craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

I have talked before about my interest in pursuing the HSK as a long-term goal. The idea of a ranked certificate to showcase my Chinese ability appealed to me as a way to put a definite achievement milestone along the practically infinite road of learning Chinese characters. I will probably never be able to say I speak Chinese fluently, but if I pass HSK level 3 or 4, I will at least have that to hang my hat on.

Recently, though, I decided to test out just how much Chinese proficiency that level of mastery would actually get me. Using the character lists I found here, I coded up a little program that takes a website and highlights the characters that are included at a given HSK level.

The resulting program was actually pretty interesting to play around with. Trying it on different websites, with different types of content, allowed me to see, visually, how much I would be able to read after having learned a given number of characters. For example, here is a section from the Wikipedia article on railroads (chosen as an example of a page with fairly straightforward content), with only the level one vocabulary (176 characters) highlighted in pink:

That should make it fairly clear that at HSK Level 1, one remains quite illiterate. (As I can testify from experience!) Now here is the same text with HSK levels 1-4 highlighted (the most I ever expect to learn, 1067 characters). In this and the following image, the different shades of pink are progressively lighter according to the level of the character (1, 2, 3, or 4 in this case):

Finally, here is what one who achieves the full HSK levels 1-6 (that's 2631 characters) would know. Again, the lightest characters are those of the highest level; the black ones are those that a reader still would not recognise even after learning the entire HSK list:

While it is said that at level 4, one has mastered enough characters to read 90% of Chinese text, and at level 6 that number rises to 98%, viewing the texts in this way allows one to see things in more practical terms: a level 4 reader can read a text, but it will require a lot of trips to the dictionary to do so, making it quite a chore to get through anything more than half a page long.

At level 6, reading is much more fluid, but still by no means perfect. Still, dictionary trips are rare enough that one should be able to read real texts, even long ones, when motivated enough to do so (in the example above, learning 轨—gui3, 'rail'—alone, would eliminate half of the black characters remaining in the text).

This is probably why the HSK only tests up to this level: once one has attained this level of literacy, the remaining 1500-odd characters that an adult Chinese person knows can be picked up in the wild, in the course of immersing oneself in the Chinese language, rather than through further classroom learning.

I thought I would share these findings, because I think it is a useful visual illustration, even for someone who cannot read any Chinese, of what knowing a certain number of characters actually gets you.

Classical Latin is a very artificial language, which both in prose and poetry favours complex constructions that to this day define what Western culture considers erudite sounding, intellectual speech. Because of this, it is hard to read, in a "pick up a book and read it" sort of way. This sentence from Cæsar is a typical, and by no means extreme example:

Ubi (Cæsar) se diutius duci intellexit et diem instare quo die frumentum militibus metiri oporteret, convocatis eorum principibus, quorum magnam copiam in castris habebat, in his Diviciaco et Lisco, qui summo magistratui præerat, quem vergobretum appellant Ædui, qui creatur annuus et vitæ necisque in suos habet potestatem, graviter eos accusat, quòd, quum neque emi neque ex agris sumi possit, tam necessario tempore, tam propinquis hostibus ab iis non sublevetur, præsertim quum magnâ ex parte eorum precibus adductus bellum susceperit, multo etiam graviùs quòd sit destitutus queritur.

That's from de Bello Gallico I.16, and you don't need to know any Latin to get my point: all that is one sentence! You need to keep a lot in your head to keep track of that many subordinate clauses, and that means that even with a perfect grasp of Latin grammar and vocabulary, you still need to read very attentively. And Cæsar is considered one of the easiest classical authors to read! (I'm told that some of Thucydides' sentences run over four pages.)

In contrast, a lot of the Latin written after the fall of Rome, mostly by monks, is a lot closer to the way we talk today. The Gesta Romanorum is exactly the kind of book you can just pick up and read once you know the basics of Latin grammar and vocab, but it's not considered appropriate to give to students because its style is so "barbarous" in comparison to the eloquent classicism of Cæsar and Cicero. (I really have to question that reasoning—it seems to me to be akin to giving King Lear to kindergarteners because Dr. Seuss' works lack literary merit—but that's an whole other article.)

This leaves students of Latin and Greek with a hurdle even greater than that of students in modern languages: not only do they have the same difficult leap from the textbook to the real thing, but the only "real thing" they come into contact with is exceedingly difficult in terms of its content!

