Watch the World’s First Film Made in Babylonian, the Language of Ancient Mesopotamia

in Film, History, Language | March 29th, 2023

“Enable sub­ti­tles,” says the noti­fi­ca­tion that appears before The Poor Man of Nip­pur — and you will need them, unless, of course, you hap­pen to hail from the cra­dle of civ­i­liza­tion. The short film is adapt­ed from “a folk­tale based on a 2,700-year-old poem about a pau­per,” says the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge’s alum­ni news, act­ed out word-for-word by “Assyri­ol­o­gy stu­dents and oth­er mem­bers of the Mesopotami­an com­mu­ni­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty.” The result qual­i­fies as the world’s very first film in Baby­lon­ian, a lan­guage that has “been silent for 2,000 years.”

“Found on a clay tablet at the archae­o­log­i­cal site of Sul­tan­te­pe, in south-east Turkey,” the sto­ry of The Poor Man of Nip­pur has­n’t come down to us in per­fect­ly com­plete form. The film rep­re­sents the points of break­age in the tablet with VHS-style glitch­es, a neat par­al­lel of forms of media degra­da­tion across the mil­len­nia.

That isn’t the only notice­able anachro­nism — tak­ing the build­ings of Cam­bridge for Mesopotamia in the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC demands a cer­tain sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief — but we can rest assured of the Baby­lon­ian dia­logue’s his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy, or at least that this is the most accu­rate Baby­lon­ian dia­logue we’re like­ly to get.

Accord­ing to Cam­bridge Assyri­ol­o­gist Mar­tin Wor­thing­ton, who over­saw the Poor Man of Nip­pur project (after serv­ing as Baby­lon­ian con­sul­tant for The Eter­nals), deter­min­ing its pro­nun­ci­a­tion involves “a mix of edu­cat­ed guess­work and care­ful recon­struc­tion,” but one that ben­e­fits from exist­ing “tran­scrip­tions into the Greek alpha­bet” as well as con­nec­tions with sta­bler lan­guages like Ara­bic and Hebrew. The result is an unprece­dent­ed his­tor­i­cal-lin­guis­tic attrac­tion, a com­pelling adver­tise­ment for the study of Baby­lon­ian at Cam­bridge, and also — in depict­ing the impov­er­ished pro­tag­o­nist’s revenge on a thug­gish town may­or — a demon­stra­tion that the under­dog sto­ry tran­scends time, cul­ture, and lan­guage.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lis­ten to The Epic of Gil­gamesh Being Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Watch a 4000-Year Old Baby­lon­ian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Har­vard

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

Trigonom­e­try Dis­cov­ered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Baby­lon­ian Tablet

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Listen to The Epic of Gilgamesh Being Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

in Language, Literature | March 28th, 2023

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin

Long ago, in the ancient civ­i­liza­tion of Mesopotamia, Akka­di­an was the dom­i­nant lan­guage. And, for cen­turies, it remained the lin­gua fran­ca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was grad­u­al­ly squeezed out by Ara­ma­ic, and it fad­ed into obliv­ion once Alexan­der the Great Hel­l­enized (Greek­i­fied) the region.

Now, 2,000+ years lat­er, Akka­di­an is mak­ing a small come­back. At Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, Dr. Mar­tin Wor­thing­ton, an expert in Baby­lon­ian and Assyr­i­an gram­mar, has start­ed record­ing read­ings of poems, myths and oth­er texts in Akka­di­an, includ­ing The Epic of Gil­gamesh. This clip gives you a taste of what Gil­gamesh, one of the ear­li­est known works of lit­er­a­ture, sounds like in its moth­er tongue. Or, you can jump into the full col­lec­tion of read­ings right here, cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Epic of Gil­gamesh, the Old­est-Known Work of Lit­er­a­ture in World His­to­ry

World Lit­er­a­ture in 13 Parts: From Gil­gamesh to Gar­cía Márquez

20 New Lines from The Epic of Gil­gamesh Dis­cov­ered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Sto­ry

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Archaeologists May Have Discovered a Secret Language in Lascaux & Chauvet Cave Paintings, Perhaps Revealing a 20,000-Year-Old “Proto-Writing” System

in Art, Biology, History, Language, Nature | February 14th, 2023

Care to take a guess what your smart phone has in com­mon with Pale­olith­ic cave paint­ings of Las­caux, Chau­vet and Altami­ra?

