Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 09.051 January 11, 2000 1) EYDES project (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 17:29:30 -0500 (EST) From: "mikhl herzog" Subject: EYDES project I expect that the following will be of considerable interest to Mendele subscribers who are interested in the language, culture, and history of Ashkenazic Jewry. My colleagues and I will be pleased to respond to any questions that may arise therefrom. Questions may be directed to mherzog@bestweb.net or to robert.neumann@rhein-neckar.netsurf.de Mikhl Herzog, Editor-in-Chief Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, Columbia University The following report was recently delivered in Chicago, to the annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, by Robert Neumann, a member of the Editorial Collegium of the _Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry_ (LCAAJ), and chief of it data-processing operations. Abstract Beginning in 1959, a group of field workers interviewed emigrant informants in the USA and Israel, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, and all of them native to one of 603 selected cities and towns in Central and Eastern Europe. Some 6000 hours of tape recordings testify to the variety of language, folklore, life style, and cultural practices that characterized the Jewish communities prior to World War II. The resulting archive provides the basis for Yiddish and interlingual study and is a resource for anthropological, cultural and historical research. The inherent biographical information is a significant record of Holocaust history. Under the acronym EYDES a group of researchers has begun to digitize the archive and build an indexed database. EYDES preserves this archive and makes it accessible electronically for query and analysis. EYDES involves a range of challenging research issues particular to spoken language data. In addition, a four tiered representation will be required: a Yiddish transcription, and translations into English, French and Russian. EYDES handles multilingual representations, access methods, methods of transliteration, multi alphabetic management, and meets cataloguing/indexing challenges. It is realized by the collaboration of various cultural and academic institutions, drawing on the expertise of their specialists. Framework and Issues 1. The Blind Spot in the European Eye Yiddish language and literature flourished in Europe during in the first half of this century and had a remarkable impact on the surrounding cultures despite intense pressure resulting from economic hardship and the nationalization of coterritorial cultures. An education system existed which supported kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, along with their respective umbrella organizations, vocational schools, teachers' seminars, theologi-cal and academic institutions. In the midst of the European modernist national literatures, Yiddish literature came to fruition in this century and enjoyed an international reputation. Yiddish theater developed with great impetus and created a linguistic standard of its own, a particular stage pronunciation. A network of social institutions sustained daily life with children's homes, old age homes, soup kitchens and other support for the poor, health organizations, and workers' unions. Reserved representation in parliaments and city councils , social clubs, sportclubs , cultural organizations and political parties were the pillars of Jewish-Yiddish identity. Throughout the centuries, Yiddish speakers were aware of the closeness of their language to its sister language German. As a result, German cultural life drew Yiddish writers and Jewish artists and intellectuals like a magnet up until 1933. These developments all came to an abrupt halt with the rise of German fascism. Jewish life and all its culture were destroyed in the Holocaust. European Yiddish with its cultural and religious variety, was all but obliterated on its home territory. In places of refuge untouched by German soldiers the Stalinist persecutions liquidated the last pockets of Jewish culture and made it impossible after 1945 to reconstitute Jewish life in the Soviet controlled imperium. The socio-psychological outcome of National Socialism in Germany, combined with pre-war anti-Semitism in Europe, together with decades of European life split by the Iron Curtain have erased the knowledge of Yiddish culture from the European mind. Since the end of World War II and the fall of the Stalin regime, centers of Yiddish language and literature have grown in communities overseas, detached from their lands of origin and from the languages with which they shared many centuries of coterritorial development, in the first instance, German and the Slavic languages. It is a paradox that in the very European areas with which they long shared both productive and tragic developments, Yiddish language and culture have been largely relegated to the realm of folkloristic exotica, with a touch of nostalgia and anachronism. This dilemma was addressed by UNESCO, in the resolution of its 24th session, which seeks to counteract those developments and to "muster extra-budgetary resources for activities to preserve and promote the Yiddish language and culture ..." In March of 1996 the European Council, too, called upon the European states to protect Yiddish language and culture and to foster activities which serve its cultivation. 2. The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry.