Sara(h) / Abra(ha)m

The following question was put to Dr Massey:

Q:  A colleague who goes by her birth-certificate name Sarah recounts that she was accosted by a fellow who admonished her to identify as (that ill-omened coinage)  “Sara”, the initial designation of Abraham’s wife, on the grounds that the -h conferred later was “honorific”. --  Now indeed the name patriarch himself, originally Abram,  likewise later achieved an extension, honoris causâ.
Question:  Is it alphabetically the same h in both cases?  And is there any sense in describing it (assuming they be the same) as an “honorific affix” (the way -ón in Spanish can be an augmentative affix), or is there nothing morphosemantically lofty about the names themselves, which merely happen to have been conferred for the purposes of honor?

The good doctor replied by return of post:

A: The person who told her this was simply wrong across the board. First off, the Matriarch's original name was not Sara, but Sarai. When her name is changed to Sarah is is simply moving to the Hebrew version of her original Aramaic name, both of which mean something like "princess."

I don't read the name changes as conferring honor at all. In the case of Abram --> Abraham, we have an actual semantic change, Exalted Father --> Father of a Multitude. In the case of Sarai--> Sarah, it might be similar to a man named Mohamed changing his name to Muhammad, i.e., making the name more purely Arabic.

The Hebrews seemed aware that, while they spoke their own distinct Semitic language, their origins had Aramaic swirling around. Deut 26:5, "My father was a wandering Aramean," referring to the Patriarchal age. NB also Gen 31:47, in which Laban, Jacob's uncle, calls a memorial stone by an Aramaic name, but Jacob gives it a Hebrew name.

The final h in feminine names and nouns in Hebrew is vocalic, not consonantal. It's equivalent to the taa' marbuta. As a result, it is added by convention in English transliteration, but unnecessary. Sara and Sarah are the same name, basically.

Help for Hebrew-learners

It is to be counted among the beauties -- nay, the graces -- of Classical Arabic,

as indeed still practiced by the more observant in our own day,

that, before reading-forth Scripture
(or indeed  any text  indited in that language 
wherein the Koran was revealed),

you utter the word  -- just this! -- :

“Bismillah.”

Which, being Englished, is as much as to say:  In nomine Dei.

(Let us pause as we contemplate the majesty of al-ism -- ha-Shem.)

~

And now  this winter evening,  reading poetry by candle-light,

and savoring a bit of brandy
(forbidden to the devotees of al-Rasûl,  

but mercifully permitted to those of Moses,

or of the Nazarene Carpenter)

I happened upon these passages,

from the pen of Charles Reznikoff (1894 - 1976;  born in America
of emigrant Ashkenazi parents):

How dificult for me is Hebrew:

even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun

is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion.

I have learnt the Hebrew blessing before eating bread;

is there no blessing before reading Hebrew?

~

Time was, one time,  back in the day,

that I fared forth at lunchtime  in the company of damsels:

a lovely Jordanian muslimah, whose name in Arabic means ‘gentle rain’,

and a stern German, a Swabian Christian

(brought along quasi as chaperone)

at a time when I myself,  all pagan and unbaptised,

was quietly Christianizing:

and requested that the Muslimah  should say grace before our meal.

Expecting something elaborate, along the lines of

words I had heard

at the table-grace  of comfortably Protestant-raised relatives,

(“Bless this food to our use,

 and us to thy service … “)

instead she said,  just this:

“Bismillah.”

(Such polyvalent brevity 

is actually not characteristic of Arabic,

which seems to have a distinct blessing for every occasion,

along with an appropriate rejoinder.

As, to someone who has just had a haircut:

“Na`îman !”

℞ :

“Allah yin`im `aleek !”  )

~

E’en so!  May not the Hebrew words

that bless the bread,  thus bless the text?

O ye of Zion and of Judah,

of all the Diaspora,

℞  !

