What is "Little Poland"?
Some of us are familiar with that accent because we are Galicianers, but not Chasidim, BTW.
Malopolska, Lesser Poland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Les...and_Voivodeship
Sorry, wrong link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%...Ma%C5%
82opolska
פולין קטן was another name for Galicia (or West Galicia). It was one of the lands in the Council of Four Lands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Cou...l_of_Four_Lands
isnt it also possible that it is simply a typo? -- i dont know how presses worked then but on todays modern keyboard i and u are adjacent to each other.
mivami
This was before linotype or anything like that. I've seen pictures of typecase layouts, and i and u aren't next to each other. And it's repeated twice.
Of course it's still possible that it was a typo, but given that the man was from Brody, given that it happens twice, given that it makes sense, I place my odds on it being the man's transliteration. Of course, it was written initially in German or Danish and the man probably used an umlauted u rather than an i, but that's the same thing.
"A book, intitled Schebet Misser"
More interesting is the fact that while "misser" follows the Galician/Yiddish pronunciation, Schebet follows the maskilish/xtian one (based partialy on the LXX transliteration)...
Shimon, I'm not sure about that inference. You're talking about the b? At the time the b was almost universally used for ב, probably because of the close association between ו and w or v.
Yes, this transliteration was almost universal among european hebrew scholars. But the fact that it doesn't reflect any european/ahskenazi jewish pronunciation needs a longer explanation.
It seems clear to me that this reflects the greek and latin hebrew transliteration of LXX and Vulgata, which was well known to any educated european. It was also a religious statement (something like: who needs the jewish tradition anyway!).
I'm not sure about that. I think for most people writing in a European tongue in the 19th century it would almost have never occurred to use a w or v for ב. I don't know if I clarified the identity of this apostate or not, but his name was John Samuel Reinhold and he converted in 1781. This means that this was written almost 50 years later, so he had spent decades living as a Christian. That said, I have found many examples of the use of w and v, but they are a tiny fraction proportionate to b (and sometimes bh).
Why isn't my explanation sufficient? And on the contrary, the Christian knowledge of Hebrew came from Jewish sources and this was widely known and accepted. By this period, scholars had long since eschewed the problematic transliterations in the Septuagint (except for text critical purposes). A question is, why did Jews neglect their own sources?
There's much that can be written about transliteration, but suffice it to say that in earlier centuries one did find quite a bit of Ashkenazi transliteration used by Christians as well. Have a look at this
http://onthemainline.blogspot.co...07/when-
is.html
Let me explain my question.
Examples of letters
1. It can be shown that(at least)for many centuries the pronunciation of ב was in the Ashkenazi communities identical with the letter ו and corresponding with the sound of the latin letter V.
2. Similary, ת was identical with ס and ש (sin), corresponding with S.
In German, Yidish or Ashkenazi hebrew there is no sound corresponfing to TH or BH.
However, the transliteration in ancient chirstian (or adopted) sources use T or TH (from greek Θ) for ת and B or BH (greek Β) for ב. Many christian sources from latter periods also state that this is the pronunciation of Aramaic (based on Syriac liturgic aramaic) and middle-eastern jewish Hebrew (Syria, Iraq).
Is it therefore reasonable to assume that we are dealing here just with an odd transliteration of ashkenazi hebrew? I've seen too many 19th century "sebaoth"s to agree with that...
Sorry, let me restate my question:
Are you aware of any other examples of transliteration that are clearly based on galician ashkenazi pronunciation and use B for "veis"?
The thing is, I've seen /s/ used for ת in Christian sources. I don't think there really was this disdain for "Jewish tradition" per se in this regard. The reason why Christians used /th/ and the like for ת rafeh is as much for consistency as anything else. They often added an h to the other bgdkpt consonants to.
That said, you're right that from the Septuagint and a variety of sources (including Jewish ones) we see that the ת was originally pronounced like Θ, and this also continued in Syriac and other eastern Christian sources.
I'd have to look into it, but the point is that "misser" itself is rare. I just don't think it's as much a hybrid as you think, because it seems to me that in the 1830s writing "schebet" would have been quite normal in the Latin alphabet. It also isn't as maskilic as you think; I bet that's how the Chasam Sofer would have written it. It was just the way one transliterated Hebrew into Latin letters at the time.
That said, I enjoy these kinds of conversations, and would be happy to discuss it further. Maybe you'll convince me.
I got too carried away to show my point. No need to go back to LXX. I used the term "maskilish" half jokingly, with a yiddish/frum accent. I meant by it an academic or contemporary customary transliteration.
I'm not saying "schebet" wasn't normal at that time, I'm saying wouldn't be the first choice to represents the galician pronunciation, especialy when we see that "Schewet Jehuda" or "Schewet Sofer" were commonly used.
It just looks weird to me, just like "Schebet Jehüde" would. I've seen many old hungarian books talking about Lulav, Lulab or Lülav, Lülev, but never Lülab.
Transliterating shuruk or kubutz as I or Ü wasn't so uncommon (as in Eminas Haiachid etc.) but I would like to see another example of this hand in hand with B for "veis".
That being said, it is clear from many of your previous posts that there were no accepted rules for transliteration, and it's hard to say how would R' Moshe Schreiber (I guess you bring as an archetypal anti-maskil, in which case I disagree) transliterate the name of his work. But his son had "Ksaw Sofer" written on the titlepage of the first edition.
Maybe I wasn't clear, but my contention is not that this meshummad was trying to show the Galician pronunciation, but that he must have done it unconsciously!
>we see that "Schewet Jehuda" or "Schewet Sofer" were commonly used.
All the examples are from the 1880s and later, with one exception, from 1865.
That said, it bears further investigation. I did indeed mean to indicate that hard b wasn't "maskilic," it was just European (and in that sense, I guess, it was Christian, but as far as I can see the sense that Jews might have their own orthography while using Latin letters ala Artscroll or, really, plenty of more modern Jewish works in the vernacular, didn't really exist back then so far as I can tell).
Well, I see many instances of rabbi "Akiva" or "Akiwa" in 1830s, going back at least to the 17th century.
I do believe that the "jewish" orthography differed from the "common" one, I or Ü being one example. In the non-jewish sources, you have much better chances to see some traces of ashkenazi pronunciation in english written protestant literature, rarely in german academic sources. One of the most fascinating contributions to this debate was mentioned on this esteemed blog:
http://books.google.com/books?id...nce%22&
pg=PA538
BTW, I would love to see a book analyzing the transliteration of Hebrew, from ancient times on. Anyone?
Not a bad idea, seriously.
By the way, in case you didn't realize (not saying you didn't) each of those results must be checked for false positives. But yes, your point is taken. There doesn't seem to be a clear method to the madness, but I bet someone can sort it all out.
Just one last thing. Reinhold himself writes Chower and not Chaber...
Commenting by HaloScan