=20 In the 1950s, the renowned American linguist Uriel Weinreich at Columbia University, New York, began to realize the long harboured dream of creating a Yiddish language and culture atlas. "... what is familiar in one year may be thrust to the brink of oblivion in the next ... What was too obvious for study only yesterday has suddenly become precious ....what we do not collect in the coming decade or so will be lost forever." He undertook the unique task of reconstructing the historical Yiddish language and culture area after it had been dislocated and its home territory had been destroyed. Such a large-scale effort at conducting language and culture geography "at a distance" had never before been attempted. Beginning in 1959, a group of skilled field workers in the USA and Israel interviewed emigrant informants, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, and all of them native to one of 603 cities and towns in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1959 and 1972 the fieldworkers conducted interviews in sessions lasting over several days, thereby creating an irreplaceable tape-recorded archive of the living language in all its geographic diversity. Some 6000 hours of tape recordings, accompanied by approximately 100,000 pages of field notes testify to the variety of language, folklore, life style, and cultural practice that characterized the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe prior to World War II. In view of the fact that many of the people interviewed were survivors of the Holocaust, the biographical information which they provided must be considered a significant record of relevance to Holocaust history, as well. At the heart of the inquiry, and thus of each interview, was a questionnaire carefully designed by Uriel Weinreich on structural principles to cover the main topics of the linguistic and ethnological variety in the former Yiddish language territory. The questionnaire guaranteed the comparability of the informants' answers and made it possible to elicit information on a large number of central linguistic and cultural phenomena. The resulting archive of nearly 6000 hours of taped conversation preserves the most authoritative testimony to Yiddish language and culture in Europe in the 20th century. It provides the basis for reconstructing the genetic links between Yiddish and German in chronological terms, i.e. to the earliest Jewish settlements in the Rhine and Danube valleys. In addition to its obvious relevance for scholars of linguistics - particularly Yiddishists, Germanists, and Slavicists - the archive also provides a unique resource for anthropological and historical research as well. The LCAAJ archive thus serves a two-fold purpose: it constitutes a first rank monument to European heritage and an irreplaceable resource for the study of a life and culture that was destroyed by the Holocaust during World War II. This was emphasized at an international meeting of experts of the Israel National Commission for UNESCO which recommended the LCAAJ as a primary object of research. The experts consider the preservation, exploration and development of this archive as a key to the "sustenance and reclamation of the cultural values created by the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe in the centuries before their destruction". Since the spring of 1995 the archive is owned by the libraries of Columbia University, New York. Columbia University is committed to the preservation of the 6000 hours of interviews which are stored on about 2600 reels of tape. Our Answer We have decided to undertake the following: to transfer the Yiddish language and culture archive onto the computer, to integrate it into a communication network, and to make it accessible computatively. The post-Gutenberg attributes and advantages of the new communication media and their structures will be used systematically in order to reflect the manifold linguistic and cultural dimensions inherent in the holdings of the LCAAJ archive. The hitherto unparalleled degree of information presence via those new communication structures will be used systematically towards presenting the wealth of information from the LCAAJ archives in the EU states, in Central and Eastern Europe, at universities and in museums, in radio stations and newspaper offices, in publishing houses and media industries. We plan to make this documentation fully accessible to cultural institutions. Although we require the skills of linguists and computer specialists in order to access and process the archival materials, the transcribed project could not be successfully executed without the collaboration of museums, memorial institutions and libraries. As a result, the LCAAJ archive is being brought to Europe and the collections are being processed and disseminated. In a first step, in cooperation with its partners, the _Foerderverein fuer jiddische Sprache und Kultur_ (FJSK), will create and test a prototype of the designed electronic archive. In a second step, the materials from the LCAAJ archive will be inputted into that prototype. They will be inputted in two ways: as digitized speech and as transcribed speech, i.e. as written transcripts. In this way, the archive materials will be electronically represented. In a third step, the archive materials will be electronically documented and 'catalogued' by building various indexes. In a fourth step, the arising Yiddish culture database will be entered into electronic networks and by that be made accessible to the general public. At the same time, special applications in different cultural areas (linguistics, music/entertainment, political education) will demonstrate the archive's relevance, importance and diversity. The EYDES Idea The goals projected above require a long-range workplan which will encompass about 4-5 years. The following description details the first component of that long-range workplan. Where it is necessary, I will also outline the framework within which that effort will take its place. 