transliteration, cantorial stuff

[cellio]

We ended up talking a little bit about the Hebrew/English balance at services and the use of transliteration in the siddur. Some rabbis apparently hold the view that transliteration is a crutch that keeps people from actually learning Hebrew. I suspect that's not quite right.

I dislike reading from transliteration, and avoid it except when urgent even if it means I won't be able to say every word (due to being slow). On the other hand, when I was just starting to attend services and didn't know anything yet, I was really grateful to have it. I was able to use it to jump-start my participation, yet I did not lose my motivation to learn to read for real. I commented on this to my rabbi, who said something like "yeah, but you taught yourself trope too -- you're not typical". Actually, though, I suspect I am typical among that subset of the population that will learn to read anyway. It's just that most people will apparently settle for transliteration -- but if it weren't there they'd sit in silence, not say "gee, I'm not getting any help here; I better learn the language". Or so I theorize. (Data welcome.)

The real issue there, I guess, is that most people don't want to learn to read a foreign alphabet at speed. I'd rather give them some tools for participation than write them off. (And just to clarify, I'm pretty sure my rabbi shares that view. He's not the one who said transliteration should be eliminated.)

But I'd also be thrilled if I, personally, never had to rely on transliteration again. :-)

- - - - - - - -

In other news, I met with our cantorial soloist last night to discuss that service at the end of July. She is quite happy to have me doing most of the music, with other committee members doing some, and she said she would like to see more of this. So we'll be sort of a test case or something, to see how the congregation reacts. The subs are already mostly lined up for her maternity leave (which is going to be very short, because she wants to be back before the high holy days), but she pointed out that next summer there will be an opportunity to do more. No, she's not planning another kid (or if she is, she didn't share that information), but the congregation has managed to clear next summer of b'nei mitzvot, so services during the summer can be less formal and more experimental. (Next year's class is small, so we are taking the opportunity to do some sanctuary renovations.) I'd love to see more lay people being more involved in things like this.

We also talked about the trope class I want us to have in the fall or winter, and she's going to do what she can to make it happen. The lines of responsibility are a little fuzzy here, and we both want to make sure it doesn't fall through the cracks.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

As someone who went and learned a foreign character set, I feel I should have something significant to say to that point.

Perhaps it is this: a year of steady use will make it possible to read it reasonably. Especially if you repeat the same things over and over, then it shoudn't be too bad.

On the other hand, for real speed you need to be reading the words, not just the phonetics, and that would seem to necessitate study of the language.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

a year of steady use will make it possible to read it reasonably.

I should qualify this with "for phonetic systems." Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and other ideographic systems are much different.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Cyrillic was maybe a week or two at the beginning of Russian, but then, Cyrillic is pretty closely related to the Latin alphabet.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

FWIW, it's based on the Greek alphabet for the most part. But Cyrillic has more letters in it than Greek since Slavic languages use many sounds that aren't present in Greek. (There are even a couple of Cyrillic characters based on Hebrew -- specifically, the letters for the "ts" and "sh" sounds.) OK, I'll stop being pedantic now. (I'm a bit of a language geek.)

[eub.livejournal.com]

Huh, "sh" is a ש, isn't it. Cool! (Also: my goodness, I'd never tried navigating Mozilla's mixed-direction text editing before.)

St. Cyril and his brother were Greek themselves, so one wonders whether they may have, in standardizing Old Church Slavonic (or was it Glagolitic they did?), have tilted towards the letterforms they knew.

[cellio]

How did you do that?

[eub.livejournal.com]

The shin? Copy-and-pasted it from here (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/hebrew.html), or I guess I could have done "ש". (Sorry that can't be any cleaner than whatever technique you're now using.)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that the creator of the Cyrillic alphabet (who was, I believe, actually Methodius and not Cyril) did stick to familiar letter forms. The creator of the Glagolitic alphabet, however, went quite a bit further from home. I can't read Glagolitic, but the few samples I've seen of it remind me a bit of the alphabet used for Amharic, one of the languages spoken in Ethiopia. (Incidentally, the root of the word "glagolitic" is a Slavic word meaning "vowel".)

In any case, the Cyrillic alphabet was, IIRC, created to represent the Slavic dialect spoken in a part of what's now the Czech Republic. The religious works written in that dialect served as the literary basis for old church Slavonic.

[cellio]

On the other hand, for real speed you need to be reading the words, not just the phonetics, and that would seem to necessitate study of the language.

If you're doing the same text repeatedly you can get to the point of recognizing words even if you don't comprehend them at the individual-word level. That's not as good as actually learning the language, of course, but it's a start. And if you try to learn what those specific words mean (even absent formally learning the language, grammar, etc), you'll be ahead when you encounter the same roots in other forms. I can't yet look at an arbitrary Hebrew word and strip off the prefixes and suffixes to get to the guts, but for some roots I'm pretty good at this by now. :-)