John Coltrane was a remarkable man and a ‘hard practicer,’ as one of my teachers once called me.

John Coltrane was born in his parents’ apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23, 1926.

His father was John R. Coltrane and his mother was Alice Coltrane.

John Coltrane’s family moved to High Point, North Carolina shortly after he was born.

He stayed in High Point until after high school (William Penn High School now Penn-Griffin School for the Arts).

 

Beginning in December 1938 Coltrane’s aunt, grandparents, and father all died within a few months of one another, leaving John to be raised by his mother and a close cousin.^[6] In June 1943 he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In September of that year his mother bought him his first saxophone, an alto.^[7] He had his first professional gigs in early to mid-1945 – a “cocktail lounge trio”, with piano and guitar.^[8]

To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6, 1945, the day the first U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. He was trained as an apprentice seaman at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York before he was shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed at Manana Barracks, the largest posting of African-American servicemen in the world. By the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. Coltrane’s musical talent was quickly recognized, though, and he became one of the few Navy men to serve as a musician without having been granted musicians rating when he joined the Melody Masters, the base swing band. He continued to perform other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen and security details. By the end of his service, he had assumed a leadership role in the band. His first recordings, an informal session in Hawaii with navy musicians, occurred on July 13, 1946.^[9] Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of jazz standards and bebop tunes.^[10]

After mustering out of the Navy, as a seaman first class in August 1946, Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, where he “plunged into the heady excitement of the new music and the blossoming bebop scene.”^[11] After touring with King Kolax, he joined a Philly-based band led by Jimmy Heath, who was introduced to Coltrane’s playing by his former Navy buddy, the trumpeter William Massey, who had played with Coltrane in the Melody Masters ^[12] In Philadelphia after the war, he studied jazz theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole and continued under Sandole’s tutelage through the early 1950s. Originally an altoist,^[13] during this time Coltrane also began playing tenor saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to this point in his life as a time when “a wider area of listening opened up for me. There were many things that people like Hawk [Coleman Hawkins], and Ben [Webster] , and Tab Smith were doing in the ’40s that I didn’t understand, but that I felt emotionally.”^[14]

An important moment in the progression of Coltrane’s musical development occurred on June 5, 1945, when he saw Charlie Parker perform for the first time. In a DownBeat article in 1960 he recalled: “the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.”^[13] Parker became an early idol, and they played together on occasion in the late 1940s.

Contemporary correspondence shows that Coltrane was already known as “Trane” by this point, and that the music from some 1946 recording sessions had been played for trumpeter Miles Davis—possibly impressing him.^[1]

Coltrane was a member of groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges in the early to mid-1950s.

Miles and Monk period (1955–1957)

The rivalry, tension, and mutual respect between Coltrane and bandleader Miles Davis was formative for both of their careers.

Coltrane was freelancing in Philadelphia in the summer of 1955 while studying with guitarist Dennis Sandole when he received a call from Davis. The trumpeter, whose success during the late forties had been followed by several years of decline in activity and reputation, due in part to his struggles with heroin, was again active and about to form a quintet. Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band (known as the “First Great Quintet”—along with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums) from October 1955 to April 1957 (with a few absences), a period during which Davis released several influential recordings which revealed the first signs of Coltrane’s growing ability. This quintet, represented by two marathon recording sessions for Prestige in 1956 that resulted in the albums Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’, disbanded due in part to Coltrane’s heroin addiction.^[1]

During the later part of 1957 Coltrane worked with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot, and played in Monk’s quartet (July–December 1957), but, owing to contractual conflicts, took part in only one official studio recording session with this group. A private recording made by Juanita Naima Coltrane of a 1958 reunion of the group was issued by Blue Note Records in 1993 as Live at the Five Spot-Discovery! A high quality tape of a concert given by this quartet in November 1957 was also found later, and in 2005 Blue Note made it available on CD and LP. Recorded by Voice of America, the performances confirm the group’s reputation, and the resulting album, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, is widely acclaimed.^{[citation needed]}

Blue Train, Coltrane’s sole date as leader for Blue Note, featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, bassist Paul Chambers, and trombonist Curtis Fuller, is often considered his best album from this period. Four of its five tracks are original Coltrane compositions, and the title track, “Moment’s Notice”, and “Lazy Bird“, have become standards. Both tunes employed the first examples of his chord substitution cycles known as Coltrane changes.^[1]

Davis and Coltrane

Coltrane rejoined Davis in January 1958. In October of that year, jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the term “sheets of sound” to describe the style Coltrane developed during his stint with Monk and was perfecting in Davis’ group, now a sextet. His playing was compressed, with rapid runs cascading in hundreds of notes per minute. He stayed with Davis until April 1960, working with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley; pianists Red Garland, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly; bassist Paul Chambers; and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb. During this time he participated in the Davis sessions Milestones and Kind of Blue, and the concert recordings Miles & Monk at Newport and Jazz at the Plaza.^[1]

At the end of this period Coltrane recorded his first album for Atlantic Records, Giant Steps, made up exclusively of his own compositions. The album’s title track is generally considered to have the most complex and difficult chord progression of any widely-played jazz composition. Giant Steps utilizes Coltrane changes. His development of these altered chord progression cycles led to further experimentation with improvised melody and harmony that he would continue throughout his career.^[1]

‘Giant Steps’ Menu 0:00 One of Coltrane’s most acclaimed recordings, “Giant Steps” features harmonic structures more complex than were used by most musicians of the time. Problems playing this file? See media help.

First albums as leader

Coltrane formed his first group, a quartet, in 1960 for an appearance at the Jazz Gallery in New York City. After moving through different personnel including Steve Kuhn, Pete La Roca, and Billy Higgins, the lineup stabilized in the fall with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones. Tyner, from Philadelphia, had been a friend of Coltrane’s for some years and the two men had an understanding that the pianist would join Coltrane when Tyner felt ready for the exposure of regularly working with him. Also recorded in the same sessions^{[clarification needed]} were the later released albums Coltrane’s Sound and Coltrane Plays the Blues.

Still with Atlantic Records, Coltrane’s first record with his new group was also his debut playing the soprano saxophone, the hugely successful My Favorite Things. Around the end of his tenure with Davis, Coltrane had begun playing soprano, an unconventional move considering the instrument’s near obsolescence in jazz at the time. His interest in the straight saxophone most likely arose from his admiration for Sidney Bechet and the work of his contemporary, Steve Lacy, even though Davis claimed to have given Coltrane his first soprano saxophone. The new soprano sound was coupled with further exploration. For example, on the Gershwin tune “But Not for Me”, Coltrane employs the kinds of restless harmonic movement (Coltrane changes) used on Giant Steps (movement in major thirds rather than conventional perfect fourths) over the A sections instead of a conventional turnaround progression. Several other tracks recorded in the session utilized this harmonic device, including “26–2″, “Satellite”, “Body and Soul“, and “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes“.

