Modern Judeo-Provençal as Known from Its Sole Textual Testimony: Harcanot et Barcanot (Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis)

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-237
Author(s):  
Peter Nahon

Abstract This study offers a linguistic description of the idiom of the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin (“Judeo-Provençal”) at the end of the 18th century, based on a critical edition of the only relevant document illustrating this language, a theatrical play in verse entitled Harcanot et Barcanot. The introduction provides a philological inventory of all known sources of “Judeo-Provençal.” The critical and variorum edition of the text, accompanied by linear glosses in English, is followed by a commentary comprising a glossary and analysis of all relevant linguistic features. It reveals, inter alia, that this language possessed words pertaining to the linguistic repertoire of French Jews since the Middle Ages; as for the phonetic features of the Jewish dialect of Provençal, their etiology is to be found in the history of the communities. The study concludes with a reassessment of the nature of linguistic variation in the dialect of the Jews of Provence.

Author(s):  
Monika Kamińska

The parish churches in Igołomia and Wawrzeńczyce were founded in the Middle Ages. Their current appearance is the result of centuries of change. Wawrzeńczyce was an ecclesial property – first of Wrocław Premonstratens, and then, until the end of the 18th century, of Kraków bishops. The Church of St. Mary Magdalene was funded by the Bishop Iwo Odrowąż. In 1393 it was visited by the royal couple Jadwiga of Poland and Władysław Jagiełło. In the 17th century the temple suffered from the Swedish Invasion, and then a fire. The church was also damaged during World War I in 1914. The current furnishing of the church was created to a large extent after World War II. Igołomia was once partly owned by the Benedictines of Tyniec, and partly belonged to the Collegiate Church of St. Florian in Kleparz in Kraków. The first mention of the parish church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary comes from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. In 1384, a brick church was erected in place of a wooden one. The history of the Igołomia church is known only from the second half of the 18th century, as it was renovated and enlarged in 1869. The destruction after World War I initiated interior renovation work, continuing until the 1920s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Shcheglova

In this review, the author analyses the Tarnovo Edition of the Stishnoy Prologue. Texts: Lexical Index (published by Bulgarian researchers Georgi Petkov and Maria Spasova) and focuses on the structure of the publication, providing a detailed description of the parts of each volume: prologue texts, prologue poems, the lexical index, and the index of saints’ names. The review evaluates the work from the point of view of its academic contribution. The reviewer largely agrees with the authors’ point of view on the history and the study of the Stishnoy Prologue set forth in the preface to the publication. While objecting to some points, the reviewer evaluates the work highly, considering it an important stage in the process of studying the history of the Stishnoy Prologue, one of the most widespread hagiographic calendar collections of the Middle Ages. The publication of the texts of the Stishnoy Prologue, even those in just the Tarnovo edition, can be a powerful catalyst for further textual criticism and linguistic studies of the numerous Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian copies that have survived to the present day. Ultimately, the reviewed publication can become the basis for a full-scale critical edition of the Stishnoy Prologue. The review emphasises the timeless significance of this publication for Slavic studies, its innovative character, its structural integrity, its theoretical sophistication, and the enormous practical importance of the work for Bulgarian philologists.


2017 ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Inna Põltsam-Jürjo

From “heathens’ cakes” to “pig’s ears”: tracing a food’s journey across cultures, centuries and cookbooks It is intriguing from the perspective of food history to find in 19th and 20th century Estonian recipe collections the same foods – that is, foods sharing the same names – found back in European cookbooks of the 14th and 15th centuries. It is noteworthy that they have survived this long, and invites a closer study of the phenomenon. For example, 16th century sources contain a record about the frying of heathen cakes, a kind of fritter, in Estonia. A dish by the same name is also found in 18th and 19th century recipe collections. It is a noteworthy phenomenon for a dish to have such a long history in Estonian cuisine, spanning centuries in recipe collections, and merits a closer look. Medieval European cookbooks listed two completely different foods under the name of heathen cakes and both were influenced from foods from the east. It is likely that the cakes made it to Tallinn and finer Estonian cuisine through Hanseatic merchants. It is not ultimately clear whether a single heathen cake recipe became domesticated in these parts already in the Middle Ages. In any case, heathen cakes would remain in Estonian cuisine for several centuries. As late as the early 19th century, the name in the local Baltic German cuisine referred to a delicacy made of egg-based batter fried in oil. Starting from the 18th century, the history of these fritters in Estonian cuisine can be traced through cookbooks. Old recipe collections document the changes and development in the tradition of making these cakes. The traditions of preparing these cakes were not passed on only in time, but circulated within society, crossing social and class lines. Earlier known from the elites’ culture, the dish reached the tables of ordinary people in the late 19th and early 20th century. In Estonian conditions, it meant the dish also crossed ethnic lines – from the German elite to the Estonian common folk’s menus. In the course of adaptation process, which was dictated and guided by cookbooks and cooking courses, the name of the dish changed several times (heydenssche koken, klenätid, Räderkuchen, rattakokid, seakõrvad), and changes also took place in the flavour nuances (a transition from spicier, more robust favours to milder ones) and even the appearance of the cakes. The story of the heathen cakes or pig’s ears in Estonian cuisine demonstrates how long and tortuous an originally elite dish can be as it makes its way to the tables of the common folk. The domestication and adaptation of such international recipes in the historical Estonian cuisine demonstrates the transregional cultural exchange, as well as culinary mobility and communication.


