 Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm joined by Alison Markin Powell, who translates Japanese literature and works with Penn Translation Committee. She and I are co-organizers of Translating the Future, the conference you're now attending. Thank you, Esther, and thank you all for joining us for the 12th installment of our weekly program. Today, we are delighted to convene a conversation, or shall we call it a seance, on channeling the ghost languages of Europe with Martin Pückner, Peter Constantine, and moderator Tess Lewis. Martin is a professor of drama and English at Harvard University and author of a forthcoming book on Rottweiltsch, A Central European Thieves' Cant. Peter directs the program and literary translation at the University of Connecticut and is a terminal speaker of Aranitika, a language of Greece, and Tess is a writer and translator from French and German. You can find more about all of them by reading their full bios on the Center for the Humanities site. As today's conversation will underscore, endangered languages are not some far flung or remote concern, but in fact a very local and intimate matter. New York City itself is home to hundreds of endangered languages spoken by residents from all over the world. Co-founded by my Queens College CUNY colleague, Daniel Kaufman, the Endangered Language Alliance, which you can find online at elalliance.org, works with speakers of endangered languages in New York and other cities to help them document and maintain these fragile and irreplaceable human creations. At the moment, the Alliance is working hard to ensure that speakers of all languages are counted in the 2020 U.S. census. Their site offers a number of video and audio messages from speakers of Garifuna, Kishua, Mistek, Tzapanek, and many other languages, encouraging all community members to fill out the census forms. And as the site states, time after time, immigrant, minority, and indigenous communities in America's cities have been undercounted in all official statistics, with disastrous results that the current crisis is once again making clear. For opportunities to volunteer and support the Endangered Language Alliance's work, you can visit elalliance.org. Translating the future will continue in its current form throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with the week's hour-long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for Lightning in a Bottle, a case study of publishing literary translation, featuring National Book Award winner Yoko Tawada with Margaret Mitsutani, Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, and Rivka Galchin. And do keep checking the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Martin Bookner, Peter Constantine, and Tess Lewis to translatingthefuture2020.com. We'll keep questions anonymous, unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the livestream, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Martin, Peter, and Tess, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this livestream possible. And now over to you, Martin, Peter, and Tess. Welcome. Thank you all for tuning in to listen to us today. I'd also like to thank the participants and the sponsors, but especially Allison and Esther, who have made our pandemic live so much richer with these weekly conversations. To start off today's conversation, I'd like to ask Martin and Peter to describe your linguistic identities. And by that, I mean tell us which spoken, written, and read languages have made you who you are, and then describe your projects by situating Roatbelsch and Arvanitika in their historical context and also in your own lives. Peter, go ahead. Peter, why don't you start. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Well, so I am, I was born in England, but my mother tongue German, my mother's Austrian, grew up in Greece. And in Greece, it was from a local perspective, I would say it was a bilingual situation, just from a Greek perspective, meaning that we, like many Greeks, that we weren't Greek, exactly. I have a Greek grandmother, I should say, so there is some connection. But we had a village and then we were in Athens, so we would spend half the time there and half, half the time in Athens. And so in the village in the Peloponnese, they basically spoke, and this was in the, in the late 60s and early 70s, Arberisht or Arvanitika. Arberisht is the way we call language, Arvanitika is the way it's called in Greece, and also in general, by linguists. So Arvanitika was still spoken quite a lot throughout all generations. Funnily enough, I would say that I didn't really differentiate between the two languages. It was sort of what we spoke there was that and what we spoke in Athens was the other. So it really sort of blended into one, which unfortunately sort of has happened to that language because it died pretty quickly, I think, I mean, in the 70s. By the end of the 70s, once in a decade, it suddenly sort of disappeared as everybody modernized everyone wanted to go to Athens, everyone wanted to be Athenian stylish with it, not speak the old village language. So, yeah, that's basically it. So at home with my mother would speak only German or Austrian dialect in the streets, Greek or Arberisht or Arvanitika, then of course English. And I also went to a high school that had very strong Russian. And practically all the classes were in Russian. So it was sort of a Russian education sense. So that that's my linguistic background is a bit of a melting pot and a bit of a hodgepodge and mishmash. Is there one of those languages where you feel most at home. I think I really do feel that Austrian is my mother tongue. Like, you know, if you if if I'm, if you surprise me, I think my very first reactions usually in dialect and I think that's that probably points to that. On the other hand, I've lived 38 years in America. I am English. So, and and I, everything everything I've translated is either into English or into modern Greek, not not into German. So that that's kind of strange. I would say English three my language and model is a language that I've begun working a lot with recently like translating into it, which is a new experience. Why, why, what prompted you to take on the project of noting down our vanity and transcribing it recording it for posterity. So my, my, my connections