First years with Impulse Records (1960–1962)

In May 1961, Coltrane’s contract with Atlantic was bought out by the newly formed Impulse! Records label.^[15] An advantage to Coltrane recording with Impulse! was that it would enable him to work again with engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who had taped both his and Davis’ Prestige sessions, as well as Blue Train. It was at Van Gelder’s new studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey that Coltrane would record most of his records for the label.

By early 1961, bassist Davis had been replaced by Reggie Workman, while Eric Dolphy joined the group as a second horn around the same time. The quintet had a celebrated (and extensively recorded) residency in November 1961 at the Village Vanguard, which demonstrated Coltrane’s new direction. It featured the most experimental music he had played up to this point, influenced by Indian ragas, the recent developments in modal jazz, and the burgeoning free jazz movement. John Gilmore, a longtime saxophonist with musician Sun Ra, was particularly influential; after hearing a Gilmore performance, Coltrane is reported to have said “He’s got it! Gilmore’s got the concept!”^[16] The most celebrated of the Vanguard tunes, the 15-minute blues, “Chasin’ the ‘Trane”, was strongly inspired by Gilmore’s music.^[17]

During this period, critics were fiercely divided in their estimation of Coltrane, who had radically altered his style. Audiences, too, were perplexed; in France he was booed during his final tour with Davis. In 1961, Down Beat magazine indicted Coltrane and Dolphy as players of “Anti-Jazz”, in an article that bewildered and upset the musicians.^[17] Coltrane admitted some of his early solos were based mostly on technical ideas. Furthermore, Dolphy’s angular, voice-like playing earned him a reputation as a figurehead of the “New Thing” (also known as “Free Jazz” and “Avant-Garde”) movement led by Ornette Coleman, which was also denigrated by some jazz musicians (including Davis) and critics. But as Coltrane’s style further developed, he was determined to make each performance “a whole expression of one’s being”.^[18]

Classic Quartet period (1962–1965)

	‘In a Sentimental Mood’ Menu 0:00 The romantic ballad features Coltrane with pianist Duke Ellington.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

In 1962, Dolphy departed and Jimmy Garrison replaced Workman as bassist. From then on, the “Classic Quartet”, as it came to be known, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, produced searching, spiritually driven work. Coltrane was moving toward a more harmonically static style that allowed him to expand his improvisations rhythmically, melodically, and motivically. Harmonically complex music was still present, but on stage Coltrane heavily favored continually reworking his “standards”: “Impressions”, “My Favorite Things”, and “I Want to Talk About You”.

The criticism of the quintet with Dolphy may have had an impact on Coltrane. In contrast to the radicalism of his 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard, his studio albums in 1962 and 1963 (with the exception of Coltrane, which featured a blistering version of Harold Arlen‘s “Out of This World”) were much more conservative and accessible. He recorded an album of ballads and participated in collaborations with Duke Ellington on the album Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and with deep-voiced ballad singer Johnny Hartman on an eponymous co-credited album. The album Ballads is emblematic of Coltrane’s versatility, as the quartet shed new light on old-fashioned standards such as “It’s Easy to Remember”. Despite a more polished approach in the studio, in concert the quartet continued to balance “standards” and its own more exploratory and challenging music, as can be heard on the Impressions album (two extended jams including the title track along with “Dear Old Stockholm”, “After the Rain” and a blues), Coltrane at Newport (where he plays “My Favorite Things”) and Live at Birdland, both^{[disambiguation needed]} from 1963. Coltrane later said he enjoyed having a “balanced catalogue.”^{[citation needed]}

The Classic Quartet produced their most famous record, A Love Supreme, in December 1964. It is reported that Coltrane, who struggled with repeated drug addiction, derived inspiration for A Love Supreme through a near overdose in 1957 which galvanized him to spirituality.^[19] A culmination of much of Coltrane’s work up to this point, this four-part suite is an ode to his faith in and love for God. These spiritual concerns would characterize much of Coltrane’s composing and playing from this point onwards, as can be seen from album titles such as Ascension, Om and Meditations. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme, “Psalm”, is, in fact, a musical setting for an original poem to God written by Coltrane, and printed in the album’s liner notes. Coltrane plays almost exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, and bases his phrasing on the words. Despite its challenging musical content, the album was a commercial success by jazz standards, encapsulating both the internal and external energy of the quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Jones and Garrison. The album was composed at Coltrane’s home in Dix Hills on Long Island.

The quartet played A Love Supreme live only once—in July 1965 at a concert in Antibes, France.^{[citation needed]}

Avant-garde jazz and the second quartet (1965–1967)

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As Coltrane’s interest in jazz became increasingly experimental, he added Pharoah Sanders to his ensemble.

In his late period, Coltrane showed an increasing interest in avant-garde jazz, purveyed by Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and others. In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler’s trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with Cecil Taylor as leader. Coltrane championed many younger free jazz musicians (notably Archie Shepp), and under his influence Impulse! became a leading free jazz record label.

After A Love Supreme was recorded, Ayler’s style became more prominent in Coltrane’s music. A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane’s playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return of Coltrane’s sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. The group’s evolution can be traced through the recordings The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition (both June 1965), New Thing at Newport (July 1965), Sun Ship (August 1965), and First Meditations (September 1965).

In June 1965, he went into Van Gelder’s studio with ten other musicians (including Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Marion Brown, and John Tchicai) to record Ascension, a 40-minute piece that included solos by the young avant-garde musicians (as well as Coltrane), and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos. After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.

Adding to the quartet

Percussionist Rashied Ali helped to augment Coltrane’s sound in the last years of his life.

By late 1965, Coltrane was regularly augmenting his group with Sanders and other free jazz musicians. Rashied Ali joined the group as a second drummer. This was the end of the quartet; claiming he was unable to hear himself over the two drummers, Tyner left the band shortly after the recording of Meditations. Jones left in early 1966, dissatisfied by sharing drumming duties with Ali. Both Tyner and Jones subsequently expressed displeasure in interviews, after Coltrane’s death, with the music’s new direction, while incorporating some of the free-jazz form’s intensity into their own solo projects.

There is speculation that in 1965 Coltrane began using LSD,^[20][21] informing the “cosmic” transcendence of his late period. After the departure of Jones and Tyner, Coltrane led a quintet with Sanders on tenor saxophone, his second wife Alice Coltrane on piano, Garrison on bass, and Ali on drums. Coltrane and Sanders were described by Nat Hentoff as “speaking in tongues“. When touring, the group was known for playing very lengthy versions of their repertoire, many stretching beyond 30 minutes and sometimes being an hour long. Concert solos for band members often extended beyond fifteen minutes.