Even though grammars, dictionaries, and introductions to Latin abound, there is still relatively little material that guides the beginner gradually yet expeditiously towards a confident mastery of classical material. For all too many aspirants, the leap (or toss) into the primary texts has entailed a falling into a kind of void: suddenly, the project slows down, often ending in a perpetual stall.

That quote comes from Claude Pavur at Saint Louis University, whose site takes one approach to the problem which you can read about there. While I don't doubt that his accelerated readers are a godsend to some, it's not a method that resonates with me. (In fairness, he's targetting the 'beginning intermediate' level whereas I probably fall closer to 'advanced intermediate'.) But I am in total agreement with him as to what the problem is:

Under such conditions, reading Latin becomes puzzle-solving, an adventure in decoding, a challenge to patience, a therapeutic escape in "busy work" — anything but an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture that often offers great writing, important ideas, valuable teachings, and significant personalities.

What I ended up doing back in university was instead turning to mediæval texts like the Gesta Romanorum that were easier to read, or less erudite Roman texts like the Passio Perpetuæ. They might not be the pinnacles of world literature that the canonical classics are, but at least I could have "an instructive and vital encounter with an interesting, complex, and vastly influential culture" through them. But I still moved like a snail through classical Latin, going to the dictionary with what seemed like every other word.

It so happens however that I recently stumbled across a fantastic new way to learn Classical Latin that makes getting across this hurdle so much easier. It came to me when I was looking for Ovid's Metamorphoses on Google Books, which has a huge selection of beautifully typeset Latin and Greek books printed in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries (when, as I've already asserted, typesetting conventions were also superior to those of the present day). I found just what I was looking for: an 1821 edition of Ovid, beautifully typeset with js and ligatures. At first I noted with amusement that the explanatory notes, pointing out the meaning of difficult words or allusions, were themselves in Latin, which didn't seem very helpful on the editor's part! But as I started looking it over I discovered something even more amazing: in addition to the footnotes, each page has a paraphrase of the text in simple-to-understand Latin! After some assiduous searching, I was also able to find an even more copiously annotated edition of Virgil based on the same principle (this time with a Talmud-inspired page layout, no less). Here's an excerpt:

An intermediate-level student can usually understand the Interpretatio and Notæ on his own, but the poem itself would be too difficult without a lot of dictionary work. But with their help, he can understand the sense and context of the poem (all the while excercising his Latin skills), and so figure out how to read the verses all by himself.

This strikes me as such a brilliant way to bridge the gap between learning the basics of Latin and learning how to deal with the intricate literary complexity of the great classics. And the reader is never discouraged to be looking at the "interpretation", since it is still Latin after all: There's no shame in being told that tellus means terra—the reader will go on to discover the nuances on his own, and through his own experience, which is much better than just being told it and adding it to one's vocab list to memorize. (And if you don't recognise even the simple word in the paraphrase, then looking it up is only half the chore, because you know that when you do you will most likely learn two words in the process, since it is a priori the synonym of another word you don't know in the text itself.)

The effect of all this is that you no longer feel "I don't know Latin because I can't read pages of Virgil effortlessly"; instead you feel that "I can read Latin, but Virgil is a difficult author who takes some effort to tackle"—which after all is just what English students feel when dealing with Shakespeare or Milton for the first time. It's an important difference for the reader's self-confidence—and a more realistic acknowledgement of the difficulty of the great classics.

My own level in Latin was until recently stuck precisely in that rut between being able to read the Gesta Romanorum without ever picking up a dictionary, but feeling like an idiot when confronted with a page of Cicero (the goal of my recent Latin kick has been to at last rectify that). Now with these books I am really looking forward to "leveling up" on Virgil and Ovid, and bet I will progress twice as fast thanks to this brilliant, yet sadly no doubt long-forgotten, idea!

I've written previously about the ways in which Latin and Greek complement each other in traditional classical education. Another interesting parallel exists in the texts that are most often read by students as their first introduction to real classical prose: for Latin, Cæsar's De bello gallico, and for Greek, Xenophon's Ἀνάβασις.

Both texts are chosen by teachers because of their style is clear and direct (and therefore not too confusing for beginners), and because their style and vocabulary are considered exemplary by the standards of classical prose for the two languages.

It is surprising, then, to note that, by pure coincidence and independently of their suitability for education, the books' actual contents are very similar. Both are autobiographical texts, narrated in the third person, about military campaigns that the author took part in. As such, they are edifying reading, both for history—giving the reader a vivid picture of the very different world that people lived in over 2000 years ago, and as guides to leadership: both tales are some of the most inspiring texts in history in this regard, and the simpler world they took place in makes it easy to take lessons from the various leadership techniques and trials that the protagonists went through.