“Desolation Row” -- Norwegian version

Bob Dylan’s legendary concert in Oslo,  15 October 1965, offered an early version of the classic ballad “Desolation Row” -- in Norwegian! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Note -- This is not a cover!  Even though he is singing in what is obviously a Scandinavian language, fans will still easily recognize the peculiar phrasing and inflections of the Midwest master.

This is the first time he is known to have sung in the heritage language of the Vikings (to whom Robert Zimmerman is related on his mother’s side) -- or indeed, in any Germanic language other than English.

Dylan in Oslo

Mor, gi meg solen!

So -- enjoy!

And note:  All proceeds from this concert, go towards the charity,   “Save the Gefillte Fish”.

You may also enjoy this version of “Desolation Row”, sung by Dylan in a concert at Gallaudet University  in American Sign Language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWq_sOMoq9w

As for his little-known Tel Aviv concert in Hebrew, we must leave this for another time;  but a (grainy) video can be viewed here:

            געפֿילטע פֿיש

[Note:  Hebrew is written from right to left, but read from left to right.  Or is it the other way around?  Anyhow, apologies if my text-editor mangled things during the copy-and-paste process.    Me I haven’t a clue -- those meaningless squiggles are Greek to me.]

~

I studied Old Norse at Berkeley (with Madison Beeler, a gentle old man;  he bequeathed me his complete Grimm’s Wörterbuch when he retired, though I proved unworthy as a bailee).  That sturdy Viking tongue has changed as little, in the past thousand years, as any language on earth.  Accordingly, I can more or less read modern Icelandic.

Norwegian is a different kettle of kippers, however.  Even so, though I am not expert here, it does appear to my unpracticed ear that Mr Dylan (or his Norwegian lyricist) has taken certain liberties with the text.   The whole thing seems to have come out rather a tergo, if you catch my drift.  For, with all due attention to the disparity between the eastern and the western dialects of Norway, the weakening of strong verbs over time, and the Bokmål/Nynorsk/Riksmål/Høgnorsk tetraglossia, what he seems to be singing is:

Paul is dead

dead dead dead

deader than deader than

deader than death itself --

done-for, doomed, down, deceased,
dousing the daisies,

displacing the dandelions,

departed in demise.

O save the gefillte,

the poor dear gefillte,

for pity’s sake:

Save the Gefillte Fish!

~

“Desolation Row” is an affecting song, in a hypnotic sort of way;  but it contains (among many gems) some of the worst lyrics that Dylan ever wrote:  which is to say, the worst that anyone ever wrote.   Couplets like

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood / with his memories in a trunk,

passed this way an hour ago / with his friend, some jealous monk.

tells you nothing of value, either about the father of Relativity, or the hero of the greenwood, or monasticism.    And the further observation, that the celebrated physicist “went off sniffing drainpipes, and reciting the alphabet”,  has little competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Award ™  (a contest actually unfair to Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, who never wrote anything as bad as that).

The Norwegian lyrics are in some ways preferable.

Even so, his delivery is (as ever, in the early/middle period) exquisite.  In the couplet above, the final word of each line  receives is articulated with an aspirated final -k, perfectly attuned to his sardonic mode.   This phonetic polemic power simply deserves a better excipient (classically, in “Positively 4^th Street”).

In the same song, he uses that same word-final plosive to good effect  in the better couplet

I received your letter yesterday,  about the time the doorknob b-broke-hh.

When you asked me how I was doing -- was that some kind of j-joke-hh.

Simply  bare on the page,  that may be  unimpressive;   but his delivery evokes, from that,
a poignancy
impossible to imagine,
unless you have   (suffering, clutching)
heard it.

~

Hmm.  This wonderful nice post has received remarkably few page-views.  Can it possibly be because people think I might just be having them on?   Or is it rather that it features tew few newd pixxx?  Well that is easily remedied!

Icelandic beauty Aurelia Delvaukisdottir

(Ah, nice.  The number of pageviews just doubled.