The group can be heard on several concert recordings from 1966, including Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Live in Japan. In 1967, Coltrane entered the studio several times; though pieces with Sanders have surfaced (the unusual “To Be”, which features both men on flutes), most of the recordings were either with the quartet minus Sanders (Expression and Stellar Regions) or as a duo with Ali. The latter duo produced six performances that appear on the album Interstellar Space.

Death and funeral

Coltrane died from liver cancer at Huntington Hospital on Long Island on July 17, 1967, at the age of 40. His funeral was held four days later at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. The service was opened by the Albert Ayler Quartet and closed by the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Coltrane is buried at Pinelawn Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.

The biographer Lewis Porter has suggested that the cause of Coltrane’s illness was hepatitis, although he also attributed the disease to Coltrane’s heroin use.^[22] In a 1968 interview Ayler claimed that Coltrane was consulting a Hindu meditative healer for his illness instead of Western medicine, although Alice Coltrane later denied this.^{[citation needed]}

Coltrane’s death surprised many in the musical community who were not aware of his condition. Davis said that “Coltrane’s death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn’t looked too good… But I didn’t know he was that sick—or even sick at all.”^[23]

Personal life and religious beliefs

Coltrane’s second wife, Alice, performed with him and also challenged his spiritual beliefs^[24]

In 1955, Coltrane married Juanita Naima Grubbs, a Muslim convert, for whom he later wrote the piece “Naima“, and came into contact with Islam.^[25] They had no children together and were separated by the middle of 1963. Not long after that, Coltrane met pianist Alice McLeod.^[26] He and Alice moved in together and had two sons before he was “officially divorced from Naima in 1966, at which time John and Alice were immediately married.”^[27] John Jr. was born in 1964, Ravi in 1965, and Oranyan (“Oran”) in 1967.^[27] According to the musician and author Peter Lavezzoli, “Alice brought happiness and stability to John’s life, not only because they had children, but also because they shared many of the same spiritual beliefs, particularly a mutual interest in Indian philosophy. Alice also understood what it was like to be a professional musician.”^[27]

Coltrane was born and raised in a Christian home, and was influenced by religion and spirituality from childhood. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Blair, was a minister at an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church^[28][29] in High Point, North Carolina, and his paternal grandfather, the Reverend William H. Coltrane, was an A.M.E. Zion minister in Hamlet, North Carolina.^[28] Critic Norman Weinstein noted the parallel between Coltrane’s music and his experience in the southern church,^[30] which included practicing music there as a youth.

In 1957, Coltrane had a religious experience which may have led him to overcome the heroin addiction^[31][32] and alcoholism^[32] he had struggled with since 1948.^[33] In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, Coltrane states that, in 1957, “I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.” The liner notes appear to mention God in a Universalist sense, and do not advocate one religion over another.^[34] Further evidence of this universal view regarding spirituality can be found in the liner notes of Meditations (1965), in which Coltrane declares, “I believe in all religions.”^[27]

After A Love Supreme, many of the titles of Coltrane’s songs and albums were linked to spiritual matters: Ascension, Meditations, Om, Selflessness, “Amen”, “Ascent”, “Attaining”, “Dear Lord”, “Prayer and Meditation Suite”, and “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”.^[27] Coltrane’s collection of books included The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, and Paramahansa Yogananda‘s Autobiography of a Yogi. The last of these describes, in Lavezzoli’s words, a “search for universal truth, a journey that Coltrane had also undertaken. Yogananda believed that both Eastern and Western spiritual paths were efficacious, and wrote of the similarities between Krishna and Christ. This openness to different traditions resonated with Coltrane, who studied the Qur’an, the Bible, Kabbalah, and astrology with equal sincerity.”^[35] He also explored Hinduism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, African history, the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle,^[36] and Zen Buddhism.^[37]

In October 1965, Coltrane recorded Om, referring to the sacred syllable in Hinduism which symbolizes the infinite or the entire Universe. Coltrane described Om as the “first syllable, the primal word, the word of power”.^[38] The 29-minute recording contains chants from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita^[39] and the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead,^[40] and a recitation of a passage describing the primal verbalization “om” as a cosmic/spiritual common denominator in all things.

Coltrane’s spiritual journey was interwoven with his investigation of world music. He believed not only in a universal musical structure which transcended ethnic distinctions, but in being able to harness the mystical language of music itself. Coltrane’s study of Indian music led him to believe that certain sounds and scales could “produce specific emotional meanings.” According to Coltrane, the goal of a musician was to understand these forces, control them, and elicit a response from the audience. Coltrane said: “I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed.”^[41]

Religious figure

Coltrane icon at St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church

After Coltrane’s death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist.^[42] The congregation later became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane’s status from a god to a saint.^[42] The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane’s music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.^[43]

Samuel G. Freedman wrote in a New York Times article that “the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane’s own experience and message.”^[42] Freedman also commented on Coltrane’s place in the canon of American music:

In both implicit and explicit ways, Coltrane also functioned as a religious figure. Addicted to heroin in the 1950s, he quit cold turkey, and later explained that he had heard the voice of God during his anguishing withdrawal. […] In 1966, an interviewer in Japan asked Coltrane what he hoped to be in five years, and Coltrane replied, “A saint.”^[42]

Coltrane is depicted as one of the 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. The icon is a 3,000-square-foot (280 m²) painting in the Byzantine iconographic style that wraps around the entire church rotunda. It was executed by Mark Dukes, an ordained deacon at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, who painted other icons of Coltrane for the Coltrane Church.^[44] Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey included Coltrane on their list of historical black saints and made a “case for sainthood” for him in an article on their former website.^[45]

Documentaries on Coltrane and the church include Alan Klingenstein‘s The Church of Saint Coltrane (1996),^[46][47] and a 2004 program presented by Alan Yentob for the BBC.^[48]

Instruments

Coltrane played the clarinet and the alto horn in a community band before taking up the alto saxophone during high school. In 1947, when he joined King Kolax‘s band, Coltrane switched to tenor saxophone, the instrument he became known for playing primarily.^[1] Coltrane’s preference for playing melody higher on the range of the tenor saxophone (as compared to, for example, Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young) is attributed to his start and training on the alto horn and clarinet; his “sound concept” (manipulated in one’s vocal tract—tongue, throat) of the tenor was set higher than the normal range of the instrument.^[49]

In the early 1960s, during his engagement with Atlantic Records, he increasingly played soprano saxophone as well.^[1] Toward the end of his career, he experimented with flute in his live performances and studio recordings (Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Expression). Dolphy’s mother is reported to have given Coltrane his flute and bass clarinet after Dolphy’s death in 1964.^[50]

Coltrane’s tenor (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 125571, dated 1965) and soprano (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 99626, dated 1962) saxophones were auctioned on February 20, 2005 to raise money for the John Coltrane Foundation. The soprano raised $70,800 but the tenor remained unsold.^[51]

Legacy

John Coltrane House, 1511 North Thirty-third Street, Philadelphia

The influence Coltrane has had on music spans many genres and musicians. Coltrane’s massive influence on jazz, both mainstream and avant-garde, began during his lifetime and continued to grow after his death. He is one of the most dominant influences on post-1960 jazz saxophonists and has inspired an entire generation of jazz musicians.