Despite the similarities, though, I think it would be unfair to Cæsar to equate the two. Firstly, the historical impact of Julius Cæsar on world history dwarfs that of Artaxerxes, let alone Xenophon, so the opportunity to hear him in his own words is so much the more valuable. Not only that, but he is the commander in chief of the campaign he narrates from start to finish, while Xenophon only comes to a position of leadership through necessity. And of course, although both outcomes can give instructive lessons, Cæsar was victorious in his conquest of Gaul, while the Anabasis, a story of a successful escape, takes place in the shadow of Cyrus' defeated attempt to overthrow his brother. Cæsar is a genius in terms of leadership and military strategy (as he intends his writings to get across to us), and also in literary terms: his Latin prose really is outstanding, and he probably still holds the literary title for best use of understatement.

Xenophon cannot be put on the same level, in my opinion. In fact I suspect that were I teaching Greek I might use Plato's Apology and Symposium as my baseline texts for Attic prose. (I think it might also be cool to compare and contrast Xenophon's and Plato's Apologies, but I haven't gotten around to doing this yet myself, so I can't vouch for this approach.) They are sublime stylistically without being too difficult, and the lessons they teach are perhaps of greater use to beginning students. The Anabasis is an adventure story, very exciting, to be sure—but you have to be able to read Greek at a certain level for a page-turner to be a page-turner!

That is not to sell the Anabasis short, though. When military campaigns go wrong, as here or in the events recounted in the movie Black Hawk Down, the ensuing story is often more exciting and more replete with heroism than when everything goes according to plan. (Cæsar's victory at Alesia, however, is a fine counterexample.) When I was a beginning student, in both Latin and Greek I skipped over these texts in favour of others that seemed more interesting to me at the time, but now that I've had time to go back to them later in life I really do think that their place at (Cæsar) or near (Xenophon) the beginning of any classicist's reading list is well deserved.

It's time for a poem in English this time:

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.

This is of course the introduction to the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive game Zero Wing, and was not intentional poetry. Rather it is the most famously egregious case of bad Japanese-to-English translation, something that Western gamers struggled with regularly in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.

That said, however, it is one of the most quoted texts in the history of the internet age, and after the De-CSS haiku, the poem that I would consider most representative of our unpoetic age. Not only that, but I'm sure that most of the confused kids playing the game thought that the odd language was intended to be poetic.

As a poem, too, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" holds up rather well. One proof being that it is so eminently quotable. I have seen separate references not only to the celebrated "all your base are belong to us" but also "somebody set up us the bomb", "how are you gentlemen !!", "what you say !!", "you have no chance to survive make your time", and of course, "for great justice". And if I ever have a voice-activated television or computer, you can bet I will program it to respond to "main screen turn on"!

We're not quite to the point where we have an instance of a famous poem created by a computer, but in some ways I feel like "All Your Base" comes close :-)

I was reading A Dissertation on Reading the Classics on Google Books, an XVIIIth-century book written for the son of a duke, telling him what classics he ought to read, when the following quote gave me pause:

I will go no farther in the Poets, only for the Honour of our Country, let me observe to Your Lordship, that while Rome hath been contented to produce some single Rivals to the Grecian Poetry, England hath brought forth the wonderful Cowley's Wit, who was beloved by every Muse he courted, and hath rivalled the Greek and Latin Poets in every Kind, but Tragedy.

He's referring to Abraham Cowley, but I had to look him up in order to know that! (I had assumed he was building up to Shakespeare.) Amazing that the author assumed Cowley to be of such enduring greatness that he would go down in history as the equal of Homer and Vergil! The fact that he was so far off the mark gives us some perspective on history all the same, though—and how surprised we might be at how the things we assume to be historic or enduring from our own lifetimes could end up being in the scheme of things.

O tempora ! O mores !

To me it sums up visually the sort of internal process of education that one gets out of learning Latin, the language that is at the foundation of our civilisation. It is at once humorous to me while still making its point very effectively.

