Guest Post: Uncovering the language of the first Christmas

by Tony Thorne, King's College London

As Christmas draws near, the now typical jokes pile up on social media. Jesus is commended for having a “stable upbringing”. The three wise men fret: “We’re running low on Frankincense. Don’t worry, though, there’s myrrh where that came from.”

But all this facetious word play prompts me to think a little more seriously about the language used in traditional accounts of the nativity, and the language – or languages – that might have been used by the participants themselves.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The christian Christmas drama begins with a baby in a cot, or rather a “manger” – a feeding trough. In biblical times, this was probably an alcove or a ledge projecting from the wall of a stable on which hay was placed as animal feed. In a private house, it may also have been a rectangular stone container or simply a depression in the lower part of the family living space where animals spent the night. The English word comes from the French manger, to eat, via the Old French maingeure, and in turn from the Latin manducare, to chew.

The Biblical reference to an improvised crib uses the Greek φατνη (phatnē), regularly translated as a stall, though some commentators insist that it denotes a feeding box and not a larger enclosure. It has been rendered in Hebrew as אֵבוּס, ebus, which can mean a trough or a booth, and as אֻרָוֹת (urvah), a stall. Mary (Maryam) and Joseph (Yosep) might have described it in their own language, Aramaic, as ܐܽܘܪܺܝܳܐ (awriyah).

The Words of God

But enough of the props, what of the location and the script?

Well, the Greek word commonly translated as “inn”, κατάλυμα (kataluma) can mean a caravanserai or inn, a house or a guest room, but can also be translated as the vaguer “lodging place”. This leads interpreters to disagree on whether the nativity took place in a public guesthouse or a family home made available to the travellers in line with Palestinian traditions of hospitality.

Aramaic was the language spoken by the common people in נָצְרַת (Naṣrat) and בֵּית לֶחֶם‎ (Bet Lehem) – we know them as Nazareth and Bethlehem, of course. However, Hebrew was the official and liturgical language of Palestine, and Greek was used by scholars, administrators and diplomats across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Latin, the language of the Roman colonisers, would not have been spoken by many poorer people in the territories in question in the first century AD.

The Hebrew historian Josephus described Hebrew words as belonging to “the Hebrew tongue” but referred to Aramaic words as belonging to “our tongue” or “our language” or “the language of our country”.

Aramaic survived to become the common language of Jews both in the Holy Land and elsewhere in the Middle East by around 200AD and remained so until the Islamic conquests in the seventh century introduced Arabic. Its descendant dialects, formerly known as Syriac, are still spoken today by the Assyrian people of northern Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and northwest Iran. I’m not the first to try to connect imaginatively with the authentic voices of the Christmas story, as a 2009 recording of a carol sung in Aramaic testifies.

Interpretations

The wise men from the East, whatever their native tongues, would have communicated with King Herod via his officials in Greek – Herod would also have been familiar with Latin, Hebrew and possibly an Arabic dialect from his youth. Unless they knew some Aramaic, they would have done the same, with or without the help of interpreters, when they paid their respects to the Holy Family.

The shepherds – ποιμὴν (poimén) – who feature in one of the two versions of the nativity would have had few difficulties expressing their veneration of the Christ-child, being Aramaic speakers, though not with the Galilean accent shared by the newborn’s “imma”, mother Mary and “abba”, father Joseph.

We don’t know what social status Mary and Joseph enjoyed, but unless it was fairly elevated they would not have been fluent in Greek or Latin and their knowledge of Hebrew would likely have been limited to some devotional terms. Although Aramaic shared some elements with Hebrew, the two were at least as different as modern English and German.

So, frustratingly, even those few key words of Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew that are present in the original Bible account are open to multiple interpretations. If we go on to consider the familiar words that became attached to the story more recently – “inkeeper”, “stable”, “cattle-shed”, “kings”, even the “little town” and the imperial “decree” that summoned the family – we find no ultimate justification for them at all.

They only serve to conjure up an enduring legend of outsiders grappling with adversity, to dramatise an interplay of the royal, humble and supernatural in surroundings that are at once impoverished and magical.

Biblical scholars will continue to dispute the nuances of translation and the “facts” that underlie them. As for me, from a brief encounter with the sublime, I’m drawn back to the ridiculous as the wits of Twitter banter on: “If you’re telling a nativity joke it’s all in the delivery”; “Already getting complaints about my front lawn nativity tableau. Apparently it’s not customary to depict the actual birth.”



Tony Thorne, Director of Slang and New Language Archive, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men

Paul Baker, Lancaster University

In early February, the Church of England College expressed regret that in an evening liturgy in Cambridge, God was referred to as the Duchess. The service had been advertised as a Polari evening prayer in anticipation of LGBT History Month, and was described as a liturgical experiment. So what was Polari and how did it end up in an evening prayer?