In 1965, Coltrane was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1972, A Love Supreme was certified gold by the RIAA for selling over half a million copies in Japan. This album, as well as My Favorite Things, was certified gold in the United States in 2001. In 1982 he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for “Best Jazz Solo Performance” on the album Bye Bye Blackbird, and in 1997 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.^[14] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Coltrane one of his 100 Greatest African Americans.^[52] Coltrane was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007 citing his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.”^[2] He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.^[53]

His widow, Alice Coltrane, after several decades of seclusion, briefly regained a public profile before her death in 2007. A former home, the John Coltrane House in Philadelphia, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999. His last home, the John Coltrane Home in the Dix Hills district of Huntington, New York, where he resided from 1964 until his death, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 29, 2007. One of their sons, Ravi Coltrane, named after the sitarist Ravi Shankar, is also a saxophonist.

The Coltrane family reportedly possesses much more unreleased music, mostly mono reference tapes made for the saxophonist, and, as with the 1995 release Stellar Regions, master tapes that were checked out of the studio and never returned.^{[citation needed]} The parent company of Impulse!, from 1965 to 1979 known as ABC Records, purged much of its unreleased material in the 1970s.^[54] Lewis Porter has stated that Alice Coltrane intended to release this music, but over a long period of time; Ravi Coltrane is responsible for reviewing the material.

As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history. He received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007

See you Sunday.  Sam.

Dr. Sylvia Earle has a rich alto voice which she uses to educate us about the ocean.

I hope there is intelligent life – among humans. Sylvia Earle

People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth’s life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth’s water is there. It’s the blue heart of the planet – we should take care of our heart. It’s what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won’t get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.

Dr. Sylvia Earle is a marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

“I wish you would use all means at your disposal – films! expeditions! the web! more! – to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Sylvia Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Time Magazine named her its first Hero for the Planet in 1998.

With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on earth you live.

Dr. Earle received a bachelor of science degree from Florida State University and a masters and PhD from Duke University.

No water, no life, no blue, no green.

She was the Curator of Phycology, the study of algae, the primary photosynthetic organisms in freshwater and marine food chains, at the California Academy of Sciences (1979–1986) and a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley (1969–1981), Radcliffe Institute Scholar (1967–1969) and research fellow at Harvard University (1967–1981).

I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1966, Dr. Earle spent a year as a research fellow at Harvard, then returned to Florida as the resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory.

The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong reponse that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place.

Sylvia Earle was selected to lead the first all-female team of aquanauts in Tektite II.

Health to the ocean means health for us.

In 1979, Dr. Earle made an open-ocean JIM suit dive to the sea floor near Oahu, setting a women’s depth record of 381 metres (1,250 ft).

I am not in any hurry to grow up.

In 1979 Dr. Earle also began her tenure as the Curator of Phycology at the California Academy of Sciences, where she served until 1986.

If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

From 1980 to 1984 Dr. Earle served on the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere.

I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.

In 1982 Dr. Earle and her husband, Graham Hawkes, an engineer and submersible designer, founded Deep Ocean Engineering to design, operate, support and consult on piloted and robotic subsea systems.

Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.

In 1985, the Deep Ocean Engineering team designed and built the Deep Rover research submarine, which operates down to 1,000 metres (3,300 ft).

The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. ‘Who, what, where, why, when, and how!’ They never stop asking questions just like a five year old.

By 1986, Deep Rover had been tested, and Dr. Earle joined the team conducting training off Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas.

Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you’re lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you’re in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.

Sylvia Earle left the Deep Ocean Engineering team in 1990 to accept an appointment as a chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where she stayed until 1992.

Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.

She was the first woman to be chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they’ve spent time in and around the ocean, and they’ve personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.

In 1992 Dr. Earle founded Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER Marine) to further advance marine engineering. The company, now run by her daughter, Elizabeth, designs, builds and operates equipment for deep-ocean environments.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

Since 1998 Sylvia Earle has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, sometimes called “Her Deepness” or “The Sturgeon General”.

I love music of all kinds, but there’s no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.

From 1998 to 2002 Dr. Earle led the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, a five-year program to study the United States National Marine Sanctuary sponsored by the National Geographic Society and funded by the Goldman Foundation.

Hold up a mirror and ask yourself what you are capable of doing, and what you really care about. Then take the initiative – don’t wait for someone else to ask you to act.

Dr. Earle was a leader of the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, council chair for the Harte Research Institute for the Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Ocean in Google Earth.

Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you’ll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

Sylvia Earle also provided the Deep Worker 2000 submersible used to quantify the species of fish as well as the space resources utilized within the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

There’s something missing about how we’re informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.

Dr. Earle has written children’s books, including Coral Reefs, Hello Fish, Sea Critters and Dive!

Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.

Sylvia Earle has founded three companies, among them DOER Marine (Deep Ocean Exploration and Research) in Alameda, California.

When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.

In 2009, Dr. Earle won a TED (Technology Entertainment Design) prize and with that support she launched Mission Blue, which aims to establish marine protected areas (dubbed “hope spots”) around the globe.

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. Those wanting to see the California gray whale can go and see them with their own eyes on a whale watching california trip. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There’s still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. If we can turn things around, the entire Ocean eco-system will stand in better stead. From the fantastic marine creatures that delve in and around the coral reefs I just mentioned, to the ginormous La Jolla’s grey whales that roam the open seas around California, it would be a huge shame for people not to experience these beautiful creations with their own eyes. The Ocean is, in my opinion, Earth’s greatest masterpiece. With around 70% still yet to be explored, who knows what’s out there…

In 1986, Dr. Earle tied the world solo dive depth record in a sub (and setting the record for a woman), going 1000m in Deep Ocean Engineering’s Deep Rover, tying the record set by her then husband Graham Hawkes.

Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It’s akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn’t do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?

Dr. Earle is a Knight in the Netherlands’ Order of the Golden Ark, and in 2000, she was honored as a new member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.

Sylvia Earle founded Deep Search (also known as the Sylvia Earle Alliance, Deep Search Foundation, and Mission Blue), a non-profit foundation for protecting and exploring the Earth’s oceans.

For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive – and thrive. ‘Harsh’ to us is ‘home’ for them. Take away the ice and snow, increase the temperature by even a little, and the realm that makes their lives possible literally melts away.

I find the lure of the unknown irresistible.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.

If you think the ocean isn’t important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. Its agriculture. Its golf courses. Its domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

_______________________________________________________

The Jews

A tough people whose soul has been forged in some very trying times.