What I did not expect, was to read in Cæsar's De Bello Gallico a passage which all but justifies this picture as being in fact an accurate depiction of the state of the ancient world! Here is an excerpt of his description of the Germanic tribes:

Neque multum frumento, sed maximam partem lacte atque pecore vivunt multum sunt in venationibus; quæ res et cibi genere et cotidiana exercitatione et libertate vitæ, quod a pueris nullo officio aut disciplina adsuefacti nihil omnino contra voluntatem faciunt, et vires alit et immani corporum magnitudine homines efficit. Atque in eam se consuetudinem adduxerunt ut locis frigidissimis neque vestitus præter pelles habeant quicquam, quarum propter exiguitatem magna est corporis pars aperta, et laventur in fluminibus.

I find it striking not only that the barbarians not only actually were basically wild hulking giants dressed half-naked in furs, but also that the Romans were so sophisticated in comparison, with a standard of living that after the fall of Rome would take a millennium to recover. This picture, which I had merely found humorous, speaks the truth in more ways than one.

One of my favourite moments in the movie The Blues Brothers occurs when the band finds itself preparing to go on stage at "Bob's Country Bunker". As our heroes slowly come to grips with the hints (hay, cowboy hats, a suggestion that they set up their steel guitars) that they are in the wrong kind of place, Elwood hesitantly asks, "ma'am, what kind of music do you usually play here?" Her chirpy reply, "oh, we've got both kinds—country and western!", underlines just how far out in the sticks they are.

Besides underlining just how country this country bar is—definitely not the kind of place for Chicago blues musicians, the joke also plays on the stereotype that country folk have very limited horizons, mistrusting anything that "don't come from 'round these parts," as it were.

It is because of those disparaging associations that I was so delighted to read the preface to Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, precisely because that work is, to me, just about the polar opposite in terms of accepted erudition. Quintilian is considered one of the most heavily educated, serious writers of the ancient world, and his work has exerted an influence on education and literary criticism that can be felt to the present day. With all this running through my head, then, I opened the noble tome and read the first sentence:

Post impetratam studiis meis quietem, quæ per viginti annos erudiendis juvenibus impenderam, quum a me quidam familiariter postularent ut aliquid de ratione dicendi componerem, diu sum equidem reluctatus, quòd auctores utriusque linguæ clarissimos non ignorabam multa quæ ad hoc opus pertinerent diligentissime scripta posteris reliquisse.

As openings go, I must say, this is as pompous and formal as my understanding of Quintilian's reputation would have led me to expect, calling attention in the very first sentence to his twenty years of scholarship and long experience as a teacher—one who only hesitates to bestow his great knowledge upon us, for the humble reason that he is so widely read! The expression that surprised me so much, though, was the casual way he refers to "auctores utriusque linguæ"—both languages: Greek and Latin! No need to even enumerate them: for Quintilian it is just as much a given that these languages have all that's worth reading as it is a certainty for Bob's wife that country and western cover all the music worth listening to.

What it means, though, is that education in itself is no defense against close-mindedness. Indeed, often education—or rather, the assumption that one has done one's due diligence—is a key cause of close-mindedness. After all, with both Quintilian and Bob's wife, I think, we are dealing with people who have 'done their homework' and now feel confident that they know what they like. Presumably, at an earlier stage, they were more open to new things, but now that they consider themselves informed, they no longer are. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" at work? Perhaps, but the remedy to the phenomenon that that proverb describes is usually assumed to be more knowledge—more complete knowledge. I think that Quintilian's case proves that assumption false: it can happen that the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to assume you know best.

The implication, for me, is that an open mind needs to be seen as something worth cultivating in and of itself, regardless of how much one may know about the world. However much one may adore or value something, the light that something brings into our life should not be the cause of a blindness to things outside of it.

(*in the two weeks since Tom put me on to reading Dinosaur comics anyway)

See it here

For reasons which will already be evident to regular readers of this blog, I especially appreciated learning that "he who can speak many languages is suspected by his peers to be a ultra super genius times two (sic)," and that "maybe in 3 months languages less spoken will be the very CURRENCY of coolness."

Perhaps then I'll get more comments on the Esperanto sections of my blog :-)

The introductory lecture to Stanford's course on Hannibal is one of the most chilling, disturbing things I have ever listened to. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I think it is extremely important to listen to for some people.

The lecture in question gives background into some of the practices of the ancient Carthaginians, in order to better understand Hannibal's culture and the things that would be weighing on him psychologically in the course of his war with Rome. Apart from that connexion, though, Hannibal and the Punic wars do not really figure into this lecture. Rather it details the discovery of a facet of Carthaginian culture that history had tried to erase from memory: the widespread practice of sacrificing their first born sons when they were little boys.