I went to came in two phases one was a sort of this confused early stage, and then more specifically my mother married into into a family. When I was in my late teens, and you're going to school is my my new uncle that meaning meaning so my stepfather was also called yours, but you're going to school is was a patriarch who spoke the language and just simply couldn't believe that that this teenager from England or anywhere, wherever, but with some kind of Greek background, would speak this language which really had died actually by then. His sons didn't speak it. In other words, my cousins. So, so we that language became a bond thing and he would then do something that is somewhat unnatural which is to speak the language to me, because what's happened as well in the villages that were able to speak it for very, very short. There might say a sentence or two, and then go back into Greek. So nobody nobody at this point really speaks sustained, at least as far as I know and I mean I've really sort of hung out in in our vanity circles I've never heard more than just two or three phrases and then let's go back to Greek. Right. So, but that was sustained sustained sustained. Yeah. That that so that that was then a very intense connection to the language, and we suddenly, suddenly realize what he didn't really consider it as a language it was really like you know make sure that so we just put one word next to the other it's not a language, but he began to which he began to realize that that it's, it's, it's dying and that he's really the last fluent speaker in the village. And that, and I was saying to him if we don't do recordings there are no recordings, at least no sustained recordings in 50 years, the language will be will be gone and I thought and I'm sort of seeing this as well. New generations are beginning to be interested. Like, yes, we are out of I need this on Facebook you see it, you know, I don't need the web pages. So there's this pride that's coming back. We've seen this as well in in America with our native languages here that there was a long period where people really didn't want to speak it at some point for very many reasons, external and internal and people talk of language murder and language suicide, meaning it's murdered by the, the powerful language all around and the suicide because people people don't want to talk it like you don't want to speak on talk it you want to speak English you want to go to university you want to go to high school you want to do things you know you don't want to stick in that and that's sort of what happened to us in in in Corinth. Yeah, so anyway in short sorry I'm going on here but in short, the idea was to do a language project. Yeah, well what's interesting is that with those native American languages that are dying out it usually takes one charismatic individual who on a mission to revive it. Not always but with with several of the languages I've seen. I've read about success stories and doing that. Martin, you have an interesting linguistic background and a project that overlaps in intriguing ways with Peters in that it was an underground insider language, but you had an uncle who was committed to preserving it and revitalizing it so tell us about your background and your project. Thank you, Tess. Well, from one perspective I have a very boring language background, which is just German period. It's just, you know grew up in Southern Germany, speaking both Southern dialect and high German and and that was it both my parents were I mean I learned other languages in school but it was just a monolingual in many many senses upbringing. However, there was this one maybe interesting thing about it that you mentioned something that I took sort of for granted at the time but that I now think it was unusual and this is why I'm writing book about it. And that was that my father and uncle inducted me into this underground language this thief's language called road Valsh, which is a combination of German Yiddish and Hebrew, and was the sort of the the language of the road. I grew up from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. And especially my uncle was obsessed with this language he he studied it he was a poet he incorporated it into his own poetry started to translate into this language he really made it his life's mission to resuscitate this language to study it to promote it. And so he taught me some and it became sort of a family game this language I'm not a really a speaker of this language but I sort of grew up around it I was he tried to sort of inject it into our lives and you know successfully so he died very early and I inherited this archive this incredible archive he had assembled around this language hundreds and hundreds of cart catalogs of expressions like I have like these kinds of things like a lot of them boxes and boxes of them. So, and I've been carrying this archive around with me ever since and so I decided finally to, to reckon with it, and then there's this other more disturbing family story connected to it, because at some point independently, I threw in an archive I realized, I found out the truth about my grandfather. And so it turned out was a Nazi historian historian of names. And this was shocking to me to find this out. Surprising and strange was the fact that among his objects, obsessions was this secret language so he was writing against it he was trying to eliminate it. And then I realized okay so there's a family story buried here and so this is why this book is not just a book about this underground language in the world, it sort of represents but also this family history how this Nazi historian writes against this language how his two sons, without quite that, at least that's the official story, make it their life's mission to rescue it, and then teach it to me, who had to discover this whole history sort of on my own so it's a very you know it became sort of a dark history. But I should say but one of the things that I think both attracted my uncle and my father and me to this language also it's this wit. It's an incredibly funny language it's a resilient language. It has this kind of it's worldwide. Besides Ruth Welsh the other name for this language is kakramalashan based on Hebrew, meaning language of the of the wise, also in the sense of the wise guys of those in