S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid        It’s tough to be a Jew.           Yiddish  saying      Liev Schreiber

Schwer zu sein ein yid.      Ben Brafman

Shvertz azayan Yid.           Issur Danielovich

I should admit right away that I am an outsider, an agnostic, a nonbeliever (apikoros, apikoyres) who was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family. I try to be as good a person as I can and to treat everyone the way I would want them to treat me. This Golden Rule is, of course, the basis of many religions, creeds and beliefs.

One of the things I always liked about Judaism (  יהודה, יהדו Yehudah, Judah in Hebrew, Greek Ἰουδαϊσμός) is that it is a nonproselytizing religion, like Buddhism.

Conversion has been discouraged since the time of the Talmud, but today most forms of Judaism will accept sincere converts. It’s just that they don’t seek converts.

The first recorded mention of the Jews is in the Mernepteh stele.

The story begins with Abraham (אַבְרָהָם) Avraham Avinu (אברהם אבינו), “our father Abraham.” He is seen as both the biological progenitor of the Jews (including converts, according to Jewish tradition), and the father of Judaism. Abraham is the first Jew.

According to the Tanakh, God promised Abraham to make of his offspring a great nation.

The Tanakh ( תַּנַ”ך‎) or Miqra is the canon of the Hebrew bible.

The Torah tells us that Jews are descended from the ancient people of Israel who settled in the land of Canaan between the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and the Jordan river.

The children of Israel are described as descendants of common ancestors, including Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob.

The nomadic travels of the Hebrews centered around Hebron in the first centuries of the second millennium BCE, apparently leading to the establishment of the Cave of the Patriarchs as their burial site in Hebron.

The Children of Israel consisted of twelve tribes, each descended from one of Jacob’s twelve sons, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Yissacher, Zevulun, Dan, Gad, Naftali, Asher, Yosef and Benyamin.

Religious texts tell the story of Jacob and his twelve sons, who left Canaan during a severe famine and settled in Goshen (אֶרֶץ גֹּשֶׁן‎ or ארץ גושן Eretz Gošen), northern Egypt.

The descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob were said to be enslaved by Pharaoh, although there is no independent evidence of this.

After they had been enslaved 400 years, YHWH sent Moses of the tribe of Levi to release the Israelites from bondage.

Then the Hebrews miraculously emigrated from Egypt (an event known as the Exodus), and returned to their ancestral homeland in Canaan. This event marks the formation of Israel as a political nation in Canaan, in 1400 BCE.

The science of archaeology tells a different story of the origins of the Jewish people. They did not necessarily leave the Levant.

By the way, the Levant, also known as the eastern Mediterranean consists of Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and a bit of southern Turkey. The first recorded name for this region was Canaan.

Levant means rising or lifting and it refers to the rising sun, so it originally meant the east in general. French levant, from Latin levare.

Similar etymologies are found in Greek Ἀνατολή (Anatolia), in German Morgenland (morning land),  and in Hebrew (mizrah).  Oriens meaning “east”, is literally “rising”, from Latin orior “rise”.

The archaeological evidence of the largely indigenous origins of Israel in Canaan, not Egypt, is quite convincing and there is no evidence of an Exodus from Egypt or a forty year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness.

Many archaeologists view the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as a bootless quest.

A century of research by archaeologists has found no evidence that can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity, escape and travels through a wilderness. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, but just that there is no evidence for it.

The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains in the local Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet is early Canaanite.

Almost the sole marker distinguishing the “Israelite” villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones at Israelite villages.

According to the sacred writings, after their emancipation from Egyptian slavery, the people of Israel wandered around and lived in the Sinai desert for a span of forty years before conquering Canaan in 1400 BCE under the command of Joshua.

For several hundred years, the land in Israel was organized into a confederacy of twelve tribes ruled by a series of Judges.

After the last judge, Samuel, the writings say, came the kings of Israel.

In 1000 BCE, the monarchy was established under Saul, and continued under King David and then his son, Solomon.

During the reign of David, Jerusalem became the national and spiritual capital of Israel.

Solomon built the First Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, but the tribes were already fracturing politically.

At Solomon’s death, a civil war erupted between the ten northern Israelite tribes, and the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the south.

The nation split into Israel in the north, and Judah in the south.

Israel was conquered by the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III in the 8th century BCE. There is no commonly accepted historical record of the fate of the ten northern tribes, sometimes referred to as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, although speculation abounds.

Judah was conquered by the Babylonian army in 587 BCE and the First Temple was destroyed. The elite of the kingdom and many of their people were exiled to Babylon, where the religion developed outside their traditional temple.

After the fall of Jerusalem, Babylonia (modern day Iraq) would become the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. The first Jewish communities in Babylonia started with the exile of the tribe of Judah to Babylon by Jehoiachin in 597 BCE.

Babylonia became the center of Jewish life all the way up to the 13th century. It was there that the Babylonian Talmud was written in the languages used by the Jews of ancient Babylonia – Hebrew and Aramaic.

Many Jews returned to Jerusalem and with Persian approval and financing completed the Second Temple in 516 BCE.

The balance of power was shifting in the eastern Mediterranean to classical civilizations, and away from the Egyptians, Syrians, and Persians. Some Canaanites had already become Phoenicians and had colonized areas of the southern Mediterranean. Also, Greeks were beginning to probe eastwards.

The Pharisees and Saducees were formed at this time. Josephus claimed that Pharisees received the backing and goodwill of the people in contrast to the more elite Sadducees.

Pharisees claimed Mosaic authority for their interpretation of Jewish laws, while Sadducees represented the authority of the priestly privileges established since the days of Solomon.

In 332 BCE, the Seleucid Kingdom was formed after the death of Alexander the Great and the division of his empire among his generals. This, of course, spread the Greek civilization to the east.

During this time, with the Jewish diaspora in Alexandria, Jewish thought was influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, culminating in the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible and some related texts into Koine Greek by seventy (Latin: septuaginta, seventy) scholars.

Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king,  banned certain Jewish rites because of the deterioration of relations between hellenized Jews and orthodox Jews, causing the orthodox Jews to revolt under the leadership of the Hasmonean family (the Maccabees) which led to the formation of the Hasmonean Dynasty.

The people, who did not want to be governed by a king but by theocratic clergy, made appeals to the Roman authorities. Big mistake. A Roman campaign of conquest and annexation, led by Pompey, soon followed.

Pompey conquered Judea in 63 BCE, reorganized it as a client state, and appointed Herod the Great as king of the jews, thereby replacing the Hasmonean Dynasty with the Herodian dynasty.

The empire was often callous and brutal in its treatment of its Jewish subjects and the Jews began to revolt against the Roman rulers of Judea. The revolt was defeated by the future Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus.

In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed much of the Temple in Jerusalem during the siege of Jerusalem.

According to some accounts, the Romans plundered artifacts from the temple, such as the Menorah.

Banished from Jerusalem, the Jewish population now centered on Galilee. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina and Judea was now called Syria Palestina to spite the Jews by naming it after their ancient enemies, the Philistines.