Classics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Natali ◽  
Gaia Bagnati

Aristotle (384–322 bce) was a younger disciple and colleague of Plato. They are the two most famous and important ancient philosophers, and Aristotle is the only Platonic disciple whose works have been transmitted to us. The relationship between the two thinkers is complex: they share some basic ideas but the disciple is a strong critic of some aspects of his master’s thought, a fact not unusual in the relationships between master and disciple. He agrees with Plato on a rejection of materialism in favor of the idea that our world is the result of a formal structure that can be formulated in rational and scientific definitions. On the other hand, he thinks that sensible moving entities contain in themselves their forms and because of that they can be the object of scientific knowledge, i.e., a universal and deductible knowledge and not only of a true unstable opinion as Plato maintained. They also are the real substances. From this basic difference many oppositions between Aristotle and his master derive. In the history of philosophy Aristotle suffered a complex destiny, different from Plato’s continuous success. In some periods he was neglected, for instance in the Hellenistic period and from the 18th century until the main part of 19th century. In other periods he achieved great fame, for instance in later Antiquity, in the Middle Ages from the 13th century, and also in our own time. The authors would like to thank warmly Professor Iain MacPherson for revising their far-from-perfect English.


1992 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Hans den Besten ◽  
Pieter Muysken

In this paper we describe a number of features of the history of Negerhollands (Creole Dutch), spoken on the Danish Antilles, later U.S. Virgin Islands, between around 1700 and 1900 (the last remaining speaker died recently). Special attention is paid to early history and demography, linguistic features of the creole (on the basis of a number of proverbs), a characterization of the type of Dutch that provided the lexical input for the language, and variation in the creole itself. The paper provides the framework in which much more detailed research, based on the analysis of 18th century manuscript sources, can be carried out in the near future.


2021 ◽  

The Siwa Oasis is located in Egypt’s Western Desert and lies about 50 kilometers east of the Libyan border and 300 kilometers south of the Mediterranean coast. The oasis has been renowned since ancient times for the presence of a temple, built during the Twenty-Sixth Pharaonic Dynasty (664–525 BCE), which hosted the oracle of the god Ammon and allegedly attracted the visit of Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. Apart from scattered descriptions, little is known about the history of Siwa in the Middle Ages. Archaeological and linguistic research has, however, yielded useful insights on the history of the oasis, on the movements of its inhabitants, and on their contacts with the wider world, while information about life in the oasis between the 18th and the 20th centuries can be found in numerous travel accounts composed mainly by European officials, geographers, and travelers and in a few anthropological studies. Siwa was formally brought under Egyptian control in 1820 by Muhammad Ali, but it remained strongly attached to Benghazi. During the 19th century, the Sanussiyya, an Islamic sufi order with headquarters in the neighboring oasis of Al-Jaghbub, acquired considerable political power, and it played an important role in the effective incorporation of Siwa into Egypt during the 19th and the 20th centuries. Today, Siwa and the smaller oasis of El-Gara, which lies about 100 km to the northeast, form a municipality within the Governorate of Marsa Matruh, with over 31,000 inhabitants (2019 official census by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics). The municipality hosts the easternmost Berber-speaking community, whose language, called Siwi, shares many linguistic features with the languages of Sokna and El Fogaha in Libya, partially also with the Zenati group, and which has been heavily influenced by Arabic. While the majority of the population of Siwa is Berber, the oasis is also home to a Bedouin community related to the Awlad Ali, the Shahibaat, as well as to a growing number of other Egyptian settlers. Currently the entire population of the oasis speaks Arabic as either a first or a second language. For centuries, the economy of the oasis relied almost exclusively on its natural and agricultural resources, specifically on its abundant spring water and date palms as well as the fine fruits from the latter, which are central to the life of the community. More recently, however, tourism and its corollary activities have gained considerable importance in Siwa’s economy, and they have contributed to redistributing wealth within the community and reshaping the landscape of the oasis. We would like to thank Sergio Volpi, the founder of the association Le Royaumes des Deux Déserts and the Black Lions Library in Siwa for sharing with us the copies of some works not available otherwise. We also thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting works that we had initially overlooked and for other valuable comments and remarks.


