depowedlajo

Weinreich's "History of the Yiddish Language. Vol. 1" (Yale 2008), p. A 43-44 (the notes at the end) contains the following intriguing section (emphasis mine):

 

Late survival of Aramaic [§2.8]: ... Scholarly Maskilim have used Targumic for humorous effect until modem times. A humorist from the former Hungarian regions, very likely eastern Slovakia, has one of his characters say: “Krapple depowedlajo, tawjo Mikrapplo [!] dezworechanjo, dos heiß of [!] gallchisch: Powedelkröpplech [!] senn besser ais wie Zworachkröpplich [!].” Cf. P. Schwarz, Reb Simmel Andrichau (Vienna, 1878), 47. To achieve a superclimax (§1.6, note), Targumic is called galkhish ‘Latin’ here (§3.3).

For clarity, I'm providing the Targumic Aramaic with glossing below:

 

As Weinreich says, the source of this passage is a purim play published by P. Schwarz in Vienna 1878 titled "Reb Simmel Andrichau". Luckily, it is now available on Google Books, so let's have a look. The dramatis personae page of the booklet says "The Handlung spielt am Purim in einer kleinen jüdischen Gemeinde Ungarns" ("The events take place on Purim in a small Jewish community in Hungary") and I wonder what made Weinreich think it was in Eastern Slovakia, aka my homeland.

 

Sure enough, we do make a pastry we call krepľe (Krapple) and fill them with both plum jam (Powedl) and cheese curds (Zworach, cf. Slovak tvaroh) and yes, obviously the former are far superior to the latter. However, we do not refer to plum/damson jam as Powidl or povidla, that is - as far as I can tell - a very distincly Czech and Austrian thing; to us in Eastern Slovakia, it's simply šľivkovi ľekvar. 

 

So I checked the text (printed in Fraktur, mind you) for some more clues, and sure enough, there they were. Like this on p. 6:

Mein Masel ober, kummt n' Orel mit e Sack auf'n Rucken

und thut sich tomid in die Stub umgucken;

...

Auf einmol sogt er: "No Schmerlitschko! Zo mie date

"Sa koßek Stschiebro lebbo Slate,

"Hrube wellize - namo duscha - hrube wellize

"Jak wasche dwje Tschewitze?"

And that is nothing but good and proper, if a bit mangled, Czech. In modern orthography:

[My luck now, there comes an Orel with a sack on his back

and starts looking around in the room;]

...

No Šmerličko, co mi dáte,

"za kousek stříbra, nebo zlaté,

"hrubé velice - na mou duši - hrubé velice

"jak vaše dvě střevíce?"

"Well, Šmerličko, what will you give me,

"for a piece of silver, or gold coins,

"very thick - I swear - very thick

"like two of your shoes?"

It should be noted that Schwarz provides translations of many Hebrew words used in the play - there are 263 endnotes for 49 pages of text, translating even common ones, like "Jeschiewe", "Emmes" and "Megille". And so "Orel" is glossed as "uncircumcised, gentile" and the entire passage I cited is translated, as are many others that feature dialogues in Czech.

 

Now the question is, what kind of Czech. The use of the word "hode" < "hody" by the aforementioned Orel (p. 8, translated as "Fasching" = carnival, religious feast) suggest that at least the Orel is from Moravia (cf. Český jazykový atlas vol 2., map 222). That the events take place somewhere in or around Moravia is further supported by a reference to Proßnitz, today's Prostějov, as a place one of the characters went to study in. 

 

So alas, not Eastern Slovakia, but rather Western Slovakia, if we are to believe the author. And I don't see why we shouldn’t, when according to the 1851 census, Western Slovakia (bordering Moravia) was the part of the country (which back then was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary) with the highest concentration of Jewish communities, on par even with Eastern Slovakia. The image below is taken from the Historical atlas of the population of Slovakia (p. 166).