There’s a lesson in this …)

Dylan’s intonation in this song is by no means unrelievedly sardonic (and here I speak of the album version, as well as bootleg performances of the time, rather than the Norwegian, which instead is characterized by a certain je ne sais quelle mélancolie du nord -- those endless summer days, those long winter nights), but can be, where the lyrics warrant it, quite tender.

~

The above was mostly satire -- or rather, sotie:  having fun with something, not making fun of it.  All in fun;  no harm done.

Yet let us dig down another layer.

This is a strange and slippery business, these backwards soundtracks.   Very few recordings could be illuminated (let alone improved) by this.   Those that admit it, must be (hypothesis here) hypnotic to begin with.   That is, the delivery and the lyrics  must already proceed  from the land of dreams.  The reversal -- rerouting, from the Gates of Ivory, to the Gates of Horn.

We have previously highlighted the reversed version of “Rain” .  Here, the fit is perfect.   The original was already so “aturdido”, that the two are simply duals of each other.  With equal justice, you might say that the album recording  was a reversed version of this one.  (In mathematics, neither dual is privileged w.r.t. the other.)

~

And noch another layer, now:
wir möchten, in des Wiener Nervenarzt Gesellschaft,  etwas weiter hinunterwühlen.   
Of all unexpected things, that satirically-intended photograph above of Mlle. Aurélie Delvaux,  has sparked an insight.   It has to do with duality,  and reversal.

The fascination of that image  presents, upon further reflection, a puzzle.  And puzzles ask to be fiddled with, turned this way and that, and  if possible  taken apart.

For the normally constituted observer, the nates are devoid of interest;  the star of the show, apud virum -- the main course, so far -- hangs (or, circumstances being favorable, stands) in front.

Yet the homologous spot chez la femelle, seems to be somehow lacking something;  in certain stages of arrested development, the attention then swings wildly, to the rear.  The latter (dull flesh, of no procreative power) thus receives the cathexis that, by rights, should settle vorne. 

~

By the time  “Desolation Row” debuted, I was as much a Dylan fan, as the little teeny-tweeny girls (my future bride among them) were Beatles fans.   I had my acoustic guitar, and a harmonica in a holder;  much as, in 1956, I’d had a coonskin cap.  So when I say now that lines like “Einstein disguised” etc. are pretty random, versteht sich:  when the album came out, in 1965, I hearkened to it, every word, with the same intensity as Orphée listening to  “L’oiseau chante … avec ses doigts”.  And the lyrics of that song marked my own  for a time, for better or worse:  as, this poem,

            Mardi Gras

which sprang from the brow of “Desolation Row”, with lyrics like:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging;

they’re painting the passports brown.

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors;

the circus is in town.

~

Okay, all satire aside:  What is Desolation Row, exactly?  It is nothing so simple as an Unhappy Place.

Heard superficially, “Desolation Row” sounds like a bummer, a place you’d want to escape from if bad luck landed you there -- something like Cleveland.   But listen to the lyrics.

First, for those outside, it is a Strange Attractor:

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

Next,  some people voluntarily go there -- indeed, “escape”:  not from it, but to it:

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

And in the final stanza of the song -- one of his finest lyrics -- Dylan makes plain that, if you do not understand the meaning and the milieu of Desolation Row,  you are not on his wavelength, and attempts at communication are pointless:

Right now  -- I can’t - réad tóo góod --
Don’t send me no more - letters, -- no-o-o …

Not unless // you mail them from :

Deh-soh-la-tion -- Row.

Lyrically, this hearks back to that immortal ballad, Birmingham Jail:

Write me a let-ter / send it by mail,

send it in care  of / the Birmingham jail.

I well understand what Dylan is talking about in this song -- I sought to go there myself, back in the sixties, when I would suck-down a Camel while listening to “Visions of Johanna”.  Laus deo, that much is now behind me.

Desolation Row is like Hell as depicted by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (unloved, but clung-to by its miserable inhabitants), or like the neurosis of a patient whose epinosic gain precludes cure by analysis.