Polari is a secret language, which has now largely fallen out of use, but was historically spoken by gay men and female impersonators. My research has tracked how it grew out of the world of entertainment, stretching back from West End theatres, through to 19th-century music halls and beyond that to travelling entertainers and market-stall holders.

It developed from an earlier form of language called Parlyaree which had roots in Italian and rudimentary forms of language used for communication by sailors around the Mediterranean. Also associated with travellers, buskers, beggars and prostitutes, it found its way into Britain, especially London and port cities, and gradually became used by gay men and female impersonators, especially during the first half of the 20th century.

The Polari bible.
Joe Richardson, Author provided

Polari itself had Parlyaree as a base, but once in Britain was supplemented with a wealth of slang terminology from different sources, including Cockney Rhyming Slang, backslang (pronouncing a word as if it was spelt backwards), French, Yiddish and American airforce slang.

In a period when homosexuality was illegal and heavily stigmatised, it was useful as a means of conducting conversations in public spaces, which would have alerted others to your sexuality. Many of the words allowed speakers to gossip about mutual friends or to critique the appearance of people who were in the immediate vicinity.

“Vada the naff strides on the omee ajax” meant look at the awful trousers on the man nearby. Inserting a Polari word – such as bona (good) or palone (woman) – into a sentence could act as a coded way of identifying other people who might be gay. The language itself, full of camp, irony, innuendo and sarcasm, also helped its speakers to form a resilient worldview in the face of arrest, blackmail and physical violence.

Polari speakers “christened” themselves with camp names like Scotch Flo or Diamond Lil, affording themselves alternative identities that reclaimed the representations of them as effeminate in positive ways.

Surplus to requirements

In the 1990s, I based my doctoral thesis around the study of Polari, examining its varied history and complicated etymology, the ways that it resembled a language, its social functions and the reasons for its eventual decline. I interviewed speakers of the language and analysed texts, including scripts of the 1960s comedy radio series Round the Horne, which had a regular sketch voiced by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who played Polari-speaking actors.

The version of Polari that was used in Round the Horne was necessarily simplified and toned down for the British public, and by the 1960s, there was a feeling that Polari had already overstayed its welcome. Round the Horne spoiled the secret, rendering the language less attractive to its speakers. Meanwhile the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 was round the corner, making it less necessary for a secret lingo in any case.

Some younger gay men were more interested in concepts like gay pride, gay liberation and coming out and viewed Polari as a naff byproduct of a more repressive time. In the 1970s, in an early gay magazine called Lunch, activists branded Polari as ghettoising and it gradually became surplus to requirements. When I carried out a survey of 800 gay men in the year 2000, about half the respondents had never heard of it.

Renewed interest

While few gay men today actively use Polari, in recent years it has gained a kind of latent respectability as an historic language – similar to the way Latin is seen by the Catholic faith. From a political standpoint, Polari is now recognised as historically important, an example of the perseverance of a reviled group of people who risked arrest and attack just for being true to who they were.

In 2012 a group of Manchester-based artists used Polari to highlight the lack of LGBT inclusivity in education. They created an exam in LGBT studies, getting volunteers to sit it under strict exam conditions. The language portion of the exam was about Polari.

Another group of activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence created a Polari Bible, running a Polari wordlist through a computer program on an English version of the Bible. The Bible was bound in leather and displayed in a glass case at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. This was not to mock religion but to highlight how religious practices are filtered through different cultures and societies, and that despite not always being treated well by mainstream religions, there should still be space for gay people to engage with religion.

In 2012, I participated in a group effort to carry out the longest ever Polari Bible reading which took place in a Manchester Art gallery. In a nice touch of high camp we had to wear white gloves while touching the Bible, to ensure the oils from our fingers didn’t ruin the paper. We took turns reading lines such as: “And the rib, which the Duchess Gloria had lelled from homie, made she a palone, and brought her unto the homie.” Translation: “And the rib which God had taken from man was made into a woman and brought to the man.”

The Polari Evensong at Cambridge, carried out by trainee priests, however, took place in a more official context and provoked a range of conflicting opinion. Some people think it is hilarious, some are concerned about Church of England rules being broken and disrespect for religious tradition, while others think that God should be prayed to in any language and that the Evensong was perfectly valid. As someone who has spent 20 years documenting the rise and fall of Polari, I find it fascinating that even now, it is finding new ways to cause controversy. Never has a dead language had such an interesting afterlife.

Paul Baker, Professor of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.