Both can be used to track fer­til­i­ty.

Admit­ted­ly, you’re prob­a­bly not using your phone to stay atop the repro­duc­tive cycles of rein­deer, salmon, and birds, but such infor­ma­tion was of crit­i­cal inter­est to our hunter-gath­er­er ances­tors.

Know­ing how cru­cial an under­stand­ing of ani­mal behav­ior would have been to ear­ly humans led Lon­don-based fur­ni­ture con­ser­va­tor Ben Bacon to recon­sid­er what pur­pose might have been served by non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings — slash­es, dots, and Y‑shapes — on the cave walls’ 20,000-year-old images.

Their mean­ing had long elud­ed esteemed pro­fes­sion­als. The marks seemed like­ly to be numer­ic, but to what end?

Bacon put for­ward that they doc­u­ment­ed ani­mal lives, using a lunar cal­en­dar.

The ama­teur researcher assem­bled a team that includ­ed experts from the fields of math­e­mat­ics, arche­ol­o­gy, and psy­chol­o­gy, who ana­lyzed the data, com­pared it to the sea­son­al behav­iors of mod­ern ani­mals, and agreed that the num­bers rep­re­sent­ed by the dots and slash­es are not car­di­nal, but rather an ordi­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of months. 

As Bacon told All Things Con­sid­ered his fel­low self-taught anthro­po­log­i­cal researcher, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Alexan­der Mar­shack, came close to crack­ing the code in the 1970s:

… but he was­n’t actu­al­ly able to demon­strate the sys­tem because he thought that these indi­vid­ual lines were days. What we did is we said, actu­al­ly, they’re months because a hunter-gath­er­er does­n’t need to know what day a rein­deer migrates. They need to know what month the rein­deer migrates. And once you use these months units, this whole sys­tem responds very, very well to that.

As to the fre­quent­ly occur­ring sym­bol that resem­bles a Y, it indi­cates the months in which var­i­ous female ani­mal birthed their young. Bacon and his team the­o­rize in the Cam­bridge Arche­o­log­i­cal Jour­nal that this mark may even con­sti­tute “the first known exam­ple of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’).

Tak­en togeth­er, the cave paint­ings and non-fig­u­ra­tive mark­ings tell an age-old cir­cu­lar tale of the migra­tion, birthing and mat­ing of aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, hors­es, mam­moths, and rhi­nos … and like snakes and wolver­ines, too, though they were exclud­ed from the study on basis of “excep­tion­al­ly low num­bers.”

Ear­ly humans were able to log months by observ­ing the moon, but how could they tell when a new year had begun, essen­tial infor­ma­tion for any­one seek­ing to arrange their lives around their prey’s pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed activ­i­ties?

Bacon and his peers, like so many poets and farm­ers, look to the rites of spring:

The obvi­ous event is the so-called ‘bonne sai­son’, a French zooar­chae­o­log­i­cal term for the time at the end of win­ter when rivers unfreeze, the snow melts, and the land­scape begins to green.


Read the con­clu­sions of their study here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

in History, Language, Writing | October 25th, 2022


Lit­er­a­cy in Chi­nese may now be wide­ly attained, but it isn’t eas­i­ly attained. Just a cen­tu­ry ago it was­n’t wide­ly attained either, at least not by half of the Chi­nese speak­ers alive. As a rule, women once weren’t taught the thou­sands of logo­graph­ic char­ac­ters nec­es­sary to read and write in the lan­guage. But in one par­tic­u­lar sec­tion of the land, Jiangy­ong Coun­ty in Hunan province, some did mas­ter the 600 to 700 char­ac­ters of a pho­net­ic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or “wom­en’s writ­ing.”