the know. But there is something that I feel like this language really knows and I think in part I wrote this book trying to find out what it knows. And you know just from reading the book which is which is a fabulous portrait of road fell of your own family and also linguistic developments over the 20th century, how certain languages are politicized and denigrated and revived. The fascinating passage which you've just alluded to is about your uncle who decided to translate Shakespeare and the Bible and other works of major works of world literature into wrote Welsh and funnily enough I was. Translation conference once and there was an author from a major author from Macedonia, and you know the question was put to him. You know what what is the point of translating into a language like Macedonia and which I think there are only 100,000 roughly speakers at the moment. It's vitally important for our language to have major works of literature translated into it because it keeps our language vital, fresh, and also it brings it raises the level of our language so that we can express the the thoughts and insights that are that have been expressed in other languages as well so more flexible. And so obviously your father your uncle died before he could do that but what are your thoughts about the success of his translations into wrote Welsh into, you know, at least your ability to understand how the language works and what it does. Yeah, no, I think it's a great question and it's, it's so true so wrote also purely spoke the complication is that wrote as many as the of these minor dialects and languages purely spoken language. There is a written record but the only people who wrote it down were the police who are trying to record it and decrypted and understand it and ultimately eliminated. So part of what what's in my uncle's archive are these police records of this language. So it's a it's a very ambivalent record, a written record, a hostile record but nevertheless the only way in which this language survived as a written language. But then you're so right. I think my uncle's project was to to to create a turn it into to turn the spoken language into a written language with a literature and there are many examples of of that trajectory and Yiddish is one of them and of course he studied Yiddish, because it's important for this language. And so translating works of literature into this language is a way of sort of jump starting a literary tradition, if you will, it's also matter of prestige, especially this is why you pick figures like Shakespeare or the Bible. But you also in a sense and this is again true of in sense all literary traditions of all language traditions that become literary at some point that you create an artifice. So the this language that my uncle translated into road vouch this written literary road vouch in some sense was probably no one ever spoke like that. But it was sort of his attempt to create a kind of written language and and he published one book of translations, and it was very proud of that. There was in his case, I think a second motivation besides turning road vouch as a part of adding prestige and a permanent record and and and and giving it a literature or trying to imagine what a literature in this language would be like. And that wall had to do with German and its relation to German. So one of the things that he loved about the relation between word Welsh and German is that that it as a German speaker you would sort of pick out words you would understand words but they would have changed their language and so you couldn't quite understand it. But there was something very vivid and mobile and alive about it and so I think he, he felt he hope that that these word vouch translations that their speakers would be Germans, the readers would be they would somehow unsettle their sense of language it would they would shake something loose about German that they that that there would be sort of a very alive literary ferment that would emerge from that. And he shared that with other modernists Kafka was someone who had a little bit of an interest in in road well she came upon it via Yiddish and he had similar Kafka use this term raking up the language, you know, sort of aerating it turning it down, shaking it loose. And so that was, I think the other, the other point, the, the other purpose, having less to do with what these translations would do to wrote Welsh and be giving it prestige and right, you know, but what it would do to the readers of the German speaking readers that it would sort of liven things up for them. Well, Peter, this overlaps with your comment just a few minutes ago that younger generations are just rediscovering our money to go and finding a certain amount of pride in speaking it. Do you see this also as part of your project to, it's primarily spoken the, I imagine the, the, because you, you, you're working from recordings of your uncle. So how do you see your project of preservation revitalization overlapping with this rediscovery of linguistic identity among younger generations. Well, actually, I should, I should say that it's. So, we have quite a few indigenous languages in Greece. Lots of Slavic languages, which nobody really ever talks about. Everyone in Europe has signed the charter for the protection regional and endangered languages except the Greece, but we don't have any, any regional languages in Greece is basically really so I'm being a little bit polemic I guess here but it is a problem, I think, because Greece is Greece and we speak Greek and we're all Greek and that's how it is. And that's caused the problem I think it's unnecessary why not have linguistic diversity. Now, what that has meant is that there has really been a sort of a, an oppression of these languages really I mean I have to say that's what it is. What really, what is happening is that people are maybe beginning to to embrace the, the, you know, we are out of I need this. But not necessarily the language. So that hasn't quite happened yet. At least I haven't seen it. I'm hoping that it's, it's happening it could be sparked from it, you know, at any moment. But what the uncle wanted to do and, well, what he wanted to do was to create a Rosetta stone, in a sense, because my prediction is that there's going to be an interest in about one or