Obviously, to me as a father, this was disturbing material to hear about, so I don't think I need to justify why this lecture chilled me so. Rather, the question is why, for some, I so strongly recommend listening to it.

For one, the Carthiginian civilisation was arguably the most advanced in the world at its prime, and inarguably it was near the top of the list. For a civilised human culture to develop along lines so alien to what we think of as civilisation today is an important revelation. Hearing about the Carthiginian practices poses important questions: What does it mean to be human? What attrocities are we as a species capable of if we develop in the wrong direction—and how can we ensure that we develop in the right direction, or even understand reliably what "right" is, if our "natural" senses can be so perverted?

Secondly, developing a better understanding of Carthaginian culture is absolutely necessary in order to understand another somewhat influential historical figure: Abraham. Carthage was actually a prosperous colony of the Canaanite Phœnician civilisation, and shared a common language and religion with those peoples. The same peoples who occupy a large part of the Old Testament. The story in Genesis of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is, I believe, completely incomprehensible without the context of the Canaanite practices that this lecture describes.

These are dark questions, and it is easy to understand why they are not often addressed (indeed, this is why knowledge of the Carthiginian sacrifices—or at least of their reality and extent—was lost to us until recently). But for those who wish to understand the story of Abraham, the life of Hannibal, or some very probing questions on human nature, I think that the first lecture of this course is an important element.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
Aridâ modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas
Meas esse aliquid putare nugas
Jam tum, quum ausus es unus Italorum
Omne ævum tribus explicare chartis
Doctis, Jupiter, et laboriosis.
Quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
Qualecumque; quod, patrona virgo,
Plus uno maneat perenne sæclo.

I saw a blog somewhere that was built around the idea going through the poems of Catullus, one by one, and commenting on and translating them. (I don't have a link; this was a random thing I came across going through some search results, and I can't find it again.) In any event there are probably a lot of people who do similar things, probably with all kinds of content (I would bet that Shakespeare's sonnets lead the pack.)

So I thought, what the hell, it might be fun to throw up the occasional poem and a few thoughts on it. I'm not going to offer a translation, though, since I find that that really ruins poetry, and it's counter-productive to share a poem you appreciate if in so doing you make it seem unattractive. It would just give the impression that I like unattractive poems to those who can't read Latin, reducing my audience to those who can. But in that case there's no need for a translation. Anyway, this first one is pretty easy to read; the only external context that it helps to have is knowing that Cornelius Nepos, whom the poet is addressing, wrote a three-volume history of Rome. (It says as much right there in the poem, but anything said poetically is easier to figure out if you're already aware of the facts.)

Anyway then, on to some thoughts on this Catullus' introduction to his libellus: It is a pretty darn impressive way to start a collection! From the very beginning it is clear that he indeed does wield language in a way that is expolitus arida pumice. I do always find it odd how in so many Latin poems you get these proper names in the vocative. Here it of course makes since, since it is a dedication, but Catullus does it all the time. Every time I see these references to random people this funny little epigram from Martial pops into my head:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare.
    Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.

What a way for Sabidius to be remembered two millenia later! Other than that remark, for me the absolute best part of this poem comes at the end: Quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli qualecumque. Something about that construction habe tibi just strikes me as particularly quaint and pleasant. This poem starts out asking itself a question and immediately answering it (tibi!), so we know from the get-go that the poet is having a little fun, almost childishly, even as he goes on to express real gratitude to Cornelius. Lepidus indeed!

Finally, the almost throw-away reference to the patrona virgo hardly qualifies as an invocation of the muse; it's ironic to me that Lucretius invokes his Venus more sincerely than Catullus does his Minerva, though I know it has more to do with the type of poem than anything deliberate on either's part. That said Catullus' invocation of Jupiter could be considered somewhat blasphemous—although I suppose the pagans didn't really have such a concept, rooted as it is in the decalogue.

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
Et quod vides perîsse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
Quum ventitabas quò puella ducebat
Amata nobis quantùm amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa cum jocosa fiebant,
Quæ tu volebas nec puella nolebat,
Fulsere verè candidi tibi soles.
Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque, impotens, noli,
Nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive,
Sed obstinatâ mente perfer, obdura.
Vale, puella, jam Catullus obdurat,
Nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.
At tu dolebis, quum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, væ te! Quæ tibi manet vita?
Quis nunc te adibit? Cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cujus esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

This is, if I'm being honest, probably my favourite poem in any language. (Officially though that honour still belongs to the Iliad, the fons fontium.) I'm aware that this poem probably speaks to me so clearly now because it is simple to understand, and my tastes may well evolve with my language ability, but even so, it speaks to me on a very personal level (taking our puella as a personification of another feminine noun in my case...) Nunc jam illa non vult; tu quoque impotens noli, nec quæ fugit sectare nec miser vive, sed obstinatâ mente perfer obdura pretty much sums up the story of my coming to France. (Although I like to think I live without the venom of the last six lines!) And you know that it's a very personal poem for Catullus as well—how could anything published "ad se ipsum" not be?

