Jewish comedians Woody Allen and Billy Crystal with Elizabeth Shue in Deconstructing Harry, 1998
Stewie, with his broad Brooklyn accent, is a powerful advocate for Yiddish. Holding court around a pool table at the Friar’s Club, he expounds: ‘It’s a great language for saying the man’s a dick. As the snow is to Eskimos, so schmuck is to the Jew. The definition of a schmuck is a guy who gets out of the shower to take a piss. A schlemiel is a loser, and a nebach is like a waste of time. You can talk to a schlemiel – I’ll sit and have a drink with him – but a nebach – you don’t want nothing to do with a nebach.’
Ari Teman, a young Brooklyn comic, concurs: ‘The nebach is the guy getting the water when you’re going on a football team,’ and, quick as a flash, Stewie responds: ‘For an older Jewish audience, if you said “ass” on stage, you were dirty. “Kiss my ass”, you are dirty. But if you said “kish mein tuchas” there, that was clean, it was accepted. You could curse in Yiddish and not offend anybody.’
Ari adds: ‘I sent a rabbi a joke, and he wrote back the acronym “LMTO”. Normally it’s “laughing my ass off”, but he replaced it with a “tuchas”. “Laughing my tuchas off”, it’s a Yiddish acronym. We’re instant messaging Yiddish acronyms now.’
Stewie continues: ‘When one Jew meets another Jew he’s a landsman [literally countryman], meaning we’re of the tribe. No matter where you are. So two old Jewish men were talking, and one said, “Morris, bei you [according to you], what is a good Shabbat?” And the other said, “A good Shabbat, bei me, is I get up, I go to school, I doven [pray], I come back, I sit with my grandchildren, and we eat, and I go back to school, and we doven. Bei me, that’s a good Shabbat. Seymour, bei you, what’s a good Shabbat?” The other man says, “I get up in the morning, I get on a plane, I fly to Vegas, I get off the plane, I go to the crap table, I shoot crap, I win 10,000 dollars, I go up to the room, there’s a chick waiting for me. Bei me, that’s a good Shabbat.” And the other guy says, “Good Shabbat? Bei me, that’s a great Shabbat!” ’
And of course it’s so important that that joke is in Yiddish, that you say Shabbat and you don’t just say Sabbath.
There’s a joke about the shtetl in Poland or southern Russia somewhere, a little village, where the Jews live in perpetual fear of a pogrom. There’s a story in the newspaper of a young teenage girl being murdered, and they’re terrified it’s going to be a Christian girl and that the local community will blame the Jews. Suddenly one of their number runs in and says, ‘I’ve got fantastic news, the murdered girl was a Jew.’ As a joke it’s both terrible and funny, because the Jews were persecuted beyond language. It’s almost unspeakable what happened. And yet always there’s this realist strain of humour.
Stewie develops this serious point: ‘Yiddish is basically our soul, and the kids are starting to go back to it. It’s our heart, our soul. Jews are emotional people. We love to cry, and in Yiddish you can cry. You can’t cry in Hebrew too easily. Judaism is not a religion, it’s a way of living your life. And Yiddish is a way of feeling your life because every time you use these words … it’s taking us back to where we came from, that we all share together. We’re all the same Jew. We’re not a rich Jew or a poor Jew.’
Stewie doesn’t believe that Hebrew can fulfil this function.
‘I grew up, and I was bah mitzvahed, but we didn’t talk Hebrew. We never thought of talking Hebrew, it was the language of the Temple, it was something we had to learn. Whereas Yiddish, I would hear my grandparents and my parents talk Yiddish. But they didn’t want me to hear. Zug gornisht! – it means “Don’t say anything” – the kid is listening. And we would try and translate what they were saying.’
So Yiddish was the language of emotion and sex and failure and hilarity, whereas Hebrew was the language of seriousness and ceremony and solemnity.
Stewie sums it up: ‘Hebrew comes from the vocal chords, and Yiddish comes from the heart.’