two generations when it's really too late. And at that point, because we've seen that that happened with many other endangered languages, where there is an interest when it's almost too late. Esther mentioned New York. I mean, we have indigenous languages in New York also in Connecticut, let's say Long Island, you know, Shinacoc, Montauk it. Then Mohegan. Now those are languages that died several centuries ago, or died. Let's say they, they, well, they fell out of use. The last speakers just maybe knew a few words. But these are now being revived people are looking into into well one of the dictionaries that Thomas Jefferson had made. For instance, and are using those those word lists in order to recreate the language with linguists. Anyway, so what I mean is one sees all these paradigms worldwide and, and we just thought well, we need the sound of the language and what the uncle did is started talking about everything that had to do with village life. Every aspect with the ideas, if I don't mention it, it's not going to be remembered. And, and, well, in order to really get give one a panoramic and encyclopedic sound recording that that will that will really touch on everything that you need in order to be able to speak the language. One thing, though, is of course that everything that was discussed was the way it was as often happens, I think as well with with languages that fall out of use. So in other words, you know, we would know the different parts of a handplow which we don't need to use anymore, but there's no way. Well, that's not even a word for electricity. In fact, you know, let alone computer iPhone. Bluetooth, whatever. Right. So, so that also means that, and this is something that the professor Luna, who's an average speaker meaning speaker of a language is very close to ours spoken in Italy in southern Italy that that when they speak about home and the language there is is more vital than ours. When when the various generations speak at home they might talk about everyday things but when it comes to talking about modern life they really do slip into Italian because that's the only way you can discuss. You know, who's doing the dissertation and who's going to be doing the defense when I mean we can't say we can't discuss that in in our British in our Vanityka or in our British. Actually, I want to ask you a question so I got a bit. I mean, when I was I was googling our Vanityka in preparation and it's actually quite fascinating they had a very, they had a very feminist culture. They had women were allowed to carry arms and to fight in the army they had a great important commander who was a woman widows inherited not only the family wealth, but the prestige and honor and social status of their of their husbands, which probably didn't make it into your uncle's renditions of daily life. No, no, I think so, like my mother was the big the matriarch of the memory my mother, who I remember as well and would have these enormous cauldrons and cook for the whole family, and she ruled the family. She's a frightening person in a sense but also rather endearing. Hard hard, you know, as everyone was really I mean it was hard life very very very hard and difficult life. What also happened though was that the, the way when a young woman entered into a family. It was a very difficult situation for her because she she would be the pretty much a slave of the man and everyone else. At least this is how I see it, but then would. If she survives all the births and if she survives all that once she reaches when she is the grandmother. She's the matriarch then there's an incredible power there. That's how I saw it. There might be anthropological studies that go more specifically but that seemed to me what how things were. Segue is very neatly into the, the title question of this of our conversation and that is, what is lost when a language is lost and and Martin addresses linguistic relativism in his book about, you know, some people believe that each language encapsulates and carries this very specific way of looking at the world. Others say that language is arise from perfect particular belt on show. Peter, what is lost, what would be lost say if our vanity is lost or any of the other endangered languages that you mentioned already today. But I think the I think that the so the European Center for Languages, I think counted 125 languages in Europe that are on the brink of extinction alone. We don't think of Europe, we think of Europe as a very straightforward linguistic place. There's a lot of German in Germany, but of course in Germany, in Germany there's also Saabish and, and, and you're, you're blundish and frieze sat up frieze said this that the other all these different languages. Platt Deutsch platt Danish, which were actually real real languages that then got relexified and became more a little bit more German but still sound sound quite different. So it was a very, very rich tapestry. So well. The simple answers would be really linguistic ecology. I mean, so, you know roses are beautiful but if that's all we have in the world, meaning if English is the rose. And English is the only language that's left, which could happen. I don't know. People seem to be very worried. Well, maybe that's fine, you know, I mean, it's a beautiful strong wonderful language so the whole world speaks nothing but but that would be I think catastrophic from from a linguistic ecological perspective, because the diversity is then gone. The different belt and show that languages do bring different worlds that they that they capture the different knowledges. So all of that the way of using verbs are not using them. I mean, some of our languages here that people say are only verbs and nothing else. So, I mean these ways of approaching or the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth person in Navajo, I hear, I don't know, don't speak Navajo but I think that's fascinating that there might be more persons. All that's gone then so so I think that's a catastrophe. Martin, I think this catastrophic vision is very clear in the case of road belch, because road belch. We're regardless of where you stand on the scale of linguistic relativism road belch is a product of or perhaps determines are both a way of life for which there is increasingly no room. And there's always been