The metre may be choliambic, which generally denotes a satirical tone, but as is so often the case in Latin poetry, the meter is used in deliberate counterpoint to the stress and content of the poem: Catullus is putting on a strong face, but we don't believe him. (This is something we can't do in English where stress and cæsura are bound to the metre; in Greek and Latin they are freed since the metre is quantitative and unrelated to stress, and this allows the poet to arrange harmonies and counterpoints that would not be possible otherwise. To say nothing of that distilled pith that is only possible in an inflected language.) Also, of course, as an English speaker, I am required to show partiality to iambs :-)

I've said before that it bothers me somewhat when a lyric poem uses proper names in the vocative, even though this is extremely common in Latin poetry. (I mean when they are specific individuals—I don't mean gods and muses and the like.) But that's because the poet is addressing someone whom he knows personally and the reader does not, so you can't help feeling a bit lost or left out. That is not the case here, though: here I love it! The difference being that we do feel like we know Catullus personally, because we know him through his poems.

Moreover structurally, he uses his name here in a way that ties the whole poem together: in the vocative in the first and last lines, and then in the nominative in the middle, a sudden surprising shift from the second into the third person that harmonises perfectly with the poet's own shift from self-pity to vengeful resolve. It's so impactful that if you're reading the poem out loud sitting down, at that point you almost feel the need to stand up! This poem is the perfect salve for anyone who has ever had his heart broken.

My own composition, as it were...

Docta Thalia jubet, chartæ perfringere ceram,
Non ex Odrysiis partibus illa venit,
Non tibi terrificos narrabit epistola casus.
Lætitias mentis deperit ipsa tuas.
Cognita nostra domus gratus, qui metra paravit
Semper eras Ductor, quod mea Musa canit.
Justitiam observas, famæ mendacia rides,
Magnus in adversis cor patientis habes.
Tot dotes ornant, vigilant quot in æthere stellæ,
Quot Mars tella vibrat, fulmina quoque Jovi.
Quis te status habet? Non læso ego corpore vivo,
Accedant meritis sæcla beata tuis.
Sed quæ causa subest? Modulis tu absistere cæptis?
Aonios superans per metra docta sonos.

Not many people know this about me (because it hardly ever has occasion to come up), but I can actually read Yiddish at a reasonably competent level. This despite the fact that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish heritage or other connexions to Yiddish culture. I have decided that I should talk more about it, though, because the language is in bad shape these days, and I find that sad. So I thought a few remarks were in order on why I, a non-Jew, find it worthwhile, fulfilling, and rewarding to study Yiddish, and why putting time and effort into the appreciation and preservation of this unique and fascinating language is a worthwhile endeavour for anyone to get involved with.

Yiddish was until recently the language spoken by the majority of the world's Jews, and as such was the language of an international culture (this was before the creation of a Jewish state in Israel), a culture that prized learning and literacy and which therefore produced many great cultural fruits, in music, theatre, literature, etc.

Today Yiddish is spoken by only a tiny minority of the world's Jews, and were it not for a few religious sects that cling to it as an article of faith (such as the Satmar hasidim), it's future survival beyond the 21st century would be in great doubt. In any event, though, the language is a shell of its former self: before World War II, Yiddish had 12 million speakers. Now there are around 300,000 and the overwhelming majority of these are quite elderly. At one time Yiddish theatres in New York put on productions of a quality and attendance that equaled those put on in English, and the Forward, then a daily paper, had a circulation of 275,000.

It is now a weekly paper whose circulation hovers around 5,000—every Yiddish-speaking man, woman, and child on the planet would have to subscribe for it to rival its former glory; the paper's original building in Manhattan (pictured here) has been converted into appartments.

There were three key reasons for Yiddish's rapid decline. First and most obviously, the massacre of the holocaust led to the murder of six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Yiddish speakers. But still, one may legitimately ask why the remaining Jews abandoned the language. After all, if Hitler and the Nazis failed in their quest to exterminate all Jews, should not Jews have fought to restore their culture? If Yiddish culture (the only Jewish culture the Nazis knew about, to the extent they knew anything about Jews) were allowed to perish, would not that be allowing the holocaust to wreak still more destruction, even after the Nazis themselves were stopped?