Esperanto: Language and Utopia
All languages are, of course, invented. They are the product of the human mind and our boundless creativity and desire to communicate. But usually they evolve more organically than modern Hebrew, and often with remarkable alacrity, which is especially true with patois, creoles and slang. But there is a whole raft of entirely invented languages. Many have an idealistic basis, and from the seventeenth century on, when Latin began to lose its place as the lingua franca of intellectual writing, there was a stream of attempts at creating more rational and logical languages that would not only be universal but also better able to describe the burgeoning advancements in science.
John Wilkins, inventor, scientist and founder of the Royal Society, spent ten years trying to create the perfect language, free of ambiguity and so precise it could be used to describe these truths. In 1668, he presented his work, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, to the Royal Society. Hooke, Newton, Locke and Leibniz all read it with interest, and there was heated debate in the coffee houses of London as to the degree to which language got in the way of understanding objects and whether Wilkins’ method, where the word tells you exactly what it signifies rather than being an arbitrary sign, was really an improvement. What his language did prove was that it was possible to create a perfectly sound, logical language from scratch. The entire universe was divided into categories, and everything belonged to one of these by ever more detailed description. So ‘shit’ becomes cepuhws – ‘a serous and watery purgative motion from the gross parts of the guts downward’ – a word that is created from four different categories expressing ‘motion’, ‘purgation’, ‘gross’ and ‘of vomiting’. You can see why it never caught on. Languages by their very nature are messy and fluid. His analytical methodology, however, did lay the foundations for the thesaurus and later for taxonomy, the science of classifying things.
Since Wilkins’ magnificent failure there have been countless attempts to invent the perfect language. The nineteenth century offers a cornucopia of new languages, but most of them, rather than reinventing the wheel, sensibly used existing languages as bases. Pirro’s Universalglot, Schleyer’s Volapuk and then the most famous and successful of them all, Esperanto, all took elements of European languages as their source.
Esperanto was the creation and life’s passion of a nineteenth-century Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist called Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof. He was born in 1859 in the city of Bialystock, which is now in Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire. It was a multilingual, multicultural city made up predominantly of Jews, with Polish, Russian, German and Belarussian minorities. Zamenhof grew up speaking Russian, Yiddish, Polish and German, deeply secure in the culture and history of his Jewishness, while living cheek-by-jowl with the competing languages and nationalisms of his neighbours.
From an early age he was fascinated by the possibilities of a completely new language which would break down national and cultural barriers and foster understanding and peace. It would be a new lingua franca with none of the colonial baggage of English or French or Russian because it would be neutral and borderless, and it would be simple enough to learn in far less time than any other foreign language.
Ludovic Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto
Throughout his time at school and university, Ludovic pursued his dream of creating this new, unifying language. ‘I was taught,’ he wrote, ‘that all men were brothers, and, meanwhile, in the street, in the square, everything at every step made me feel that men did not exist, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on.’ His father was not impressed. He spoke to the headmaster at school about Ludovic’s ideas and was told that that his son was lost for ever, and that his work was the surest symptom of the onset of an incurable madness.
Zamenhof studied medicine but lasted only a few months as a GP. He didn’t like it and decided to specialize in ophthalmology instead. By the time he set up business in Warsaw in 1887 he had married Clara Zilbernik, the daughter of a rich soap manufacturer, who brought a dowry of 10,000 rubles with
her. This was supposed to support the family, but instead Ludovic asked his father-in-law if he could invest half of it in the dream which still drove him: the promotion of his new international language. With the money he published his first booklet in 1887, a basic grammar of Esperanto, in Russian. He used the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful), and the book was so successful that Polish, French and German versions came out before the end of the year. Esperanto was officially born.
Zamenhof’s utopian vision was of Esperanto as a new, neutral, non-imperialist world language which would overcome national enmities and inequalities. His first problem was that, if he wanted it to be a language which belonged to no one nation or ethnic group, what could he base it on? He himself spoke or knew Russian, German, Hebrew, Polish, Latin and Greek, but it would be hugely complicated to try to combine the grammatical rules and vocabularies of multiple languages. When he learned English at secondary school, he liked how simple the grammar was, so he started stripping away irregular verbs, exceptions and superfluous and little-used word forms from his language planning.