Many of the Judaean Jews were sold into slavery while others became citizens of other parts of the Roman Empire, but many, many Jews dispersed (διασπορά) throughout the known world. The policy encouraging prosyletism and conversion to Judaism, which spread the Jewish religion throughout the Helenistic civilization, seems to have subsided with the wars against the Romans.

Some of the most famous and important Jewish texts were composed in Israel at this time.

The completion of the Mishnah, the system of niqqud (dots representing vowels in Hebrew script), and the compilation of the Jerusalem Talmud are examples of this creative period.

In 359 CE,  Hillel II ( הלל נשיאה, Hillel the Nasi) created the Hebrew calendar based on the lunar year, which was necessary for the proper observance of the Jewish holy days.

The 5th century of our era was a period when a wave of new synagogues were built, many with beautiful mosaic floors.

Jews adopted the rich art forms of the Byzantine culture. Jewish mosaics of the period portray people, animals, menorahs, zodiacs, and Biblical characters.

Sometime in the 7th or 8th century, the Khazars, a Turkic tribe (who dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppe lands to the eastern Crimea), seem to have converted to Judaism.

The completeness of this conversion is unclear.

There had been a Jewish population in the Crimea since the Hellenistic era, and the conversions may have been reinforced by Jewish migrants entering the region, who had emigrated from areas of Byzantine rule.

In 638 CE the Byzantine Empire lost control of the Levant.

The Arab Islamic empire under Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and the rest of the Levant, but the Jews still controlled much of the commerce in Palestine. According to the Arab geographer Al-Muqaddasi, the Jews worked as “the assayers of coins, the dyers, the tanners and the bankers in the community”. Professor Moshe Gil documents that at the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century CE, the majority of the population was Jewish.

In 1099, Jews helped the Arabs to defend Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered many Jews in a synagogue and set it on fire.

Jews almost singlehandedly defended the town of Haifa against the Crusaders.

Jews were not allowed to hold land during the Crusader period, so they worked at trades and commerce in the coastal towns during times of peace.

Most were artisans: glassblowers in Sidon, furriers and dyers in Jerusalem.

During this period, the Masoretes of Tiberias established the niqqud, a system of diacritical marks used to represent vowels.

The niqqud (dots, dotting) distinguished between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which, like most Semitic scripts only used consonants.

The Mamluks ( مملوك mamlūk (singular), مماليك mamālīk (plural), meaning “property” or “owned slave” of the king”) were proud of their origin as slaves and only those who were purchased were eligible to attain the highest positions. Finally, the Mamluks attained the sultanate of Egypt and an empire.

During the years 1260–1516, Israel was part of the Mamluks’ domain. Jews suffered persecution and humiliation under the Mamluks, but at least thirty Jewish urban and rural communities were flourishing by the beginning of the 16th century.

Jews were in Europe, especially in former Roman colonies, from very early times. As Jewish males had emigrated, they sometimes took wives from local populations, as is shown by MtDNA compared to Y-DNA among Jewish populations.  Records of Jewish communities in France and Germany date from the 4th century, and substantial Jewish communities in Spain were noted even earlier.

Norman Cantor and other 20th-century scholars dispute the tradition that the Middle Ages was a uniformly difficult time for Jews.

Medieval society was tolerant before the Catholic Church became powerful, stratified and rule bound.

Between 800 and 1100, about 1.5 million Jews lived in Europe. They were not Christians, and thus they were not included as a part of the feudal system of clergy, knights and serfs, so they did not have to satisfy the oppressive demands for labor and military conscription that Christians suffered.

In relations with the Christian society, the Jews were protected by kings, princes and bishops, because of crucial services they provided in three areas: financial, administrative and medical.

Christian scholars interested in the Bible consulted with Talmudic rabbis.

By 1300, however, the friars and local priests staged the Passion Plays during Holy Week, which depicted Jews (in contemporary dress) killing Christ. From this period, there was frequent persecution of Jews and  the deportations began.

Around 1500, Jews found relative security and a renewal of prosperity in present-day Poland.

As Catholics were forbidden by the church to loan money for interest, some Jews became prominent moneylenders.

Christian rulers gradually saw the advantage of having such a class of people who could supply capital for their use without being liable to excommunication. As a result, the money trade of western Europe became a specialty of the Jews. But, in almost every instance when Jews acquired large amounts through banking transactions, during their lives or upon their deaths, the king would take it over.

Jews became servi cameræ, the property of the King, who might present them and their possessions to princes or cities.

The Crusades were followed by massive expulsions, including (in 1290) the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and in 1421, thousands were expelled from Austria.

In 1492, after los reyes católicos, Ferdinand and Isabelle, had reconquered al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was known, the worst of the expulsions of the Jews occurred.

Benjamin Netanyahu is, of course, the present prime minister of Israel. His father wrote this book.

With the ejection of the last Muslim rulers from Granada, the Spanish Inquisition (Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición) followed and around 200,000 Sephardic Jews were expelled.

This was followed by expulsions in 1493 in Sicily (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled Spanish Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire, Holland, and North Africa, others migrating to Southern Europe and the Middle East.

Jews in Spain were generally better treated by Islamic rulers than Christian ones.

Despite second-class citizenship, Jews played prominent roles in Muslim courts, and experienced a Golden Age in Moorish Spain about 900–1100, though the situation deteriorated after that time.

Riots resulting in the deaths of Jews did however occur in North Africa through the centuries and especially in Morocco, Libya and Algeria, where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos.

During the 11th century, Muslims in Spain conducted pogroms against the Jews, occurring in Córdoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.

During the Middle Ages, the governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen enacted decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues. At certain times, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad.

The Almohads had taken control of much of Islamic Iberia by 1172.

They surpassed the Almoravides in fundamentalist outlook, and treated the dhimmis harshly. Dhimmis are non-Muslim citizens of an Islamic state, be they Jewish or Christian.

The Almohads expelled both Jews and Christians from Morocco and Islamic Spain. Faced with the choice of death or conversion, many Jews emigrated. Some, such as the family of Maimonides, fled south and east to the more tolerant Muslim lands, while others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.

In the 2nd century CE, Spanish Jews gave the name Sepharad (סְפָרַד, Modern Sfarád Tiberian Səp̄āráḏ) to the Iberian peninsula.