In its hey­day, Nüshu’s users had a vari­ety of names for it, “includ­ing ‘mos­qui­to writ­ing,’ because it is a lit­tle slant­ed and with long ‘legs,’ ” writes Ilar­ia Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the scrip­t’s his­to­ry. Its great­est con­cen­tra­tion of prac­ti­tion­ers lived in “the vil­lage of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friend­ly affec­tion, such as fans dec­o­rat­ed with cal­lig­ra­phy or hand­ker­chiefs embroi­dered with a few aus­pi­cious words.”

Oth­er, more for­mal occa­sions for the use of Nüshu, includ­ed when girls decid­ed to “make a full-fledged pact of close­ness with one anoth­er that they were ‘best friends’ — jiebai zimei or ‘sworn sis­ters’ — a rela­tion­ship that was rec­og­nized as valu­able and even nec­es­sary for them in the local social sys­tem. Such a once-obscure chap­ter of Chi­nese his­to­ry has proven irre­sistible to read­ers from a vari­ety of cul­tures in recent decades.

“Most inter­pre­ta­tions and head­lines have been about a ‘secret lan­guage’ that women used, prefer­ably to com­mu­ni­cate their pain,” writes Sala, which struck her as evi­dence of peo­ple tak­ing the sto­ry of Nüshu and “read­ing into it what they want­ed, regard­less of what it meant.” Yet such an inter­pre­ta­tion has sure­ly done its part to spread inter­est in the near-extinc­t’s scrip­t’s revival, described by BBC.com’s Andrew Loft­house as orig­i­nat­ing in “the tiny vil­lage of Puwei, which is sur­round­ed by the Xiao riv­er and only acces­si­ble via a small sus­pen­sion bridge.” After three Nüshu writ­ers were dis­cov­ered there in the eight­ies, “it became the focal point for Nüshu research. In 2006, the script was list­ed as a Nation­al Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Her­itage by the State Coun­cil of Chi­na, and a year lat­er, a muse­um was built on Puwei Island.”

There train­ing is pro­vid­ed to the few select “inter­preters or ‘inher­i­tors’ of the lan­guage, learn­ing to read, write, sing and embroi­der Nüshu.” Iron­i­cal­ly, Loft­house adds, “much of what we know about Nüshu is due to the work of male researcher Zhou Shuoyi” who hap­pened to hear of it in the nine­teen-fifties and was lat­er per­se­cut­ed dur­ing Mao Zedong’s Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion — a treat­ment that includ­ed 21 years in a labor camp — for hav­ing researched such an arti­fact of the feu­dal past. Once a use­ful tool for express­ing emo­tions and per­form­ing social rit­u­als social­iza­tion, Nüshu had become polit­i­cal­ly dan­ger­ous. What it becomes now, half a cen­tu­ry lat­er and with its renew­al only just begin­ning, is up to its new learn­ers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What the Rosetta Stone Actually Says

in History, Language | October 19th, 2022

When most of us think of the words “Roset­ta Stone” — or, at least, when those of us past a cer­tain age do — we also think of at-home lan­guage-learn­ing cours­es. This must count as a tri­umph of brand­ing, but not one with­out a gen­uine basis in his­to­ry. For the Roset­ta Stone, the real Roset­ta Stone, did pro­vide human­i­ty with a means of great­ly expand­ing its store of lin­guis­tic knowl­edge. The stone’s text, orig­i­nal­ly carved dur­ing the Hel­lenis­tic peri­od, turned out to be use­ful indeed after the stone’s redis­cov­ery about twen­ty cen­turies lat­er. Its con­tent, and more specif­i­cal­ly its con­tent’s hav­ing been writ­ten three times in three dif­fer­ent scripts, unlocked the mys­tery of Ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs.