Author(s):  
Dmitriy Polyvyannyy

The article is dedicated to three Bulgarian historical works created at Athos in the second half of the 18th c. – "Slavo-Bulgarian History" by Saint Paisius of Hilendar, anonymous "Zograf History" and "Brief History of the Bulgarian Slav People" by monk-priest Spyridon of Gabrovo. By the author’s opinion, these works, on the one hand, were born in the atmosphere of rivalry between the monasteries of Athos and their Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian clergy, and on the other, were actualised by the strengthening contacts of Hilandar and Zograf with Bulgarian lands. If the first affected the contents of the mentioned works, the second lead to sufficient enlargement of their audience, which, in its turn, became a precondition of the growing interest to the national history among the Bulgarian population of Rumelia in the first half of the 19th c.


Author(s):  
Ans van Kemenade

The status of English in the early 21st century makes it hard to imagine that the language started out as an assortment of North Sea Germanic dialects spoken in parts of England only by immigrants from the continent. Itself soon under threat, first from the language(s) spoken by Viking invaders, then from French as spoken by the Norman conquerors, English continued to thrive as an essentially West-Germanic language that did, however, undergo some profound changes resulting from contact with Scandinavian and French. A further decisive period of change is the late Middle Ages, which started a tremendous societal scale-up that triggered pervasive multilingualism. These repeated layers of contact between different populations, first locally, then nationally, followed by standardization and 18th-century codification, metamorphosed English into a language closely related to, yet quite distinct from, its closest relatives Dutch and German in nearly all language domains, not least in word order, grammar, and pronunciation.


Author(s):  
Gerda Haßler

The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.


2019 ◽  
pp. 455-504
Author(s):  
Eneko Zuloaga ◽  
José Alfonso Antequera

LABURPENA Artikulu honetan Bizkai mendebaleko xviii. mendeko testu baten edizioa eta hizkuntza- azterketa aurkezten ditugu. Bilboko eskribau-etxe batean 1770ean sortutako dokumentu judiziala da, eta Zollon (Bizkaia) ezagutarazteko prestatu zuten. Testuak euskararen corpus historikoko hutsune bat betetzen du, eta interesa du bai generoari dagokionez, bai alderdi geolinguistikoari eta historikoari dagokienez. Bada, lan honetan testua sortu zen testuingurua hobeto ulertzeko azalpenak, testuaren edizio kritikoa, testuko ezaugarri linguistiko nagusien azterketa eta hizkeraren filiazio linguistikoari buruzko proposamena ematen dira. RESUMEN En el presente artículo damos a conocer una nueva fuente para el estudio del euskera occidental del siglo xviii. Se trata de un documento judicial redactado en una escribanía de Bilbao en 1770, que fue preparado para ser dado a conocer en Zollo (Bizkaia). El texto, por lo tanto, viene a cubrir uno de los huecos existentes dentro del corpus histórico de la lengua vasca, y resulta interesante tanto desde el punto de vista del género textual como desde el de la geolingüística y la época. El presente trabajo presenta una introducción histórica que permite comprender mejor el contexto en el que fue creado el texto y una edición crítica del mismo. Además, analizamos los principales rasgos lingüísticos y proponemos una hipótesis sobre la filiación de la variedad lingüística atestiguada. ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a new source for the study of the 18th century Western Basque. It is a judicial document written by scribes in 1770 in Bilbao, and it was prepared to be exhibited in Zollo (Biscay). Therefore, the text comes to fill one of the gaps in the historical corpus of Basque, and it is interesting because of the textual genre as well as from the geolinguistic and chronological points of view. After a historical introduction, whose aim is to better understand the context in which the text was created, we present a critical edition. Furthermore, we analyse the main linguistic features and we propose a hypothesis about affiliation of the text’s linguistic variety.


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