Who does not speak Arabic

...should better not speak Arabic, says the Hungarian proverb. Honestly, I cannot imagine in what circumstances our proverb-making forefathers found themselves constrained speaking precisely Arabic rather than Turkish, Tartar or Teuton and thus facing the gulf yawning between the subjective and objective reality of their linguistic competencies. Quite unrealistic. But so many unrealistic things happen daily in our lives. I would have not imagined Serbs getting in such situation either, and lo, it did happen. True, they have no proverb to defend them from such a danger.

The popular group Kulin ban has played since 2005 Medieval Serbian music mixed with modern elements (“od Kulina bana do današnjih dana” – “from Kulin Ban (†1204) to our days”). On their site composed with great ethnomusicological care they also present in detail the traditional instruments of the Balkans and of the Middle East. They describe Arabic lute – oud – like this:


“Both the words oud and lute [laúd, liuto] come from Arabic al-’ud [“the tree”]...” In fact: every lute history begins with this phrase. However, the word written there with Arabic characters does not mean this.

First of all because of the uncorrect form of the letters. In Arabic every letter has four different forms, depending on its position at the beginning, middle or end of the word. It isn’t magic: in our cursive script we also put a little stroke in front of “o”, for example, when it follows another letter, but omit it if it stands at the beginning of a word. The difference of the various Arabic character forms is no more important than this, and it is also dictated by the momentum of the writing hand. Nevertheless, whoever picked together these five letters from the computer’s character table knew nothing about this convention, and always chose the standalone form, like this:

د و ع ل ا

This is like someone writing in cursive script, but lifting the pen after each letter, leaving a short break, and then continuing with the next letter. In Arabic this looks even more strange as the difference of the various forms is much more marked. If the composer chose the correct medial and final forms, the word would look like this:

دوعلا

The more important mishap is, however, that he typed the word from left to right, as Serbs write, and not from right to left as Arabs do who would read the above word as du’lā. I don’t know whether this means anything. It does not figure in the dictionary, although Google has 303 occurrences of it. Anyway, the correct right-to-left form of the word al-’ud should be this:

العود

And as to why the name of the lute comes precisely from the word “tree”, Arabic popular etymology offers a fascinating explanation. The tree, while living, absorbes the song of all the birds singing on its branches along the years. Then the tree becomes a lute, and the lute emits the condensed song of the birds, the more profusely the longer the tree had been absorbing it. I have seen a wonderful Persian miniature illustrating this in the bazaar of Esfahan. I am sorry for having not bought it. Perhaps I would also play more beautifully on the lute if I put it in front of myself.

However, this small typo was only good to offer an occasion for the popularization of the Kulin ban. For both their site and their program is rich and beautiful, as is the music they play. Their first CD Kulin ban was published in 2006, still with much experimenting. We are looking forward to the more mature next one.


Kulin ban: Žali Zare da žalimo, 2006 (2'08")

Kulin ban: Januške Beluške, 2006 (6'12")

Medieval Typos

In studiolum we have finally published the digital edition of a medieval codex to be published together with the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa as the second volume of the “Treasures of Kalocsa” series. This beautiful 13th-century Parisian manuscript contains the epistles of Saint Paul, accompanied by the detailed verse-by-verse commentaries by Petrus Lombardus, in 300 parchment leaves all in all.

This voluminous codex was produced with the working method of the pecia, already widespread at the Paris university at that time. The exemplar kept in the library of the university was divided in sheets and distributed among several copyists at the same time, so that a complete new copy could be produced in a relatively short time. The copied sheets were then collected, and miniators painted large initial letters with alternating red and blue colors in the spaces left blank at the beginning of the biblical verses commented.

This procedure, according to the glorious Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental edited by Chartier and Cavallo – that we had the honor of translating into Hungarian – already foreshadowed the working method of the book press, where single sheets were prepared by different compositors, and – at least in the first decades of the printing era – the initials were painted by miniators in the spaces left blank. The more so, because – as we will see below – together with this new method apparently the printer's devil was born as well – some two hundred years before the very invention of printing itself!

Namely, this method assumed that the miniators knew the text, and always painted the appropriate initial in the given space. However, this was not always the case. Apparently the miniator often just casted a short glance at the text to be complemented, and then quickly painted the letter he felt most logical – but which sometimes in fact differed from the sacred text.

So he did, for example, on fol. 264r (Heb 2:7), where he read and complemented the initial word of the verse as “Innuisti” (‘you consented’). Right after that, however, he realized his error, and initialized the commentary at the right of the verse with the correct word “Minuisti” (‘you diminished’).


In other cases, however, it fell to the stationarius – the librarian responsible for the distribution of the sheets and then for the revision of the copies – to correct the error afterwards. Thus for example on fol. 233v (2Cor 16:21), where the miniator complemented the initial word “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” – a frequent initial word in liturgical texts – both in the verse and in the commentary. In the latter it was the corrector who wrote the black ‘S’ in the middle of the red ‘L’, thus changing the word in the correct “Salutatio”.


The same he did on fol. 286r (Heb 10:7), where a little black ‘T’ got into the initial red ‘N’ of the commentary, thus changing the erroneous “Nunc” (‘now’) in a correct “Tunc” (‘therefore’).


In some cases the attention of the corrector grew slack too. Thus for example on fol. 247v (2Tim 1:16), where the miniator had imagined – and created – a “Sed” (‘but’) in place of the relatively rare “Det” (‘let him give’). This example, together with the above quoted misreading of “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” permits us to hypothesize that the miniator did not feel a sharp difference between phonemas ‘t’ and ‘d’.


And finally a very subtle case. On fol. 292r (Heb 11:22), at the right of the verse beginning as “Fide Ioseph”, the initial word of the commentary was complemented as “Mosep”, instead of “Iosep”. Why then?


In this passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle enumerates the examples of faith from the patriarch to the prophets. The verse beginning with “Fide Ioseph moriens” is preceded – on the previous page – by a very similar verse beginning with “Fide Iacob moriens” but mentioning “Ioseph” as well, and is followed by another one beginning with “Fide Moyses”. Perhaps the miniator, arriving to the line “Fide Ioseph”, lost track for a moment, and remembering that he had already painted an initial to such phrase on the previous page, he complemented the initial word “...osep” of the commentary as “Mosep” that almost corresponded to the initial word of the following verse. Later this typo was corrected as well with a small black ‘J’ written into the large red ‘M’.

Any moral? Perhaps that errare was humanum already eight hundred years ago. This certainly will not be different with our edition either. We can only hope that the errors of this one will not cause annoyance to the Benevolent User, only some lenient serenity, just like those of the medieval miniator did to us.