suspicion, and, you know, because it overlaps say with the travelers or gypsies, Roma, Cindy. What do you see as the, the service that road belch can provide in in encapsulating and preserving a way of living in the world. So, right so I mean road belch was always persecuted. As I mentioned from the beginning for by the police. It got a lot of anti Semitic, even though most of the speakers were probably not Jewish it was not an ethnically defined language but a language as you put it has based on a on a form of life as Wittgenstein would say who whose theory of language I think really fits well, strangely well to this thieves language I think he would like this idea, namely that a language is sort of really part and parcel of a way of life. If you eliminate the way way of life, the, the, the ecosystem to pick up a term Peter just used you, you, you change the language or ultimately it dies, and I think that ultimately what what what killed road belch even though it's still alive here and had fascinating encounters and knowledge of speakers here and there was was not just the persecution, above all by the Nazis and that basically the more or less elimination of Yiddish from Europe. But also the change of modernization, the fact that this life of the itinerant underground has changed it. It changed in the course of the 19th century from the, from, from the road into the underground of the big cities. But it survived some of these changes so you know who knows I mean it's it's also it's sort of hard to kill languages. And they have a way of sometimes coming back and unexpected places, but yes I think that that that and I think that's the answer, because I would give to your question that and it's in many ways similar to what Peter said is that a language captures a way of life. So in the, in the case of our need to gather that way of life that didn't include Bluetooth and computers but it included all these other things. In, in the case of road belch there, when you look at the language, you really get a picture of the life. There are many words for police different kinds of police, different kinds of prisons, getting arrested foods, many words for lice. I mean all the, but also fun, lots of words for food and alcohol and sex and, and so you get sort of a, because I should technically road belch is is what linguists would call a sociolect. So it's mostly a lexicon that is words and you know for for nouns and verbs that the grant the grammatical structure is not that unusual here it's mostly provided by German. But so you get a picture of that life so in a sense that it's a record of this life. And for me I have very few illusions that I would that I could revive this language I've seen that project fail in my uncle's case and it's fascinating by the way that in both Peter in both of our cases it's, it's an uncle. Maybe we should coin a term not for a father tongue I sometimes talk because mostly this language was transmitted to me by my uncle and father, and then this weird opposition from my grandfather. Not a father tongue but no it's an it's an uncle tongue and uncle language, perhaps. But, but that that it is a record of that of that language and for me it's a way of preserving that and not just a record and a kind of clinical or purely scholarly way but also a record of what life of the road look like and and and and and what kind of view of the world. It brought with it. Well, what would I find fascinating about that very topic. The road to us as a view of the world is, as you mentioned earlier terms shifted and changed according to the level of secrecy. It's not necessary. In the last weeks, fascinating conversation about motherless tongues. Eric, see me talked about come from come from the the Cameroonian mixture of the native language, French and English, as a vernacular that was in a sense of resistance to the language and part of the mechanism of creating come from gay and using it against the occupying or controlling forces was adopting terms, changing them. In fact, recycling them, and you, Peter, Martin, talk about recycling at road felt as a language that recycles it based on a way of life that is heavily focused on recycling. I want to hear both of your thoughts on language as resistance, minor languages subversive languages. And also it's sort of the one thing that gives me hope that we won't be stuck with the one very beautiful rows of English. But perhaps, Martin, you could talk about the idea of recycling within language. I love this idea of recycling. It was actually given to me by a Yenish speaker, sort of a modern variant of road Welsh who said, you know, we, we nomadic peoples we have to recycle everything including our language. So recycling is one thing but you also mentioned this kind of secrecy and resistance from come from Glenn, I would say, in word relish that's very, very similar. It's not so much. So it's complicated because on the one hand there is this one, the view of the police, which is that these work well speakers deliberately created a secret language in order to sort of plot the next heist and so on and so forth. So there's a large amount of paranoia, I think also part of it. And so everyone says oh it's a secret language and they sort of made it up they made it secret. And that that occasionally happens but we know that's not really how a language emerges, a bunch of people getting together and saying you know we're going to come up with a secret language. I mean I talk a little bit about Esperanto I mean this is something slightly maybe artificial about creating an artificial lingua franca but in any case. But, but more, I think more plausible is what you describe as an analogy to come from clay test namely that it is, you take languages from the words from the major languages. You mix them sometimes you take them from minor languages to so these speakers took a lot of words from German, but also from Yiddish, which is sort of a also a language to some extent of migration and the road in central Europe, and also from from Romani the language of the Cynthia and Roma, who were sort of more linguistically defined as separate, but to some extent occupied an overlapping milieu and so you take words you recycle them, you change them and there is a form of resistance and I think to that extent there is something to the secrecy because