But what, exact­ly, is that con­tent? In the video above, you can hear the nature of the Roset­ta Stone’s mes­sage explained by British Muse­um cura­tor Ilona Regul­s­ki. “It was a priest­ly decree that was drawn up on the 22nd of March, 196 BC,” she says. Issued by a coun­cil of priests who’d trav­eled to the ancient cap­i­tal of Mem­phis, it lists “hon­ors that they want to give to the king” Ptole­my V Epiphanes, going so far as “to com­pare him with a god.” These hon­ors include his stat­ue being placed in the tem­ple and car­ried dur­ing pro­ces­sions, his birth­day being cel­e­brat­ed in the tem­ple, and the date of his suc­ces­sion being added to offi­cial doc­u­ments — all of them enu­mer­at­ed in “one big sen­tence.”

The text also stip­u­lates that this decree had to be “writ­ten in stone, in sacred writ­ing, which is hiero­glyphs, in native writ­ing, which is the Demot­ic that we see in the mid­dle, and the writ­ing of the Greeks. And the stele would have to be put up in all impor­tant tem­ples of Egypt,” which means that there would have been many copies all over the coun­try. (And indeed, more have been found since the ini­tial dis­cov­ery in 1799.) Nor is the Roset­ta Stone the only known exam­ple of such a priest­ly decree from Ancient Egypt. More recent research has turned toward the ques­tion of who wrote such texts, as well as who trans­lat­ed them.

“In the time the Roset­ta Stone was inscribed, Egypt was a very mul­ti­cul­tur­al place, with many for­eign­ers and peo­ple who could speak more than one lan­guage,” says Regul­s­ki. “For Egypt­ian priests and scribes, who were work­ing for the cen­tral­ized admin­is­tra­tion for the states, it prob­a­bly would­n’t have been so dif­fi­cult to com­pose the text in Greek and then trans­late it into their own Egypt­ian native lan­guage. In fact, this prob­a­bly would have been eas­i­er for them, because they worked on a dai­ly basis in the Greek lan­guage.” At the time, the task of trans­la­tion would sure­ly have seemed rou­tine, even triv­ial beside the roy­al exal­ta­tion per­formed by the mes­sage itself. But today, when few of us wor­ship kings as gods, we exalt the Roset­ta Stone’s for­got­ten trans­la­tor instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

A 4,000-Year-Old Stu­dent ‘Writ­ing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Cor­rec­tions in Red)

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Meet the Hyperpolyglots, the People Who Can Mysteriously Speak Up to 32 Different Languages

in Language | September 29th, 2022

Poly­glot, as its Greek roots take no great pains to con­ceal, means the speak­ing of mul­ti­ple lan­guages. Some­what less obvi­ous is the mean­ing of the asso­ci­at­ed term hyper­poly­lot. “Coined two decades ago, by a British lin­guist, Richard Hud­son, who was launch­ing an Inter­net search for the world’s great­est lan­guage learn­er,” the New York­er’s Judith Thur­man writes, it refers not just to the speak­ing of mul­ti­ple lan­guages but the speak­ing of many lan­guages. How many is “many”? “The accept­ed thresh­old is eleven,” which dis­qual­i­fies even most of us avid lan­guage con­nois­seurs. But Vaughn Smith eas­i­ly makes the cut.

You can meet this for­mi­da­ble hyper­poly­glot in the Wash­ing­ton Post video above, which com­ple­ments Jes­si­ca Con­tr­era’s sto­ry in the paper. Smith grew up in D.C. speak­ing not just Eng­lish but Span­ish, his moth­er’s native lan­guage. On his father’s side of the fam­i­ly, dis­tant cousins from Bel­gium expand­ed Smith’s lin­guis­tic world­view fur­ther still.

At 46 years of age, he now speaks just about as many lan­guages, “with at least 24 he speaks well enough to car­ry on lengthy con­ver­sa­tions. He can read and write in eight alpha­bets and scripts. He can tell sto­ries in Ital­ian and Finnish and Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. He’s teach­ing him­self Indige­nous lan­guages, from Mexico’s Nahu­atl. to Montana’s Sal­ish. The qual­i­ty of his accents in Dutch and Cata­lan daz­zle peo­ple from the Nether­lands and Spain.”

