It is Tisha Be Av and I was reading (praying?) from my late Mother's Hebrew-Hungarian old prayerbook. The Hungarian is so antiquated that it is almost unintelligible for me, and I am not a modern Hungarian speaker. The scan is the page of half Kadisch, transliterated into German-Hungarian in Ashkenazi pronunciation.
5 comments:
This is not the half Kaddish - it is the Mourner's Kaddish (Kadish Yatom or Juszem) according to the heading in Hebrew.
K
The Kaddish occupies two pages and here I scanned only the first half of it.
Later I'll scan another page with the old Hungarian translation that rings so strange in my ears.
You know that you have been too long in Israel when you understand only the Hebrew version of the Hungarian-Hebrew bilingual prayerbook.
It may be that you never would have understood the Hungarian half - it was probably written in a flowery literary formal style which was not the way people spoke on the street even when it was written.
Modern Hebrew on the other hand was consciously designed with Biblical Hebrew as its base (because as a semi-dead language, that was all that was just about all that was left of it) so there is not as big a gap, at least not yet - in another few hundred years (if God willing Israel is around that long) the language will again diverge just as by the time of Jesus biblical Hebrew was no longer the spoken language (which is why the Kaddish is not in Hebrew at all - it is in Aramaic).
All languages change and evolve - Chaucer's English is almost unintelligible and Shakespeare isn't always that easy to understand anymore either. I'm sure Hungarian, because of all the ideological pressures it has been under, the changes from West bloc to East back to West again, has evolved more rapidly than most but even in the US the speech has changed over the last 60 years. I was listening to the radio today and they were playing a recording of a song from 1950 - the singer was (despite the old recording technology) enunciating each word almost impossibly clearly (it would have required a lot of training to be so clear and yet still be singing). Modern singers mumble so that half the time you can't even tell what they are saying.
K
Kaddisch is in Aramaic and Hebrew, and I can understand it. Regarding liturgical Hungarian a hundred years ago, it contains words and concepts that I am unfamiliar with, that were not used during the Communist regime. I have the same difficulty to understand old Catholic prayers and masses and literature, and the Catholics in Latin America have discarded their old texts and rewrote it. Today, a Caholic mass is very clear and makes perfect sense and I think it captures the spirit of the original Church ceremonies.
Post a Comment