part of the, the, the, the, the tool that this language provided was to create a community in the face of incredible amount of opposition and persecution. And for, for Arvanitica it was quite different because Arvanites, so my uncle would always say, you know, we are very, very, very, very alien so real true, very, in fact, which is Italian right a true a true, which actually verus alien as I would say comes from Greek Italian anyway I'm walking down linguistic memory lanes here but okay true Greek true true Arvanites, the Arvanites were the forefront of the of the 1821 war of independence against Ottoman occupation. So, when Greece was a province of the Ottoman Empire. So, so what what happens there is that the Arvanites in Greek history have a strong position in a way as, as, as the heroes of the of the Greek war of independence. Um, but on the other hand, well, there is also the problem of many. So you know you hear things like Arvanitica, like Arvanit head meaning a sort of a villager who doesn't understand or for the blacks who are a Latin group of speakers in central Greece. The black black house means means is also sort of a swear word I mean so so it is a problem you know that that identity issue, but it was not that the language wasn't. I don't know that one I never experienced that one would slip into Arvanitica so that Greek speakers wouldn't understand. It was more that if they're Greek speakers around we won't really speak it. He sets in my experience that way. So, it was never a secret language maybe it was secret in the sense that that Arvanites trying to blend into to Greek society and really be part of it might really prefer not to discuss that not to mention that there are I need this and not to speak the language. Not really not not in front of non speakers but then maybe also not less and less at home. I mean, in our case, also my uncles in in Shinyan and current thing is Yanis would speak to grandmother who really didn't speak that her Greek was a problem. So everyone took to her in Arvanitica, but then among themselves really more and more modern Greek. So, to turn a bit to your to your Russian background, your Russian personality linguistic identity and, and talk about compare the road to the language in the gulags of the sex, the political and criminal prisoners, because in a, in a previous talk about mentioned that it was called Fenya, which comes from often in, you know, so that it wasn't actually spoken openly it was, it was their, their secret line underground language. But you can speak often you can speak when you speak Fenya, the Russian, then you can speak openly with the sex and in the present. Okay, that that was what that came from. And well, there is a big tradition. Dostoyevsky, for instance, was very, very interested when he ended up in in Siberia. He, he would cut pieces of he was very ill he was in in, I want to say hospital but it wasn't really a hospital it was God knows what it was but anyway he was in hospital today. And he would cut pieces of crewed sackcloth, which he was covered, and write things that he heard which, which then became a Siberian notebook, but which he also then used in his, his novels like when you hear, you're here particularly in the House of the Dead, there's a lot of dialogue that doesn't really make sense but that is from that Fenya. And then later on writers like like Solzhenitsyn, one day in the life of Ivan Dmytrovich, or, or many of the Gulag works that he did, did did also acknowledge and and really brought the plight of that and often yeah Fenya often. I don't know that in Russia actually I don't know that speakers of Fenya would know that it comes from Yiddish often, but, but, but that's where it comes from. Yeah. Okay. And do you, how first are you in, in that variant of Russian or myself. Yeah, is it clear to a Russian speaker what it means or is it sort of like the, the hodgepodge of language that was spoken in the Gulag where you recognize certain words from different languages. Well, I think that, that, that, that, you know, something that Microsoft brought up is I think that that as words become popular, maybe the true speakers of Rotwelsch or Fenya or Ingo in Japanese in Japan, the hidden language there have to reinvent new things in order to remain as the police learns, learns the word and it becomes a police jargon. You know, spill the beans, whatever, I don't know. I mean it sounds corny now but that probably was brought the American version of Rotwelsch all those years ago. So now we know what spill the beans might mean so now we might need to use something else and so it developed and it developed and it changes that way in order to to keep avoiding the fact that the public knows and and as we said we talked about and I talked about that in Austrian we have lots of Rotwelsch traditional Rotwelsch sort of streets line you know when we well maybe my generation I tried I tried some some of those Rotwelsch words on on my cousins kids and it was interesting because my cousin understood many things from our generation but the kids like on the most next loss like if you know hand over the cash otherwise we're not going to do anything kind of thing on the most next loss which was Rotwelsch right so my cousin and I we understand that we're in our 50s her kids were in the 20s and 30s don't work naturally they understand that but not other not other things like leader for money and things like that right. I have a quick question for Martin actually two part question. First of all we've heard a lot about women and our vanity kind of role set out for women. But Rotwelsch the impression I have from listening to speak so far Martin is that it was almost entirely male language. So were there female speakers of Rotwelsch female users of Rotwelsch. And then based on what Peter just said, were the speakers of Rotwelsch aware of how strongly Jewish it was how Yiddish and how Hebrew it was or where they like the inhabitants of the Gulak that Peter has mentioned who might not even have known the basis of the language that they considered their own secret language. Thank you for both of these questions fascinating the quest second I haven't really hadn't have to admit I hadn't even thought of it that much, but I think you're right because I think the speak that is that they may not have been that