Unlike his fel­low hyper­poly­glot Ioan­nis Ikonomou, pro­filed in the Great Big Sto­ry video above, Smith is not a trans­la­tor. Nor does he work as a lin­guist, a diplo­mat, or any­thing else you’d expect. “Vaughn has been a painter, a bounc­er, a punk rock road­ie and a Kom­bucha deliv­ery man,” writes Con­tr­era. “He was once a dog walk­er for the Czech art col­lec­tor Meda Mlád­ková, the wid­ow of an Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund gov­er­nor,” which was “the clos­est he ever came to hav­ing a career that uti­lized his lan­guages.” Hav­ing brought him most recent­ly to the pro­fes­sion of car­pet clean­ing, Smith’s life resem­bles a beloved genre of Amer­i­can sto­ry: that of the undis­cov­ered work­ing-class genius, most pop­u­lar­ly told by movies like Good Will Hunt­ing. Con­tr­era’s inves­ti­ga­tion adds a chap­ter in line with a major 21st-cen­tu­ry trend in reportage: the brain activ­i­ty-reveal­ing func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) scan.

Under the fMRI scan­ner, “Vaughn works through a series of tests, read­ing Eng­lish words, watch­ing blue squares move around and lis­ten­ing to lan­guages, some he knows and some he doesn’t.” The results were sur­pris­ing: “the parts of Vaughn’s brain used to com­pre­hend lan­guage are far small­er and qui­eter than mine,” writes the monoglot Con­tr­era. “Even when we are read­ing the same words in Eng­lish, I am using more of my brain and work­ing hard­er than he ever has to.” Per­haps “Vaughn was born with his lan­guage areas being small­er and more effi­cient”; per­haps “his brain start­ed out like mine, but because he learned so many lan­guages while it was still devel­op­ing, his ded­i­ca­tion trans­formed his anato­my.” Smith him­self seems to have enjoyed the expe­ri­ence — not that it took his mind off a mat­ter of great impor­tance even to the less inten­sive lan­guage-learn­ers: keep­ing his Duolin­go streak intact.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Art of Translating Hamilton into German: “So Kribbeln Schmetterlinge, Wenn Sie Starten”

in Language, Music, Theatre, Travel | September 23rd, 2022

The city of Hamburg’s nick­name is Tor zur Welt- the gate­way to the world.

If the Ger­man lan­guage pro­duc­tion of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s record break­ing hiphop musi­cal now in pre­views in that city’s St. Pauli The­ater is as warm­ly received as the Eng­lish orig­i­nal has been in Lon­don, Mel­bourne, and, of course, the US, it may earn itself with an addi­tion­al one — Hamil­ton­burg.

Excite­ment has been build­ing since ear­ly sum­mer, when a dual lan­guage video mashup of the open­ing num­ber placed the orig­i­nal Broad­way cast along­side their Ger­man lan­guage coun­ter­parts.

One need not speak Ger­man to appre­ci­ate the sim­i­lar­i­ties in atti­tude — in both per­for­mance, and inter­nal asso­nances, a lyri­cal aspect of hip hop that Miran­da was intent on pre­serv­ing.

Trans­la­tor Kevin Schroed­er quipped that he and co-trans­la­tor rap­per Sera Finale embraced the mot­to “as free as nec­es­sary, as close as pos­si­ble” in approach­ing the score, which at 46 num­bers and over 20,000 words, more than dou­bles the word count of any oth­er musi­cal:

At least we had all these syl­la­bles. It gave us room to play around.

Good thing, as the Ger­man lan­guage abounds with mul­ti­syl­lab­ic com­pound nouns, many of which have no direct Eng­lish equiv­a­lent.

Take schaden­freude which the cre­ators of the musi­cal Avenue Q summed up as “hap­pi­ness at the mis­for­tune of oth­ers.”