Of course the Jewish nation did re-assert its identity in the wake of the holocaust, re-taking the Holy Land in 1948 and creating the Jewish state of Israel. But the new state took as its language Modern Hebrew—and the use of Yiddish was actively discouraged. This effort to eradicate Yiddish from Israel is the second major reason for the language's decline.

It may seem paradoxical to replace a language with such a vibrant intellectual heritage with one that, in its modern incarnation at least, had little past—although of course Ancient Hebrew has through the Bible one of the most important literary heritages in the history of the world, it was produced some two thousand years before the modern state of Israel or the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

But the fact is that Yiddish culture was very much out of style following World War II: the founders of Israel wanted to make a new beginning, in a strong and independent state, and the image of the ghetto Jew, discriminated against and persecuted in Europe for so long, was something that the Jewish people were now eager to distance themselves from. And Yiddish was for many too closely tied to these images of the ghetto to be allowed to continue in "Eretz Israel". It was a past they were ashamed of.

Another, more practical reason for Hebrew to be used in place of Yiddish in Israel was that the holocaust had changed the demographics of world jewry. Whereas before most Jews were European and Yiddish-speaking, the slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis made these Jews, called Ashkenazi, less numerically dominant. Middle Eastern Jews, called Sephardi, had no knowledge of Yiddish, but if the state of Israel was to survive it would have to have as many Jews as possible on board to build it. Hebrew was a neutral language and a link to the common heritage of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi; Yiddish was not. Thus Modern Hebrew, a spoken language less than a century old, became the official language of Israel.

The third reason for Yiddish's decline lay with the diaspora. Not all Jews live in Israel, obviously; many millions continue to reside in other countries all over the world. Here too, though, modernity and a desire to fight the anti-semitism seen in the ghetto have led Jews to abandon Yiddish. American Jews now most often speak English at home, French Jews speak French, etc. The older generation, eager to see their children better integrated, simply did not teach them Yiddish, and as their generation dies out, a large percentage of the remaining Yiddish speakers in the world will go with them.

So far I have laid out what Yiddish is, and how it once flourished, and how it came to be that it is now becoming endangered. However now that I have traced the reasons for Yiddish's decline I want to get back to my main topic, which is why, despite all this, one might still get a heck of a lot out of knowing Yiddish.

Cultural Charm—the Joys of Yiddish

There is no other language like Yiddish. It is a Germanic language (it shares a common ancestor with German), written with Hebrew letters, and with a large amount of borrowings from other languages, mostly Hebrew and Slavic. It has a wealth of idiomatic expressions, which combine to give it a character and personality that are completely unique. Many Yiddish words have come into English, such as klutz, chutzpah, and tukhes—and the fact that these are some of the most colourful words in English should give you a taste of what sort of personality Yiddish has as a language. This makes Yiddish a fascinating language to study for linguists and those interested in quirky languages. For those with a more casual interest in this side of Yiddish, all of this is explored in Leo Rosten's book The Joys of Yiddish, which provides an accessible look at Yiddish as a language of humour and personality that is aimed at those who are not big on learning languages.

The Language of Literary Heavyweights

Yiddish was once the language of an international intelligentsia whose literary works have gained international acclaim. As a language that is highly idiomatic, and with its own personality and character, it should be obvious that Yiddish literature is best appreciated in the original. Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer provide a wealth of literary classics in Yiddish that are not read often enough by students of world literature today. Admirers of world literature have a lot to gain by reading Yiddish; in this light the objection "but I'm not Jewish" seems as absurd as avoiding Victor Hugo because one is not French, or Dostoyevski when one is not Russian.

Preserving What has Nearly Been Wiped Out

I try to avoid talking about politics in my posts on this blog, however I am willing to go so far as to say that I am not in favour of Nazism. Dead set against it, as a matter of fact. It is not for me to judge, living in another time and place and not being Jewish, the feelings of those who decided that Yiddish culture was something to be ashamed of. However, with the perspective that distance does bring, I can see this much: the Nazis wanted to eliminate Yiddish culture, and in light of the events of the last 65 years, they have been largely succesful. Learning Yiddish and appreciating its culture is one small way to, symbolically at least, refuse them that success.