aware of it. I think where the where the Yiddish identity of this language I see it most strongly in the archive is on the part of the often anti Semitic enemies of this language. So they will be saying in a sense you could say the language is perfect for an anti Semite, because it associates somehow through the Yiddish influence Jewishness and underground and the theory, you know, and so this is what we've been saying all along all Jews are the thieves, you know, so this is in a sense what what anti Semites made of it so they really emphasize they they spoke of it as a Jewish language, the anti Semites and use that as to to prosecute the language. Whereas, in fact, I mean it has it has this very interesting and fascinating complicated relationship to Yiddish and Hebrew as spoken in Central Europe but the speakers were not ethnically identified so I, and I think that they were probably therefore not as aware of that, though some may have been, and I've somehow lost track of your first question about women did women. Oh, yes. So no, it's, it's very hard to actually pinpoint who spoke it when and it but because it was only, you know, was only a spoken language, but absolutely, even in the scant record, they are women. Basically, it represents who was only who was in the itinerant underground and they were. Yes, there was sort of the figure of the male hobo or the male apprentice or the male. You know, deserter who sort of strikes out and wanders the road and sort of makes do so there's that figure and in some sense that's maybe a dominant figure, but I also came across and I write about that, because I did have that that is something I did think about is this an entirely male thing and not at all. So there are sometimes you had whole families who were on on, you know, on the road together, speaking and I have records of that. And there are also times that the more, you know, it's it's many, the speaker, it's this language that existed for like 5600 years. So and it particularly thrives during times of upheaval. So for example, in the aftermath of the of the 30 years war. There's lots of, there's a lot of displacement and ref a lot of refugees internal refugees because Central Europe had been the center of this 30 years war. And so you have groups of 50 even 100 people living together. And then you have women, women, children, speaking this language. So absolutely it's also, and then when it goes into the underground. The underground milleers of the big cities like Vienna or Prague or Berlin. You have, you have women associated with with sex workers, you are speaking that the language trickling into that milieu so yes, absolutely it's not a male language, even though I threw these, you know, family words, learned it from an uncle and I'm joking that it's an uncle language. It's in fact there there it's it's it's there there women who spoke it and that became important for me and I had I looked for that. And in fact Peter there's a wonderful woman character in your book, it was Gertie, I think she her name is. There was a prominent woman in the underground. I'll have to, I'll have to look up that but I'll just put it I'll put a pitch in for for Martin's book it's a fabulous story and you get a number of characters in the itinerant underground to come to life. Here's a question that we have in light of Martin's answer to that I think this is kind of this is an interesting transition. One of our viewers has sent in. This conversation about disappearing deeply rooted languages is particularly compelling in light of the fact that younger generations are starting to renew interest in these languages and breathe new lives into these components of their cultural or communal past. I'm reminded however of how attempts to revive or reshape languages can sometimes be directly connected to nationalist or separatist movements to take a very obvious example the splintering of Yugoslavian languages in the 1990s. Does the revival of a language always entail the revival of a nationalist or sectarian identity. Are there ways for the two trends to be unyield from me from one another. If I could say something about that because that is one of the problems perceived in in in Greece. And I'm upset about it because first of all, I think all the communities. The Arvanites, the Vlahi, the Zagonis, the Pormaks. Anyway, people who speak who live in Greece and identify as Greeks but speak this language would not see that the language is a reason to break away but it has happened. It has happened with the great of Vlah. I mean, there have been plots to create separate states with these languages. And I think that's what makes certain countries nervous. This is 2020. I mean, we are in Greece. We are part of the European Union. I do not think that there would be that the North might break away and that all the Slavic languages. So, yeah, but it is a very good question because that is what people are often frightened of in countries that that that it could lead to to to break up break up of a nation so it's easy to say this is Germany we speak German this is Greece we speak Greek. It's a simpler, simpler solution. Let's stamp out these other little problems. Yeah, Martin, do you want to speak to Rudd-Velsch as a sort of stateless language. Yeah, just very briefly because as you say it is by from the beginning and a stateless language language spoken by sort of internal migrants and anti nationalist language so it's interesting that that that you know to so in that sense there's no danger, if you will, of nationalism attached to it, but that may be also the reason why the attempt to revive it as undertaken by my uncle and now by myself is absolutely futile. We have a couple of questions that I want to kind of join into one. Someone would like each of you to comment on specific phrases, specific turns of phrase within the languages that you're speaking about that will give us more of a sense of the language. And in your case in particular Martin, can you talk about the written aspects of Rudd-Velsch which apparently used symbols it was sort of pictorial and so we have a someone wants to know more about that. Yeah, so that's so I keep saying that it is a purely spoken language but you're absolutely right that's not entirely true there are these signs like written hobo sign so this is the one book