Or torschlusspanik — the sense of urgency to achieve or do some­thing before it’s too late.

Might that one speak to a trans­lat­ing team who’ve devot­ed close to four years of their lives to get­ting every­thing — words, syl­la­bles, meter, sound, flow, posi­tion, musi­cal­i­ty, mean­ing, and dou­ble mean­ings — right?

Before Schroed­er and Finale were entrust­ed with this her­culean task, they had to pass muster with Miranda’s wife’s Aus­tri­an cousin, who lis­tened to their sam­ples and pro­nounced them in keep­ing with the spir­it of the orig­i­nal.

As trans­la­tors have always done, Schroed­er and Finale had to take their audi­ence into account, swap­ping out ref­er­ences, metaphors and turns of phrase that could stump Ger­man the­ater­go­ers for ones with proven region­al res­o­nance.

In a round up demon­strat­ing the Ger­man team’s dex­ter­i­ty, the New York Times’ Michael Paul­son points to “Sat­is­fied,” a song where­in Hamilton’s prospec­tive sis­ter-in-law recalls their first encounter:

ORIGINAL

So this is what it feels like to match wits

With some­one at your lev­el! What the hell is the catch?

It’s the feel­ing of free­dom, of see­ing the light

It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite

You see it right?

 

GERMAN

So kribbeln Schmetter­linge, wenn sie starten

Wir bei­de voll auf einem Lev­el, offene Karten!

Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn

Die Füße kom­men an den Boden nich’ ran

Mein lieber Schwan!

 

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF GERMAN

So that’s how but­ter­flies tin­gle when they take off

We’re on the same lev­el, all cards on the table!

My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track

My feet don’t touch the floor

My dear swan!

Miran­da, who par­tic­i­pat­ed in shap­ing the Ger­man trans­la­tion using a 3 col­umn sys­tem remark­ably sim­i­lar to the com­pare and con­trast con­tent above, gives this change a glow­ing review:

That sec­tion sounds fan­tas­tic, and gives the same feel­ing of falling in love for the first time. The metaphor may be dif­fer­ent, but it keeps its propul­sive­ness.

And while few Ger­man the­ater­go­ers can be expect­ed to be con­ver­sant in Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War era Amer­i­can his­to­ry, Ger­many’s size­able immi­grant pop­u­la­tion ensures that cer­tain of the musical’s themes will retain their cul­tur­al rel­e­vance.

The Ham­burg pro­duc­tion fea­tures play­ers from Liberia and Brazil. Oth­er cast mem­bers were born in Ger­many to par­ents hail­ing from Ghana, the Philip­pines, Aru­ba, Benin, Suriname…and the Unit­ed States.

For more of Michael Paulson’s insights into the chal­lenges of trans­lat­ing Hamil­ton, click here.

Hamil­ton is in pre­views at Hamburg’s St. Pauli The­ater, with open­ing night sched­uled for Octo­ber 6.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Hidden History of “Hand Talk,” the Native American Sign Language That Predated ASL by Centuries

in History, Language | September 13th, 2022

No one per­son can take cred­it for the inven­tion of Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. Its his­to­ry reach­es back to the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, when forms of sign devel­oped among Deaf com­mu­ni­ties in New Eng­land. Ear­ly attempts at a signed form of Eng­lish that repli­cat­ed pho­net­ic sounds gave way to a pure sign lan­guage with no ref­er­ence to speech, com­bin­ing forms of sign used by Deaf com­mu­ni­ties in New Eng­land with LSF (Langue des Signes Française), a French sys­tem invent­ed in 1760. By 1835, ASL had become the stan­dard lan­guage of Deaf instruc­tion. 20 years lat­er over 40% of teach­ers were also them­selves deaf users of ASL.