There are religious communities within Judaism that feel the same way, and more strongly than I do. I am confident that because of their existence, Yiddishkeit is not really in danger of extinction. Yiddish-speaking communities exist in the United States and Israel who are not persecuted (and have phenomenally high birth rates), and some still remain in Europe as well, so the language will not be allowed to die out. Secular Yiddish culture, though, such as that embodied in the Forward, has clearly seen its glory days come and go.

Still, there is nothing like the connexion one feels through a first-hand knowledge of Yiddish with the world of pre-war European Jewry, the vibrant world of intellectual debate and artistic achievement that lives on in their writings, music—and cinema. The most poignant illustration of this for me is the 1936 movie Yidl Mitn Fidl (a film that is as charming as the name sounds), filmed on location in Poland (then home to hundreds of thousands of Jews; now home to barely any). Many of the extras in the film were inhabitants of the local shtetls (Jewish villages). In other words, the faces of many of the extras in this movie are those of the very people who would soon be rounded up into concentration camps. To me, hearing the songs of this film gives us a connexion to what happened in the holocaust that makes Schindler's List pale in comparison—so much so that I feel it is unfortunate that for so many people, holocaust awareness pretty much begins and ends with that movie. A far cry from cold memorials and remembrances, learning Yiddish gives one the opportunity to connect directly with the past and to know those who lived and died in it through their own voices.

(Posted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009. Move ahead a few minutes in the clip above to see an extract of the movie Yidl Mitn Fidl.)

ἢ μὴ γενοίμαν ἢ πατέρων ἀγαθῶν
εἴην πολυκτήτων τε δόμων μέτοχος.
εἴ τι γὰρ πάσχοι τις ἀμήχανον, ἀλκᾶς
οὐ σπάνις εὐγενέταις,
κηρυσσομένοισι δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἐσθλῶν δωμάτων
τιμὰ καὶ κλέος· οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν
ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ
καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει.
κρεῖσσον δὲ νίκαν μὴ κακόδοξον ἔχειν
ἢ ξὺν φθόνῳ σφάλλειν δυνάμει τε δίκαν.
ἡδὺ μὲν γὰρ αὐτίκα τοῦτο βροτοῖσιν,
ἐν δὲ χρόνῳ τελέθει
ξηρὸν καὶ ὀνείδεσιν ἔγκειται δόμος.
ταύταν ᾔνεσα ταύταν καὶ φέρομαι βιοτάν·
μηδὲν δίκας ἔξω κράτος ἐν θαλάμοις
καὶ πόλει δύνασθαι.

I've already given one concrete reason why learning classical languages does indeed have practical utility: it can save you from getting a nonsense tattoo. This selection from Euripides' Andromache is another example; but explaining why requires a little context.

The section that is in italics in the text above, "οὔτοι λείψανα τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἀφαιρεῖται χρόνος· ἁ δ᾽ ἀρετὰ καὶ θανοῦσι λάμπει," is engraved in stone at McGill University (my alma mater), over the entrance to the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium and Armoury, which was the main student sports building, where I regularly worked out as a student.

The noble sentiments expressed in this quote, clearly intended in memory of McGill's war dead, are only part of what make it an inspirational thing to read on one's way to a workout. As choral verse, this passage also happens to be in the Doric dialect of Ancient Greek—the dialect of Sparta (as you can immediately see from "ἁ ἀρετά"). There is nothing more motivating, when you are setting off to lift weights and train, than having an inspirational verse of Spartan Greek put into your head on your way in the door. Not only does the entire Greek ideal of physical perfection come to mind, but beyond that the extreme training of the Lacedæmonian state as well. (ἢ τᾶν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς!) By the time you lift the first weight, you already picture yourself training for Leonidas! I have no doubt that my university workouts were far more effective because of this inscription over the door than they would have been otherwise, and it would have had no effect if I did not know Ancient Greek :-)

Besides that personal anecdote, I do think that this is a fine passage of Greek poetry, easy to read while at the same time offering a thought-provoking pre-Judæo-Christian take on morality, so I recommend taking a look at it if you study Ancient Greek. Bonus points for any commenters who relate the selection to this quote from Sallust :-)

Nam sæpe ego audivi Q. Maximum, P. Scipionem, præterea civitatis nostræ præclaros viros solitos ita dicere, cum majorum imagines intuerentur, vehementissime sibi animum ad virtutem accendi. Scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam vim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum eam flammam egregiis viris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam virtus eorum famam atque gloriam adæquaverit.