Phrase for the Sabbath: Shabbos Goy (updated)

The original sabbath is Saturday, a connection reflected in cognate terms for the latter such as Spanish sábado, Arabic sabt, and more obscurely in French samedi (from Late Latin sambati dies), German Samstag.   For observant Jews, the day comes with many practical restrictions on what you are allowed to do -- no turning on lights, operating machinery, etc.

To observe the letter of the Law while yet enjoying the usual convenience, some Jews traditionally made use of a Shabbos goy -- or, more genteelly, Sabbath gentile -- to perform the necessary actions.

As, in the Depression-era memory of a working-class Gentile growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan:

There was also some Jewish fellows who I made a few dollars from.  I’d be standin’ around on one of the holidays  and the Jewish man would say, “Come up and light my fire.  I’ll give you a nickel.”  So, great, I’d go up the stairs, but I never could understand the whole concept of the Jewish holidays  where somebody would stand right next to you and you would light it for them, but who was gonna question them? I nickel here and a dime there -- that was big money.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 575

Yet a more particular conscience might be troubled at this dodge, and indeed we read:

If a non-Jew lights a lamp on Sabbath, a Jew may make use of the light.  But if he lights it for the sake of the Jew, it is forbidden.

-- The Mishnah: Oral Teachings of Judaism, transl. & ed. by Eugene Lipman (1970)

With a curious combination of ostensible observance and covert opportunism, a loophole was found even for this.   A footnote explains:

Non-Jews have also been used to keep coal furnaces going on Sabbath  and to perform similar minor chores -- all in violation of the Sabbath.  A legal fiction is used by the rabbinate to justify this practice.  The Jew may not ask the non-Jew to perform the service, nor may he compensate the non-Jew for performing such services.  The non-Jew “volunteers for his own reasons”, and the Jew benefits.  Later, a gift of gratitude is given to the non-Jew for the coincidental fact that his “volunteer” service was of benefit to the Jew on Sabbath.

One is reminded of those Islamic banks which obey the letter of the ban on usury by not charging “interest” on loans, so named;  but charging … ahem … certain fees …

Jesus, as was his wont, swept aside the casuistry, and cut right to the root: 

“The Sabbath was made for Man,

 not Man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

[Folkloristic note:]  Notions related to the "Shabbos goy":  cat's-paw;  proxy.

~

~   ~

A bonus, of Jewish interest:

Why you should never let a gentile run a pawnshop:

Murphy Makes a Mitzvah

[Kindle] [Nook]

~   ~

~

In European history we find a sort of mirror-image or dual of the shabbos goy:  the Hofjuden.

The wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had played into the hands of the Jewish money-changers and moneylenders, who had made themselves indispensable to the absolutistic princes.  Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the rules of states and principalities were depending  in their financial enterprises  on their “court Jews” (Hofjuden) … In the age of Metternich, most of the Jewish court bankers were baronized, although they were still deprived of citizenship.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 554

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin der Graf von Metternich, and I approved this message.)

~        

Another little-known parallel between European and MidEast social history, this from 19^th-century Prussia:

Jews and members  of the armed forces  were excluded from citizenship,  the former for racial,  the latter for professional reasons.  Members of both categories were considered as “denizens” (Schutzverwandte).  They were forbidden to own real estate, were excluded from trade and industry, and had no share in city administration.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 434

This arrangement of Schutzverwandte is reminiscent of the institution of dhimmis -- certain non-Muslim groups tolerated (and surtaxed) under caliphal rule.  (The “dh” here represents a voiced interdental fricative, like the initial sound of English this.)

The English Wikipedia entry, by the way, paints a happy-face on the history of dhimmi disabilities.

