Hebrew, the official correspondence is in Aramaic; from that point on, Aramaic creeps into the late Biblical books, especially Daniel.

Meanwhile, Cyrus the Great's new Achaemenian Empire of the Medes and Persians continued to use, and solidify, Aramaic as its language of bureaucracy and administration. This spread Aramaic as far west as Egypt and deep into Central Asia. Though I simply cannot allow any reference to the Medes and Persians to go by without quoting the immortal S.J. Perelman's "One man's Mede is another man's Persian." (For non-native English speakers: there's a proverb, "One man's meat is another man's poison.")

When Alexander conquered Persia, Aramaic and Persian got a new competitor: Greek. Greek became the administrative language of Syria and points east, and Aramaic lost ground, but it remained the spoken language of Syria and the Levant, including Judea.

The Christian gospels are written in Greek, though many think Matthew and perhaps others had an Aramaic original; when they quote Jesus in the original language, a few of the quotes are in Hebrew, but several are in Aramaic. Some could be either; the languages were intermingled by then, and are close to begin with. Aramaic was the language of the eastern varieties of Christianity from teh beginning. Aramaic had always had many dialects, and was always written in many scripts; soon its Jewish religious forms evolved into the somewhat differing vocabularies of the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Iraqi (or Babylonian) Talmud, while the language evolved among Christians into the late Aramaic form known as Syriac, with a distinctive writing system. The Syriac translation of the gospels known as the Peshitta became the accepted scripture not only among Syriac-speaking Christians but among Persian-speakers and even the far-away St. Thomas Christians of India, not to mention the eventual Nestorian colonies in Central Asia and China. Aramaic in its Syriac form, though displaced by Greek as an administrative language, remained the common vernacular in the Middle East east of Egypt and west of Iran (though still in use in both) up to the rise of Islam. Arabic, whose writing system derives from Syriac via Nabatean and whose grammar is not that far removed from Aramaic, eventually supplanted its older cousin, but the languages were close enough kin that the transition in Syria must have been easy. Certainly it would have gone more smoothly than the shift from Coptic to Arabic in Egypt, where the two languages, though both in the "Afro-Asiatic" family, have vast differences.

But Aramaic never died. It did not even go into a period (as Hebrew did) of being only a liturgical and learned language, until revived anew. Many people just kept on speaking it, often for religious or ethnic reasons (though oddly, not always: of the three towns in Syria that still speak it, one is Christian but two are mostly  Muslim, and some say one of the Muslim village's Aramaic is less Arabized than the other two!).

But modern Aramaic will be the subject of Part 2.

Portman Said to Name Her Baby Aleph

Natalie Portman, who was born in Jerusalem, is reported to have named her first child Aleph, after the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Well, if her second kid is named Bet, I hope it's a girl, because she could go by Betty.

But if she has a third, I fear little Gimel could have a troubled childhood.

Is Arabic Hard? The Latest Silly Controversy

There's a new controversy in the Middle East blogosphere over an Israeli study that claims that Arabic is harder to read than other languages because the detail of the characters means people use only the left side of their brain, rather than both sides, thus creating learning difficulties. The original study is apparently not online, but there's a BBC report here, and a summary from the University of Haifa.

Well, of course there's been a lot of reaction. Brian Whitaker reflects on the subject here. A roundup of various comments from around the blogosphere is over at Global Voices. As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab, is angry of course, calling this a "colonial study." (Obviously, too, there's a loaded element in that the study came from an Israeli university.)

My own reaction is puzzlement and wondering what motivated the study. Only 40 subjects were studied, all university students. Learning a language in adulthood is, of course, always more difficult than acquiring a first language as a child. Some of the students spoke only Hebrew; others already "knew Arabic well", though it's not clear if they were native speakers. It's also clear that the study is talking about the writing system, not the language itself.