 

And that's before considering the language of the play which seems to blend Yiddish with Standard German and South German varieties - the auxiliary "thut" in the passage cited above strikes me as very Austrian - and maybe even various registers of Yiddish, presumably for humorous effect. But that's another story.

 

 

mentalist

 I subscribe to an embarassingly high number of streaming services. I don't have much time to watch any of them (and in any case, I am an old man and I dislike everything except Matlock Columbo and look, it's on right now!) and so the only two justifications I can give myself for the expense are a) I get some of them for free or at a low cost b) it's all for research and learning. I am talking here of course about the dubs and subs various streamers provide, especially here in Europe.

In addition to the usual major languages, Netflix is doing a lot for Catalan, Galician and even Basque, as well as keeping Syrian voice actors who live in Turkey employed by dubbing all their Turkish production into Syrian Arabic. The European equivalent of Paramount+, Skyshowtime, provides subtitles in - among others - Albanian and Bosnian and if you are the kind of person who enjoys the slop that is now churned out under the name "Star Trek", you can watch it dubbed into multiple languages, including Norwegian, Slovenian and Romanian.

My favorite streamer is HBO Max. For one, the only way to watch Rick and Morty is in the original Polish and 90s nostalgia in Friends is so much better in Bulgarian which I am currently trying to learn. I also like to rewatch procedurals like The Mentalist and lucky for me, HBO Max also subtitles it in Bulgarian. I am working my way through it while on airplanes and trains and so I am currently on season 4. Yesterday I watched episode 19 where at one point, Jane's friend the magician addresses Jane as "dude". Bulgarian subtitles render this as пич [piʧ]. I chuckled - the word sounds like a Slovak vulgar term for feminine genitals and I am mentally 14 - and then today I looked it up.

It turns out the semantic range of the word is quite interesting and when it refers to human beings, it has four different senses in Bulgarian.

1. (archaic, dialectal, vulgar) a male child born out of wedlock, bastard
2. lazy and incompetent person
3. (slang) a man who can be counted on, especially when it comes to something bad
4. (youth slang) a stand-up guy

The dictionary gives the etymology as Persian pič پیچ "a plant shoot", in Bulgarian via Turkish. Now I seem to have misplaced my copy of Junker-Alavi's dictionary, but all the other resources agree or give a more specific sense, "young wine". And then I checked a Turkish dictionary and it all got interesting: the Persian word appears in the Codex Cumanicus, a 14th century manual of the Turkic language spoken by the Cumans known as Cuman, Kipchaq or Tatar. The book is arranged in three columns with Latin terms and their Persian and Cuman equivalents.

Our word appears on fol. 50r of the Venice 1597 copy (Marziana Lat. Z 549) in the second part of the Codex where lexical items are arranged in semantic fields. Fols. 49v-50r contain a section titled "Defecta hominum" and this is where we find Persian pič as a translation of the Latin bastardus.

 

This of course complicates the etymology and history of the Bulgarian пич, since the fifth meaning the Bulgarian dictionary gives is that of "sprout, plant shoot", albeit only dialectally. Persian dictionaries give this word a secondary sense "turn, complication, intricacy" and this the main sense also given by Turkish dictionaries. The same dictionary also gives the sense "bastard" (in the purest Turkic as "veledi zina"), but only with a question mark, so possibly only because of Codex Cumanicus. And, as the entry in the Turkish dictionary points out, the sense "bastard" is not found in any Persian dictionaries. Redhouse's Ottoman Turkish dictionary, however, gives all three senses - "bastard", "sprout", and "complication" (and one derivation that sounds extra funny to me).

 

This is the most likely source of the Bulgarian meaning, where the "shoot" sense was preserved only dialectally. Whence the Persian entry in Codex Cumanicus still remains a mystery, one that Jane, Lisbon and the rest of the CBI team probably can't help with.

 UPDATE: A colleague informs me that the Persian pič is derived pičidan "to twist" which is also attested in Middle Persian as pēčīdan, see e.g. the following entry from MacKenzie's A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (OUP 1971, p. 68).