1. The Significance of the Archive User All activities associated with the first project period are accompanied by a usergroup. Its role stresses the immense importance of users for our project, users who will realize the dissemination of the archive materials in the future and thereby serve as potential multiplicators of this initiative. To constitute the usergroup, representatives have been invited from various sectors: institutions devoted to secondary and tertiary education, political education, culture and the arts; the entertainment industry; institutions for the preservation of cultural heritage; academic institutions. At every stage of the work, the representatives are expected to provide the project with feed-back and advice. At the same time, the usergroup also serves the important function of introducing potential users to the computerized archive while it is being built. 2. The Original taped Interviews as a Data Base The interviews of the LCAAJ archive stored on digital audio tapes will be inputted as digital speech signals into a data base. In the process, the continuous interview from each location will be so segmented as to permit the user direct access (i)to all the data relating to each of the 603 locations covered by the survey and (ii) to the responses from 603 different locations to each of approximately 3200 questions in the questionnaire. The segmentation of the data by location and by question number permits small and well defined units to be extracted in response to a set of linguistic and culture-historical questions which underlie the design of the questionnaire and of the entire investigation. 3. Transcription and Accessibility At the above described first level of work, easy access will be provided to the answers of each informant (of each location) to all questions indicated in the questionnaire. However, all taped materials not directly relating to the specifically elicited questionnaire topics will remain unidentified and therefore inaccessible. Each interview also has taped records of many hours of continuous conversation which touch upon topics of ethnographic and historical relevance. These discussions constitute a unique resource for the study of contemporary European history, cultural and settlement history, connections between the Central and East European territories, the history of emigration, and the growth and development of overseas 'colonies' throughout the five continents, which maintained decades-long cultural and economic relationships to their home territories until the latter were destroyed in the Holocaust. These records consist of shorter or longer narratives, sometimes of songs, proverbs, folk-remedies, folktales, etc. We estimate that a third of the tape materials consist of such materials which, in accordance with French tradition, we call "ethnotexts". These data are contained in largely unstructured and freely associative speech passages which originated spontaneously during the course of an interview. While they were invited and actively welcomed by the interviewers and were tape-recorded in full, they were neither recorded on paper nor indexed in any way. They are accessible only on the tapes in the original sound, with no indication as to place or content. In order to provide access to these invaluable and irreplaceable unstructured materials and to make most efficient use of them, we have begun to transcribe all interviews, creating written records of the audio recordings. The transcription of the LCAAJ tapes follows the guidelines of Standard Yiddish spelling (the transcription of the western language varieties will provide a functional equivalent thereof). All spoken language that can be heard on the tapes will be transcribed: the speech of each interviewer and the comments of bystanders will be recorded in script along with the answers of each informant. Each text will be attributed to its respective speaker and marked as such. The transcribed interview records will be inputted into the computer along with the original sound recordings. The transcripts in Standard Yiddish orthography will also be presented in a transliteration based on the Roman alphabet, so that the accessibility of the archive be maximized. The presentation which will follow the internationally used YIVO Romanization of Yiddish texts. It can be generated automatically, on the basis of rules and exception files. The emerging written texts will be linked and synchronized with the previously structured question/ location segments of the original sound signals. In this way a bi-medial full text data base originates, consisting of spoken language and accompanying written records which are synchronized and referred to one another through pointers. The symbolic part of text in this full text data base can now be accessed as described below, using the general techniques of indexing and retrieval. The wordforms will be lemmatized and lexicalized, so that a new kind of thesaurus will emerge therefrom. This new thesaurus is then not dependent of the concepts used by specific academic disciplines; it is based, instead, on common language designations and provides optimal access to any kind of search process. When the outlined tasks have been carried out potential clients will be able to research the archive to its full extent on the basis of text tokens. They will not be restricted to specific, pre-structured concepts and to the coordinates of a scheme which was pre-designed by linguistic or ethnologic spealists. In addition, we intend to translate the lexicalized documentation into English, French, Russian and German. Of course, we will also install the already existing specified indexes, i.e. the Index to the Dialectology. Thus the archive can assume its innovative role and serve specific research purposes as well as broad educational aims in the public sector specific research purposes. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 09.051 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu http://metalab.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html