The German version, by contrast, names names:

Der Erlass des Abbasidenkalifen al-Mutawakkil gegen die Dhimmis

• Gemäß dem Historiker at-Tabarī erließ der Abbasidenkalif al-Mutawakkilim April 850 einen Befehl, wonach Christen und alle Schutzbefohlenen honigfarbene Umhänge taylasan und die althergebrachten Gürtel zunnar und eine gelbe Kopfbedeckung zu tragen hatten. Kleidervorschriften und weitere Unterscheidungsmerkmale sind allen Gemeinschaften des ahl al-dhimma auferlegt worden.
• al-Mutawakkil ließ ferner an die Häuser aller Nicht-Muslime schwarze Teufelsköpfe malen und ihre Gräber einebnen, um sie dadurch von den Gräbern der Muslime unterscheiden zu können.
• •            Gottesdienste und Beerdigungen sind unauffällig zu halten; dabei sind keine Zeichen ihres Glaubens, z. B. Kreuze, zu zeigen.Gemäß diesem Erlass von al-Mutawakkil mussten neu errichtete Gotteshäuser zerstört werden. Wenn der Platz groß genug war, sollte er als Bauland für eine Moschee verwendet werden.
• Dhimmis durften in Staatsämtern nicht beschäftigt werden.
• Kinder von Dhimmis hatten keinen Anspruch darauf, Schulen der Muslime zu besuchen oder von einem Muslim unterrichtet zu werden.

You will notice that the imposition of a yellow badge of shame upon the Jews, made notorious by the Nazis, was actually invented much earlier, under the Abbasids.

For a rich collection of cultural and semantic observations about the classical age of Arabic,

consult my book:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Update April 2014]

Jung had been, as is very clearly evident from Freud’s own emphatic statements, the Parade-Goy of the early psychoanalytic movement.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 8

(Here  Gellner is using the modifying appositive Parade-  in the German sense, as in Paradepferd;  nowadays Americans would say "poster-goy".)

The author adds in a footnote (p. 226):

This term, literally Display-Gentile, was in current use to describe a Gentile figurehead of a Jewish firm, set up to ward off anti-semitic feelings towards the establishment in question.

Compare, in our own day, the Parade-shvartser (among other ornaments) as a front for business benefitting from set-asides.

Update July 2018]  It turns out there is a curious reflex of goy in the French lexicon: goujat.

1. (vieux) valet d’armée
2. (vieux ou régional)  apprenti maçon

3. (vieux) rustre …

[mot languedocien, de l’ancien provençal gojat “gars”, hébreu goya “servante chrétienne”]

-- Dictionnaire de la langue française (Bordas)

Amos Oz

NPR just broadcast a sparkling interview with the celebrated Israeli author  Amos Oz.
There is nothing I can contribute here except to impart the useful information that his name is not pronounced like that of the equally celebrated Wizard, but is rather:  AH-moss OHZ.
Anyhow -- what struck me linguistically was his comparison of modern Hebrew to... Elizabethan English.
I had always thought rather slightingly of the Hebrew revival -- several cuts above Esperanto, to be sure,

("Toute langue artificielle, d'inspiration  soit mathématique,  soit logique,  est une langue mort-née. “  -- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 84 -- who, pourtant, actually went to the trouble of learning Esperanto, until he heard that it had been superseded by Ido;  at which point he wrote it all off  as a bad bargain.)

but still... you can no more invent your own mother tongue, than you can invent your own mother.
And yet... once invented... The astonishing practical success of this quixotic project was first brought home to me, many decades ago, when I met some Israelis monolingual in modern Hebrew, speaking very halting English.  And such is the Zeitgeist   that any language may become a cauldron, brewing and birthing forth --  lo!  bright new things ...

[Update]  A bonus, courtesy of Martin Gardner -- again a monosyllabic surname, with an unexpectedly long rounded vowel:   that of cosmic-inflation-maven Alan Guth,  with (delightfully) rhymes with truth.  (Unfortunately this chime -- this resonance! -- cannot be adduced as evidence for the validity of his theory, which Penrose now is calling "not just falsifiable, but falsified".  -- Oh well.  Still.  Nice name.)