Their descendants refer to themselves as Sephardi Jews (Hebrew, plural: Sephardim) and identify Spain as Sepharad in modern Hebrew.     Hank Azaria

In Greek the Sephardi are called Σεφαρδίτες.     David Levy

In the narrower ethnic definition, a Sephardi Jew is a Jew descended from the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century, immediately prior to the issuance of the Alhambra Decree of 1492 by order of los reyes católicos in Spain, and the decree of 1496 in Portugal by order of King Manuel I.           Camille Pissaro

In Hebrew,the term Sephardim Tehorim (ספרדים טהורים, Pure Sephardim) is used to distinguish Sephardim proper “who trace their lineage back to the Iberian/Spanish population” from Sephardim in the broader religious sense.   Émanuelle Béart

The broad religious definition of a Sephardi refers to any Jew, of any ethnic background, who follows the customs and traditions of Sepharad.     Peter Sellers

In modern Israel, Sephardim is most often used to encompass most non-Ashkenazi Jews who are not ethnically Sephardi, but are in most instances of West Asian origin, but who  use a Sephardic style of liturgy.   Rita Levi Montalcini

Ethiopian Jews, whose branch of practiced Judaism is known as Haymanot, have recently come under the already broad  umbrella of Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi.        Amedeo Modigliani

Their traditional language is referred to as Judezmo (Jewish, Judaism), it is the Judeo-Spanish sometimes also known as Ladino.

If you understand Spanish, you can probably understand the Sephardic Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino, Judezmo), just as if you understand German, you can probably understand Yiddish.  The headline above says:  Now we have completed the third year of ‘El Amaneser’ (The Dawn).

Judeo-Spanish  (Ladino, Judezmo)

El djudeo-espanyol, djudio, djudezmo es la lingua favlada por los djudios sefardim ekspulsados de la Espanya en el 1492. Es una lingua derivada del espanyol i favlada por 150.000 personas en komunitas en Israel, la Turkia, antika Yugoslavia, la Gresia, el Maruekos, Mayorka, las Amerikas, entre munchos otros.

Spanish

El judeo-español, djudio, djudezmo o ladino es la lengua hablada por los judíos sefardíes expulsados de España en 1492. Es una lengua derivada del español y hablada por 150.000 personas en comunidades en Israel, Turquía, la antigua Yugoslavia, Grecia, Marruecos, Mallorca, las Américas, entre muchos otros.

Judeo-español is usually written in the Hebrew alphabet and can look like this.

Yiddish (German: Jüdische Jewish) is a dialect of old German that is written in the Hebrew alphabet, so there are many, many variant spellings when the language is transcribed into the Roman alphabet that we use. Also there are variations from country to country and even from family to family, so I guarantee that there are going to be many people who read below and say, “Oh, that’s not how that’s spelled,” or “We say that differently,” or, “That’s not what that means.”  Please, read with some indulgence.

A shande fur die goy.    A shame in front of the goyim.  This is what Abbie Hoffman said to Judge Julius Hoffman in the trial of the Chicago Seven.

A shlekhter sholem iz beser vi a guter krig.       A bad peace is better than a good war.

Abi gezunt    ! אַבי געזונט   As long as you’re healthy.  (sometimes said ironically)   Mel Brooks said this to Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.  The goyim thought he was speaking Apache, but, no, it was Yiddish.

The Vanishing American Yiddish Speaker.     Abi gezunt!      

My friend George Michalski claims to be the world’s youngest Yiddish speaker. I mentioned this to someone and she said, “There are thirteen, fourteen year old girls who lie on the sand in Miami Beach speaking fluent Yiddish to each other.”

Alter Cocker:   An old, complaining person, an old fart, an alter kocker.

A maidel mit a klaidel.      A girl with a dress.   Cutie-pie got a new dress!   kleyd   קלייד    dress

German Kleidung clothing

Bei mir bist du shayn.      To me you are beautiful.       German schön

Berye, berryer   בריה    a skillful person, especially one who keeps house well

Bisl, bissel, a bissel, a bisele   ביסל    a bit of something, a little bit    German ein bißchen

Boytshik, boychik   בויטשיק    young boy (American Jewish)

Brokhe, broche   ברכה    a prayer

Bube, bubeleh    בובי     bubby, a term for someone you like   (American Jewish)

Such a sheine punim, kenahora.   Such a pretty face, keep evil away from her.  Kenahora is difficult to translate.

People, even some Jews, think kenahora is a jinx. It’s actually the opposite of a jinx. It’s the warding off of a jinx. It’s saying “No evil eye.”

This phrase has so many spellings and so many meanings. In the Bronx they say No canary. Sometimes it’s spelled kinahorra.

The phrase can be pronounced either “Bli Ayin Hara” in Hebrew, or “Kein Ayin Hora” in Yiddish. Both expressions translate as, “without the evil eye” or “there should be no evil eye.” When it’s said quickly is can sometimes sound like “Kina Hora.”

When people talk about their or others’ gains, assets or blessings, they often say “kein ayin hora” to ward off any envy, any negative thoughts, any evil that may be lurking anywhere, anyhow in the universe.  There’s a similar phrase in English, but I can’t think of it right now. Maybe Knock on wood?

“Bless her heart” comes close but it often has the opposite effect.  In the South, if you hear someone say, “Now, Jenny, bless her heart…” you know that what follows is not going to be so good. The speaker is pardoning Jenny, but really cursing her at the same time. This sentence completed could be something like, “Now, Jenny, bless her heart, is not one of the deepest puddles in the parking lot.”  There is something of a Kein ayin hora feeling here, but not really, know what I mean?

The classical word for this warding off of evil is apotropaic. Apotropaic magic is intended to “turn away” harm or evil influences, as in deflecting misfortune or averting the evil eye. The Greeks made offerings to the Averting Gods, (Ἀποτρόπαιοι θεοί), chthonic deities who grant safety and deflect evil.

The Yiddish expression, Kain ein horeh (קיין עין הרע) is apotropaic in nature, and literally translates to no evil eye.

Eyn-ore    עין־הרע   Evil Eye, a power that can cause injury

Keyn eyn-hore zol im nit oysmaydn!    קיין עין–הרע זאָל אים ניט אויסמײַדן!     Let no evil eye avoid him!

Farbissener     bitter

Farkakt, fercockt   פֿאַרקאַקט    lousy, screwed up, washed up, shitty, crappy, full of shit, fucked

Farklemt, verklempt   פֿאַרקלעמט     choked up, extremely emotional, distraught, depressed, on the verge of tears

Gam-atem.    גם־אַתּם   Same to you. Likewise.

Garmoshke    גאַרמאָשקע     harmonica                   Larry Adler

Gazlen    גזלן     robber, thief             Jean Lafitte, the pirate, was a Sephardic Jew.

Geboyrner reder     געבוירנער רעדער      a born (Yiddish) speaker

Gelt     געלט    money             David Ricardo, the economist, was a Sephardic Jew.

Grepse  Blech   a burp, a belch

Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik!  האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק    Stop talking nonsense!

Haymish     informal, friendly    A haimisher mensch is someone you feel comfortable with.    German heimisch

Hor     האָר    hair                          German  Haar            Vidal Sassoon was a Sephardic Jew.