Then he turned to the vocabulary. First of all he tried to construct a logical system of words based on a, ab, ac, ad … ba, ca, da … aba, aca, ada … in which each element had a specific meaning. But he soon realized this was far too complex and almost impossible to memorize, so in the end he went to the Romance and Germanic languages, and tried to select the most internationally recognizable words. However, he was still swamped in massive vocabularies, so he decided on a system of root words plus affixes. In other words he could add invariable suffixes and/or prefixes to create words in the same semantic field without the necessity to learn each one separately. For example, the root-word vend (= related to selling) allows the formation of words like vendi (to sell), vendejo (store, shop), vendisto (salesperson, salesman), vendistino (salesperson, saleslady), vendaĵo (item for sale).
Based on the three principles of an international vocabulary, a regular grammar and word formation using affixes, Esperanto is a bit of a rag bag. Many root words look familiar to Europeans, while the diacritics give it a strange, exotic twist. For example: ‘good morning’ is bonan matenon, which seems pretty straightforward. But ‘what is your name?’ is kiel vi nomiĝas? ‘Do you speak Esperanto?’ is ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? And kiom da blankaj birdoj flugas en la ĉielo? means ‘how many white birds are flying in the sky?’ The word order is straightforward and noun and verb endings simple and consistent.
Today, Esperanto is used by anything between 10,000 and 2 million people worldwide. It’s the most widely spoken constructed language in the world, and the only one which has native speakers, i.e., those who have learned from parents (such as the financier George Soros). It has been criticized for being too European-based in its vocabulary and grammar and therefore more difficult for, say, Asians to learn, but that hasn’t stopped usage being particularly high in countries like China, Japan and Korea, as well as in Europe. Just as clearly, Esperanto hasn’t realized its founder’s vision of becoming a universal second language and bringing peace and unity among nations. It’s too magnificent and impossible a dream. In that sense, Esperanto is the linguistic equivalent of a utopian world.
Zamenhof set out to construct a language which would be simple and easy, and various studies have suggested it can be learned in between a quarter and a twentieth of the time of other languages. If you surf the web, you’ll find dozens of associations, clubs, articles, sites for learning and testimonials from Esperanto-speakers that learning Esperanto is easy and pain-free.
The popularity of Esperanto in Asia is curious, given its predominantly European vocabulary and grammar roots. Maybe it’s the vision thing which appeals more, the idea of universal brotherhood and world peace. It’s a kind of quasi-religious belief, which might explain why several small, non-traditional religions and sects have embraced Esperanto. Like Oomoto, for example, an offshoot of Shintoism, which was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only do most of its 45,000 adherents speak some Esperanto but they venerate Ludovic Zamenhof as a saint and visionary.
Other religions also espouse the Esperantist philosophy, including Bahá’í, which was the adopted faith of Zamenhof’s youngest daughter, Lydia. Lydia was born in Warsaw in 1904, learned Esperanto from the age of nine, took a law degree and then travelled the world promoting Esperanto and her father’s philosophy of brotherhood. She became a Bahá’í in the 1920s and continued to work, teach and promote both religion and language. While she was in Poland teaching Esperanto and translating Bahá’í scripture she was arrested by the Nazis because of her Jewish background and died in Treblinka in 1942.
Every single one of Zamenhof’s children died in the Holocaust. His son, Adam, became an ophthalmologist like his father and was head of a hospital in Warsaw. He was arrested in 1939 and sent to Palmiry camp, where he was shot. His younger sister Sofia, a paediatrician, also died in Treblinka in 1942.
There are other names honoured in the Esperanto community. Petr Ginz was an immensely gifted Czech boy, a native speaker of Esperanto and a Jew. He wrote stories, drew and produced an Esperanto magazine called Vedem (We Lead). Before he was transported to Auschwitz, where he died in 1944, he passed on some of his writings and artwork to his sister, including a drawing called ‘Moonscape’ – a view of the earth from an imagined moon. Nearly seventy years later, in 2003, the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, took a copy of that drawing on board the space shuttle Columbia. At the end of its sixteen-day mission, Columbia exploded on re-entry, and all seven astronauts were killed. A special stamp issued in memory of the shuttle featured a reproduction of Petr’s sketch and a picture of him, young and smiling and happy.
