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Abstract
Although few linguistic corpora are available in Yiddish, there are numerous sources of so-called “found data” that can be adapted for language research, pedagogy, and resource development. We describe the steps taken to create the first speech synthesis (text-to-speech) program in Yiddish. A state-of-the-art TTS model, FastSpeech 2, was trained on a hand-corrected data set consisting of literary texts paired with audio narrations by native speakers of the Polish and Lithuanian dialects. A quantitative evaluation by listeners found that the system produced speech that was both intelligible and natural-sounding. To demonstrate the system’s applications for language pedagogy, we offer a qualitative evaluation of Yiddish phonological features that are present or absent in a sample of synthesized recordings. We hope that the success of speech synthesis in Yiddish will inspire future projects to enable technological support for other minority languages in which transcribed recordings are available.
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to problematize the ontology of Judeo-Spanish qua language. First, I argue that its traditional conceptualization as an autonomous, self-contained language is predicated on a (flawed) classical ontological framework that relies on so-called ‘named languages theory.’ Second, I contend that a more enlightened understanding of Judeo-Spanish as a linguistic phenomenon necessitates a paradigm shift toward a hauntological framework consistent with theoretical models such as translanguaging and revivalistics. I conclude that Judeo-Spanish is best understood as an ensemble of the only partially overlapping idiolects of people who share a common Sephardi cultural/ethnic identity and who manage to communicate with reasonable success. Third, I discuss the momentous implications of this shift in three domains: linguistics, minority rights, and education.
Abstract
The Calvinist politician and diplomat Theobald Hock (1573–ca. 1623) published in his collection Schönes Blumenfeld (1601) the poem “Das Cupido kein Kindt sey” (Cupid is not a child). Hitherto hardly noticed, it is a clear palinody to one of the most famous song poems of the epoch, to “Venus du und dein Kind” (Venus you and your child) written by the Kapellmeister and poet-composer Jacob Regnart († 1599) who was in Habsburg service. Both authors lived in Prague for a short time before 1599. Hock did not protest primarily against the use of pagan mythologems, as did some Christian rigorists (such as J. Rist), but (in a critical obituary of his Catholic neighbour?) Hock polemically dismisses Regnart’s text as a document of a foolish superstition that was widespread even among the educated. He replaces it with a conception of an omnipotent Eros that goes back to Hesiod and Plato, apparently mediated by rinascimental Platonism (M. Ficino), and which accompanies and drives all creations, including man’s cultural and moral achievements. Hock thus joins critical questions that the puerile figure of the naked Cupid/Amor had also provoked elsewhere (for example in the emblem book of Andreas Alciatus).
Abstract
In 2004, fire struck the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek (HAAB), particularly affecting its seventeenth-century collections, among them rich holdings of works associated with the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbearing Society), the foremost seventeenth-century German cultural society. Scholars and librarians feared that unique copies of titles that Society members deposited or once owned, which represent valuable source material relating to early modern German and European thought and culture, were lost or damaged in the fire. This article examines the development and dispersal of the library of the second head of the Society, Duke Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-Weimar, and analyzes its Society connections and context, including the handling of deposit copies members sent to the Erzschrein, or Society archive. This library, as one of the predecessor libraries to the Ducal Library and ultimately the HAAB in Weimar, is a channel through which unique copies of Society works may have reached the HAAB. Through analysis of archival sources related to Wilhelm’s library and the Society in Weimar, application of bibliographic methods, and physical inspection of HAAB copies of Society titles for evidence of provenance, this article investigates their fate from a qualitative perspective in the wake of the library fire.