Many commenters have already taken the natural tu quoque approach and noted that some of the things that make Arabic hard to learn — being written from right to left, not writing the vowels — also hold true for Hebrew. (And I'd note that handwritten Hebrew script diverges from the printed character much more than does handwritten Arabic.)

And what about the thousands of characters in Chinese? Japanese kangi? (Here again the difficulty is the writing system, not the underlying grammar.)

I personally suspect this is just another case of an academic study that had funding and decided to prove what it already assumed to be true, but I shouldn't impute motive I suppose. The summary seems to suggest that the Arabic language itself creates a learning disability, which has naturally infuriated some people. Of course it's harder for an English speaker to learn Arabic than say, Spanish; it's a different language family and a different script. But it's an alphabetic script and once learned seems pretty readable to me. Admittedly as my aging eyes struggle with small diacritical marks I prefer to read newspapers online, where Control++ magnifies the letters, rather than on paper. But I have the same trouble with small print in English.

Enough of this silly discussion. Go do your Arabic homework.

Article on Ladino Singer, Ladino

A while back I was discussing the ambiguous position of Yiddish in Israel. So it seems fair to also note this article in Ha'aretz about Yasmin Levy, an Israeli singer who sings in Ladino and is seeking to revive, or at least keep alive, that language. Ladino is the Sephardic analog to the role Yiddish played among the Ashkenazim: a Jewish form of Spanish that, after the expulsion of the Jews of the Iberian peninsula, became the lingua franca of Jews in countries such as Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and the non-Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire. (Various Judaeo-Arabics were more common in the Arab world.) The Wikipedia article here seems pretty comprehensive, though I'm no expert. It also includes sample texts for those who find languages fascinating, as I guess you've figured out by now I do.

A Note on Yiddish in Israel and Elsewhere

This Jerusalem Post obituary for a major Lithuanian/Israeli poet is entitled "Avrom Sutzkever: Master of a Dying Language." It's a reminder of the curious relationship between the State of Israel and Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern European and Russian Ashkenazi Jews. While not entirely unjustified, even in Israel I'm not sure that Yiddish is a "dying" language; some of the more ultra Haredi ("Ultra-Orthodox") groups cling to it insistently, and among more recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, it, alongside Russian and the three Baltic languages, plus Belarussian and Ukrainian, still flourishes. In parts of Brooklyn and Queens, it still reigns. Much of what follows is an area on which I have only very secondary and derivative knowledge, so if I get anything major wrong, go ahead and pounce on me in the comments.

But the obit does remind us of the profound bias Israeli secular Zionism had against Yiddish. The project of creating a state for all the world's Jews demanded a language that was not constrained to a particular continent but was universal among Jews: Hebrew, the liturgical language for all Jews but a language no one had spoken in daily life for some 2000 years or more, was the obvious candidate.

In the meantime, Jewish variants of local languages had taken over. First Aramaic (the language of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds), then the Greek of Alexandria, of Philo and the Septuagint, and in time the emergence of such languages as Yiddish (a Jewish dialect of German), Ladino (a Jewish dialect of Spanish, or at least Romance, common in the northern Mediterranean), Judaeo-Arabic in various forms from Morocco to the east, etc. These languages were usually the local language, usually written (like Yiddish) in an adapted square Hebrew character and with Hebrew and Aramaic loan-words. But they were not Hebrew, and a Sephardic Ladino-speaker would not understand a Polish Yiddish-speaker or a Mizrahi Judaeo-Arabic speaker, unless they all had studied Hebrew and/or Aramaic, the scriptural/Talmudic languages.

The father of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, seems to have streets named for him in every town in Israel (the bigger the city, the more important the street). Yet to most of us, reading his biography, he seems a monomaniacal tyrant, a single-minded obsessive who managed to create a national language through sheer self-will.

