Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman
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Название: Vernacular Voices
Автор: Kirsten A. Fudeman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Языкознание
Серия: Jewish Culture and Contexts
isbn: 9780812205350
isbn:
The most common type of code-switching in Jewish texts in Old French involves isolated Hebrew words. Many of the same words occur in other Jewish languages and can be considered symbols of unity between far-flung Jewish communities. Many have no apt vernacular translation, but many do (for example, rasha‘ [“wicked”], mizraḥ [“east”], sha‘ah [“hour, time”]), suggesting that the Hebrew words served both practical and stylistic purposes. Most of the Hebrew words in Jewish French texts come from the religious sphere, denoting, for example, people and other beings (e.g., ḥatan [“bridegroom”], kallah [“bride”], kohen [“priest”], qadosh [“martyr”], mal’akhim [“angels”]),109 texts (e.g., torah),110 ritual objects (e.g., shofar [“instrument made from the horn of a ram or other animal”]),111 concepts (e.g., galut [“(Jewish) exile”], qedushah [“sanctification, martyrdom”], teshuvah [“return, repentance”], zekhut [“right, merit”]),112 or the Temple, its parts, and the items found there (lo mishkan [“the Temple”] [lo is French], dukhan [“platform”]).113 In the written documents that have come down to us, it is Hebrew-French code-switching, including the use of Hebrew vocabulary items (regardless of their frequency or limitations on contexts in which they were used), that renders medieval Jews’ French most distinctive.
In Hebraico-French poetry, the mixing of occasional Hebrew words creates a “poétique des contrastes,” a linguistic texturing considered by Paul Zumthor a fundamental tendency of medieval literary aesthetics.114 In this stanza from a hymn for Rosh Hashanah in Old French, avot (“fathers”) is used instead of Old French peres; shofar, which has no true equivalent in Old French, designates the ritual ram’s horn sounded during the service for the new year.
Les anfanz des AVOT sages i apris, bian anseneiz,
A tocher do SHOFAR ce setein mais cheke an sont peneiz;
Roi de rainçon, remanbr[e] l’amor d’anci[a]nz: ver soi eteiant adoneiz; Lus anfanz si acreis[s]e come éteiles de ciel, plus ne seiant mal meneiz.115
(The well-taught children of the wise and learnèd FOREFATHERS
take pains to sound the SHOFAR in this, the seventh month, each year;
King of Redemption, remember the love of the Ancients: they dedicated themselves to you;
multiply their children like stars in the heavens, may they not be harassed anymore.)
Jews writing in Old French regularly called the bride kallah and the bridegroom ḥatan, as in the final stanza of the wedding song beginning El giv‘at ha-levonah (To the hill of frankincense) (see Chapter 4), and it can be argued that these have no real vernacular equivalents, because they denote a specifically Jewish bride and bridegroom.
ET SHEN SELA‘ HA-EITAN
tu ve[n]ras ja eiproveir
EL TOKH GINNAT HA-BITAN
Ou li ḤATAN fu livreiz
HE-ḤATAN QOLO NATAN
Il a dit a seis priveiz
Bia chanteir einuie ce saveiz
Le ḤATAN e la KALLAH an la cheire sus leveiz!116
(THE TOOTH OF THE HARD ROCK
You will come to experience it
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PALACE GARDEN
Where the bridegroom was turned over,
THE BRIDEGROOM GAVE FORTH HIS VOICE
He said to his attendants
“I’m bored by this fine singing, you know.”
Raise the BRIDEGROOM and the BRIDE upon the throne!)
This stanza is remarkable for another reason: the Hebrew preposition el (“to”) in the third line seems out of place, but it may have passed unnoticed by speakers of Old French, who would have heard Old French el (“in the”), making el tokh ginnat ha-bitan linguistically hybrid.
Not all of the special terms in Hebraico-French texts come from Hebrew. Melder (“study, meditate on [a text]”), originally from Greek (μελ-ετάω) through Latin (meletāre), was fully integrated into the Jews’ French, as demonstrated by its participation in phonological and morphological processes. Its phonological shape changes in accordance with regional phonological processes such as /l/-deletion in Lotharingian, and its inflections in accordance with its grammatical context.117 While Christian-authored texts contain prefixed forms of Latin meletāre, it seems that from the Middle Ages onward, unprefixed cognates occur almost exclusively in Jewish texts, whether Greek or Romance (French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish).118
Ḥaldrube (“camel’s hump,” “hunchback’s hump”), cognate with Classical Arabic ḥádaba and modern Spanish joroba and apparently borrowed into French from Hispano-Arabic, is given as a French term in numerous contexts, including the glosses of Rashi, Joseph Kara, and pseudo-Gershom, and the Hebrew-French glossaries of Basel, Leipzig, and Paris.119 Another word that appears in multiple contexts is the bird name herupe, which is given as the Old French translation of Hebrew dukhifat (an unclean bird sometimes translated into English as “hoopoe”) by Rashi, as well as in brief glossaries in ms. Valmadonna 1 and Cod. Parm. 2342 (on the latter, see Chapter 3) and in the much more extensive Basel, Leipzig, Paris, and Parma (Cod. Parm. 2924) glossaries.120 Herupe, which may be onomatopoeic, is not, to my knowledge, attested in non-Jewish texts in Old French, which call the hoopoe hupe or huhud.121 Note that the existing evidence shows only that ḥaldrube and herupe existed in a French Jewish scholarly register, although either might have potentially been used in non-scholarly contexts as well (in the case of ḥaldrube, presumably only with the sense “hunchback’s hump”).
In many Jewish texts in Old French of diverse geographic provenance, the word for “God” is Gé.122 The more typical Old French oblique forms Dié and Dé are also attested, even in manuscripts from the same regions.123 Deriving Gé (pronounced [dže] and later [že]) from Latin Dĕus or Old French Dié is straightforward,124 and so it is likely that Jews were not alone in pronouncing the name of God thus some of the time. The solemn significance of the name meant that its spelling was particularly bound to the Latin one in Christian-authored texts. Indeed, we know from Ch. Théodore Gossen’s study of Picard that even when medieval French speakers’ pronunciations of the word for “God” varied, their spellings rarely did.125 But Jewish scribes, relatively free from СКАЧАТЬ