Although the world does not speak Esperanto, millions of words of world literature have been translated into Esperanto, from the works of Shakespeare to the Koran. The Scottish Esperanto poet and translator William Auld translated Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But it was for his own poetry in Esperanto that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. There is a growing body of original literature by Esperanto writers all over the world, including the Icelandic novelist Baldur Ragnarsson, who learned Esperanto at school.
Esperanto has not become the world force its creator intended, but neither has it died out. Zamenhof, who died in 1917, is revered and celebrated by Esperantists all over the world, and there are two minor planets named in his honour – 1462 Zamenhof and 1421 Esperanto.
The language itself continued to change and develop after he died. There were schisms and arguments and reforms, resulting in offshoots like Ido. But Esperanto has held on to its place as the most successful constructed language, and it is part of the popular culture. So much so that, when Littlewoods ran a series of TV adverts for a new range of clothes in 2008, they decided to have the dialogue – between mysterious, scantily clad women on a beach – in Esperanto. ‘We believe it is a language that not only sounds beautiful, but exists to create harmony in the world, making this the perfect choice,’ said a spokesman. Unfortunately, the Esperanto Association of Britain said it was really only cod Esperanto. But it’s the thought that counts.
An Esperanto version of Shakespeare’s King Lear
Globish: a Language to Do Business With
Globish is the name given to one of several simplified forms of English. It is not an artificial or constructed language, like Esperanto, but a fit-for-purpose, stripped down, simplified version of English put together for the business world. It is, claims the man who codified and now markets it, a form of global English, hence ‘Globish’.
Jean-Paul Nerrière is a retired businessman, former naval commander and holder of the Légion d’Honneur. In the late 1980s he was a vice-president of IBM in America, in charge of international marketing. As he criss-crossed the globe, doing business with many different nationalities, he had to communicate in the one language which was common to all of them: English. Not perfect, literary English, but the get-you-by, pidgin English necessary
for all non-native speakers wanting to do business in the global market.
The interesting thing Nerrière noticed was that the non-native speakers communicated with each other much more efficiently and easily than with native English-speakers. Whether it was a Japanese talking to a Korean, or a Moroccan talking to a Hungarian, the simple, basic form of English they used was mutually comprehensible and got the job done. On the other hand, the English used by native speakers, says Nerrière, is too complicated and idiomatic, and American or British businessmen didn’t make the effort to simplify or adapt it in conversation. That could cost money. ‘If you lose a contract to a Moroccan rival because you’re speaking an English that no one apart from another Anglophone understands, then you’ve got a problem,’ he says.
In essence, Nerrière’s anecdotal and unscientific observations led him to this thesis: non-native speakers find a simple, common linguistic ground in order to do international business in English. He described it as ‘the worldwide dialect of the third millennium’. What he did then was codify a Globish vocabulary of 1,500 words and publish it, along with a sort of mission statement, in his 2004 book Parlez Globish. He argued that non-native speakers had been finding their way round the subtleties and difficulties of English for years, by using simple words and describing things as best they could if they didn’t know the idiomatic expression; in fact, doing what everyone does when they’re speaking a foreign language. Nerrière simply took this a stage further by saying that there is no need to learn more than the basics required to be understood and to do business.
Nerrière identified the basics of English grammar, provided the cut-down vocabulary (most native speakers have about 7,500 words in their vocabulary) and developed rules and training to help non-native speakers use Globish as a lingua franca. He makes no bones about the utilitarian goal of Globish. ‘It’s ‘a proletarian and popular idiom which does not aim at cultural understanding or at the acquisition of a talent enabling the speaker to shine at Hyde Park Corner’, he wrote. ‘It is designed for trivial efficiency, always, everywhere, with everyone,’ he told The Times in 2006. It’s designed for doing business.
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