The Wikipedia article I linked to notes that he insisted that his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda ("Son of Zion son of Judah," a loaded name to begin with: he later changed it to Itamar), was the first person raised entirely in Hebrew. This was because Ben-Yehuda insisted his family speak Hebrew even though no one else could speak it, other than the rabbis. The Wikipedia article tells only part of the story, noting that he rebuked his wife for singing a song in Russian to Ben-Zion when he had forbidden his son to hear any language other than Hebrew. The story as usually heard (perhaps Wikipedia didn't feel it was sufficiently documented) is that Ben-Zion spoke not a word until he was four years old or so. Then, when his father rebuked his mother for singing that Russian song, the boy suddenly spoke his first word: "Avi!" ("Father!") in rebuke of his father. True or not (it's not in Wikipedia), it suggests that Ben-Yehuda's single-minded devotion to Hebrew may have influenced his parenting skills.

The rebirth of Hebrew is unparalleled. Lots of other languages that want to restore their ancient glories have tried to model themselves on the renaissance of Hebrew. I'm told that the Welsh language enthusiasts even call their schools for learning Welsh ulpans using the Israeli term for the Hebrew schools for immigrants. I've also heard anecdotally that some of the former Soviet republics have asked Israel for advice on reviving their own Russian-swamped languages. But these countries generally already have a dominant language (usually English or Russian), and while there are hopes for survival (I fondly remember standing in a pub in a provincial town in Galway years ago and hearing teens and young adults chatting each other up in Irish, a sign the young are keeping it up in the Gaeltacht at least), there is no exact analog to Hebrew in Israel.

One of the victims has been Yiddish, a language with a great literary tradition, well down into the 20th century.

But the influx of ex-Soviet immigrants (including folks like Avigdor Lieberman), the haredi population growth in Israel, and the continuing rich Yiddish tradition in New York and a few other places, may not mean that Yiddish is really a "dying language." I tend to belong to the school of thought that says when a language dies, something of a culture dies. Of course people will always read Yiddish, as they read Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, or as they read Hebrew until Ben-Yehuda almost single-handedly revived it.

Oh, perhaps I should note that I'd never actually heard of the Lithuanian-Israeli Yiddish poet I just used as a starting point for this longish post. It was the headline in the Jerusalem Post that set me off.

Web Addresses in Non-Latin Scripts

ICANN, the international body overseeing Internet web domains, has approved web addresses in non-Latin alphabets for the first time. An Arab News editorial here; Haaretz on the subject here.

Good. Most of the world writes in non-Latin scripts; it shows that the Internet Revolution really is spreading to everyone.

Happy Halloween.

Ironies: Lieberman Compliments ‘Erekat's Hebrew

This would actually be funny if it weren't also so much a crystallization of a major problem. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Foreign Minister, reportedly said that he was surprised to be greeted by Palestinian negotiator Sa‘eb ‘Erekat in excellent Hebrew. So Lieberman tells reporters: "Erekat — I didn't know he had such good Hebrew."

Here's the irony: ‘Erekat was born in East Jerusalem (then Jordanian) in 1955. From the age of 12, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, he has been surrounded by Hebrew speakers. As a professor at Najah University in Nablus and in his many other positions related to the peace process he has had to interact regularly and constantly with Israelis. He studied in the US and has a PhD from Bradford in Britain. He has been a senior negotiator with the Israelis since Madrid in 1991.

Avigdor Lieberman was born as Evet Lieberman (hence his popular nickname "Yvette" in Israel) in Kishinev in the then-Soviet Union, now Chisinau, Moldova. His education was mostly in things like agriculture, though he also famously worked as a bouncer. He came to Israel in 1978, eleven years after Sa‘eb ‘Erekat found himself under Israeli occupation. Lieberman now lives on a settlement in the West Bank. So Hebrew is a second language for both men, but ‘Erekat got a head start. I wouldn't be shocked if ‘Erekat's was actually better than Lieberman's, but that would be far too ironic.

Sa‘eb ‘Erekat speaks good Hebrew, as a great many Palestinians do. I'm glad Lieberman is impressed. How's your Arabic, Mr. Lieberman? You are the Foreign Minister.