The “ori­gins of the Amer­i­can Deaf-World” — as Har­lan Lane, Richard Pil­lard, and Mary French write in an arti­cle for Sign Lan­guage Stud­ies – has “major roots in a tri­an­gle of New Eng­land Deaf com­mu­ni­ties.” Here, the first school for the Deaf that used ASL was found­ed by Thomas Gal­laudet and Lau­rent Clerc; annu­al con­ven­tions brought togeth­er Deaf stu­dents and edu­ca­tors from all around the coun­try; peri­od­i­cals were found­ed; and, at one time, a Deaf com­mon­wealth was pro­posed and “debat­ed at length at the 1858 meet­ing of the New Eng­land Gal­laudet Asso­ci­a­tion.”

How­ev­er, as the Vox video explain­er points out, there’s anoth­er, far deep­er his­to­ry – notably the pre­vi­ous exis­tence of Indige­nous sign lan­guages all over North Amer­i­ca. One form of “Hand Talk” called Plains Indi­ans Sign Lan­guage (PISL) rep­re­sents “one of the old­est lan­guages in North Amer­i­ca.” It was not only a sys­tem of sign for the Deaf but also oper­at­ed as a lin­gua fran­ca among dif­fer­ent lan­guage groups. PISL “was the means for com­merce,” says PISL edu­ca­tor Lan­ny Real Bird. “It was the means for eco­nom­ics.… Plains Indi­an Sign Lan­guage was the medi­um for com­mu­ni­ca­tion of inter­trib­al nations.”

Melanie McK­ay-Cody, Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona and mem­ber of the Chero­kee Nation West, shows how many of the ges­tures of Hand Talk more gen­er­al­ly — or “North Amer­i­can Indi­an Sign Lan­guage” — can be found in ancient rock writ­ing. Hand Talk has region­al vari­a­tions all over the con­ti­nent, includ­ing a North­east Indi­an Sign Lan­guage cov­er­ing what is now New Eng­land, the upper Mid­west, and the Mid-Atlantic. Researchers like McK­ay-Cody believe that this vari­ant sig­nif­i­cant­ly influ­enced ASL through Native Amer­i­can chil­dren forced to attend the Amer­i­can School for the Deaf, which was then called the Amer­i­can Asy­lum for Dead Mutes.

The video presents com­pelling evi­dence for North Amer­i­can Indi­an Sign Lan­guage’s influ­ence on ASL, and on Amer­i­can cul­ture more gen­er­al­ly, includ­ing a 1930 film of the Indi­an Sign Lan­guage Grand Coun­cil, “one of the largest gath­er­ings of inter­trib­al Indige­nous lead­ers ever filmed.” Orga­nized by Gen­er­al Hugh L. Scott, the pur­pose of the coun­cil was to pre­serve PISL. Con­cerned that “young men are not learn­ing your sign lan­guage,” as he signed to the trib­al lead­ers, Scott wor­ried “it will dis­ap­pear from this coun­try.”

It so hap­pened that ASL itself might have dis­ap­peared in the 1870s and 80s when fierce oppo­nents of sign lan­guage — called “Oral­ists” and lead by Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell — attempt­ed to ban ASL and force Deaf stu­dents to com­mu­ni­cate with speech and lip-read­ing. Gra­ham’s moth­er was Deaf; his father invent­ed a sys­tem of sym­bols called “Vis­i­ble Speech” which Gra­ham him­self taught at a pri­vate school. Despite his efforts, ASL thrived.

As you’ll learn in the video, how­ev­er, Scott and the trib­al lead­ers he gath­ered had rea­son for con­cern all the way back in 1930. Few users of Indige­nous sign lan­guages remain after the gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents forced to assim­i­late “were told,” McK­ay-Cody says, “that ASL was supe­ri­or to what­ev­er their Native sign was.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Inge­nious Sign Lan­guage Inter­preters Are Bring­ing Music to Life for the Deaf: Visu­al­iz­ing the Sound of Rhythm, Har­mo­ny & Melody

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Eve­lyn Glen­nie (a Musi­cian Who Hap­pens to Be Deaf) Shows How We Can Lis­ten to Music with Our Entire Bod­ies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.