my uncle published and on the cover are some of these signs they're like very simple hobo signs about 50 signs. So they are not the signs are not a you know phonetic representation of the language but they're sort of pictographic ways of. So, for example, go here and go begging and you will get something or there's a sign of a cross. You know, if you act piously, they will give you Brad, or you know this this kind of thing. So to make the road navigable so that's the written there so there is this written component though it's not a written version of the of the of the spoken language. Yeah, sort of like emoji or icons. Exactly. And are there any specific Rudd-Velsch or Arvanitika phrases that the two of you'd like to share. So the I mean some of my favorite there are many favorite phrases in a way my love for these phrases since childhood is really the deep I think driver in part of the book. So what one phrase I love is to unhasen machen, which means to make a rabbit, which is to escape. I love I love that to make a rabbit to escape really quickly. I love the phrase. There's a phrase that also trickled into German actually even into English to be in a pickle. So there's no logical reason why, if you're in a difficult situation, why it would make sense to say you're in a pickle. And so this is one of the examples where a Hebrew and Yiddish derived phrase that sounded to German speakers like Saurigotensite, the time of pickles in English, sounded like that phrase so they adopted it without understanding its meaning, and then it even trickled into English. So those are the and Peter mentioned another another phrase like that, you know, most for money and so on and so forth. So there are these phrases that are sometimes absorbed into the dominant language or sometimes they're sort of misappropriate and sort of sit there as these unexplained idioms, like being in a pickle. And so those are some of my favorite phrases in language. Peter, do you have any? Oh yes, I mean, lots of things that I find very, very, very interesting objectively like you don't think about it when you're there. But for instance, greeting rituals I think are always quite indicative of a culture right so one thing that that we do is. You know, as you walk up the slope, you'd say something like spend the winter like how, how are the olives, you know, is the way of saying hello. And then the olives are fine so you talk about the olives and the decker then like what you're going to do there and then you say so and how, how the gosh at the like how are the, the animals might get down to the family and ask how the wife or something like that. So that that's one thing. Oh, and speaking of animals actually that's something else that I found interesting is that that there's different taxonomy. That's the word. I'm not quite sure if that's the right way to put it but let's say, and this is something that I always come back to that when you look out into when you have hundreds and hundreds of goats or sheep. You, you have different words with different kinds. You don't see them as one animal. I think that's another interesting thing, you know. Yeah, so you know chocolate like with a short short short. Yeah, whatever they're just different different colors different so there's a whole thing. There's a whole group of animals that is something that we do as well. I'm going to try and sneak in one last question from a viewer. So something is lost when the language is lost and something is saved when it is safe. So the question is, if this is something that can be. Let's see, could something lost in some, let me just find the best part of the question, do this something lost and something saved function in the same way for instance for social psychology, or for people's literary or are there aspects of each of these languages that that could influence the psycho social psychology or literary imagination do you think into or out of any other way. Well, I can speak. I mean, I think that, you know, one reason my, my uncle was so interested it is was for the literary imagination I think he had, he had a sort of social project project behind it it had a he had a project of criticizing racism in Germany behind it but he also had a literary the literary the literary the fertile literary promise of this language so I think for him it was both so I would I would say it's a great question and I agree these are two separate things and and I think in the case of my uncle they were both very strongly there and I would say from speaking for myself as well. I can quickly say actually. So, I don't think there's not a written language. So, it doesn't have a literature in that sense. But, but what what this project with the uncle did is, is that turned out that he that he not only in recounting the village legends, reciting them, but he also created the oral literature, but he also created that much of when he was talking about, for instance, how we killed and she had to kill because she got rabies I mean it's a terrible story, but that's a harrowing piece that you just pick out and it's powerful powerful point was just says it. And so there's a lot of that, lots of moments in his narrative that that suddenly create a a the collected words of works of yours was so close. So, I'm not sure if I fully understood the question but it definitely this language, it's death and are trying to capture it, created a literary moment a very powerful one and and discovered a well a major unique the first and the end of this last, I need writer and poet. Thank you, we're unfortunately out of time now, but thank you to Martin and Peter and tests for moderating this was a wonderful conversation. So we have it's a sort of, it's been touched upon in today's conference and today's conversation but later next month on August 25. We will be talking about the effects of and sustaining stateless languages so we'll be talking about Catalan Yiddish in and of itself and Frisian. So, stay tuned and check out the Center for the Humanities site for updated listing. So once again we would like to thank our partners how round pen America, the Center for the humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for scholars and writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E seagull Theater Center. Thank you. Hope to see you next week. Thank you.