Ikh vais.       I know.    Ich weiss. (German)

Kalifornye   קאַליפֿאָרניע    California

Kop  קאָפּ     head              German Kopf

Krasavitse   קראַסאַוויצע    beautiful woman, une belle

Lakhn biz trern    לאַכן ביז טרערן   laugh till you cry

Lakhn mit yashtsherkes   לאַכן מיט יאַשטשערקעס      laughing through tears

Langer loksh     לאַנגער לאָקש    tall, thin person

Libe    ליבע     love, love affair, romance            German Liebe

Makhn a fayg.   מאַכן אַ פֿײַ    derision, meaning that nothing will come out of one’s efforts  Italians call this il manofico, the hand fig, and in Dante the devil makes this gesture to god, meaning Fuck you.

Mame-loshn, mama loshen   מאַמע־לשון    mother tongue

Maven, meyven   מבֿין    an expert, a connoisseur, or, in this case, a connoisseuse      Barbara Tuchman

Meshuge, meshugge   משוגע    crazy

Nakhes   נחת    pleasure, especially the pleasure that a parent gets from a child

Oysergeveyn(t)lekh   אויסערגעוויינ(ט)לעך   outstanding, extraordinary, exceptional

Onshtendik   אָנשטענדיק    decent, honorable

Pirog   פּיראָג    meat pie, vagina (vulgar, obviously)

PLOTZ, Plats:   פּלאַץ     To burst, to explode, to crack, split,   I can’t laugh anymore or I’ll plotz.

PUTZ: A vulgarism for penis but most usually used as term of contempt for a fool, or an easy mark.

Red tsu mir yidish.    רעד צו מיר ייִדיש   Speak Yiddish with me.   Simon Schama

Sara groyse oygn!       What! Wow! (admiration, surprise)  big eyes  Sarah Silverman is a Sephardic Jew, but she probably knows her share of Yiddish.

Sheyn   שיין    beautiful, pretty, lovely, nice     Susan Zelinsky

Shayneh kepeleh          pretty head     good looking      good thoughts

Sheferish    שעפֿעריש or שאפֿעריש    creative  or  Shaferish    German  schöpferisch   Benjamin Disraeli was a Sephardic Jew.

Shmek    שמעק     sniff, whiff    When Albert Grossman told us that he didn’t want any heroin use in the band, this is the word he used.  We all knew what he meant immediately.           German schmecken taste

Shmok, Schmuck   שמאָק    jerk, fool, idiot, contemptible person, naïve person, penis, dick, asshole

Shmuel    שמואל     Samuel

Shtayer-moner         tax collector

Shtrayml, shtreimel    שטרײַמל     a fur edged hat worn by rabbis and Hasidic Jews on the Sabbath and holidays

Tants   טאַנץ    dance

TSIMMES, Tzimmes: A side dish with many ingredients and complicated cooking instructions, a prolonged procedure, an involved and troubling business, as in the phrase, “don’t make a tsimmes out of it.”

Tsuris, TSORISS: Suffering, woes, blues

Umfarshemt   אומפֿאַרשעמט      shameless, impudent     The Spanish for this is Sin vergüenza.

Untergebn kheyshek   אונטערגעבן חשק    encourage

Vebadres  וועבאַדרעס  web adress, URL

Vegetariar    וועגעטאַריער     vegetarian

Velt    וועלט     world                  German  Weld              the planet Mercury

Ven meshiakh vet kumen.       When the Messiah will come.

Vild    ווילד   wild, savage, absurd        a vilda chaya   a wild child

VUS MACHS DA: What’s happening? What’s up?         German  Was machst du da?  What are you doing there?

Yeshive  ישיבֿה  A Jewish school of high talmudic learning

Yitskhok, Itzak   יצחק    Isaac

Zlote    זלאָטעס   Zloty (Polish currency)

Zshlob, shlub  זשלאָב  boor, ill mannered, peasant, clumsy person

See you next week?     Vayln zikh    ווײַלן זיך   Have a good time.

Mari Mack     Sam Andrew

__________________________________________________

Middle English, the language that Chaucer used, was spoken in the three centuries between 1175 and 1475. It is really quite a beautiful version of English.

We understand the language of Shakespeare when we hear it from the stage and especially when we read it. It’s our language. It is early modern English. When we hear or read “They told me that to make her fall in love I had to make her laugh, but when she laughs, I’m the one who falls in love,” we nod in recognition and don’t even think about the language.

Geoffrey Chaucer only lived two centuries before William Shakespeare and yet to understand Chaucer most of us would need an interpreter. If we heard someone say, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote the droughte of March hath perced to the roote, thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,” with the pronunciation of that time, where the vowels are pronounced as in Italian or Spanish, Rs were trilled or flapped, and words like droughte are pronounced as in German, it might take us a while to realize that we were being told that When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, then folks long to go on  pilgrimages.

How did the language change so radically in a mere two centuries?  After all, we read English written in the 18th century as easily as we read this morning’s newspaper.

Shakespeare lived four centuries ago and we understand him.

What happened was that there was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language between 1400 and 1700. Linguists call it The Great Vowel Shift.

The main feature of the Great Vowel Shift was that a, e, i, o and u  changed from being pronounced as they are in Italian or Spanish to being pronounced as they are today.

In the 14th century, ‘time’ was pronounced team(a).  ’House’ was pronounced hoos(a).  The word ‘feet’ was pronounced to rhyme with fate. ‘Fool’ was pronounced the way we say foal today. The vowels at that time were pronounced more or less as Lucrezia Borgia would have pronounced them.

The word ‘take’ rhymed with how we say clock a tock a.  That final ‘e’ that is silent now, was often pronounced in Middle English.

For a long time people thought that Chaucer, while an interesting storyteller, was imperfect and unschooled because his poetry wouldn’t scan. They thought this because they didn’t realize that the final, unaccented e was pronounced in Chaucer’s time. It sounded like an unstressed -a.

Readers of The Canterbury Tales thought that Chaucer’s rhymes were rude and crude because they just didn’t ‘read’ right.

Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, there were perceptive readers who understood that maybe we were not reading The Canterbury Tales the same way that someone in the fourteenth century might have.

When you read aloud the line Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote and pronounce the final -e after shoures and soote, all of a sudden the line scans. It becomes a five beat line, a decasyllable.

Linguists call this unaccented final -e or final -a sound a schwa.  It might surprise you to realize that the schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) the schwa is written as an inverted e.

Uh, I’m going to go get a pizza.  There are three schwas in this sentence. Uh, a,  and the final a at the end of pizza.

The schwa is the only phoneme with its own name.

Thus, in linguistics, a schwa is an unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel (rounded or unrounded). Such vowels are often transcribed with the symbol ?, regardless of their actual phonetic value. An example in English is the a in about. An example in Italian is the a in festa.

Not all final -e‘s in Middle English were pronounced.

Look at the words not and note. The -e is not necessarily pronounced here, even in Middle English. It only shows that the -o is lengthened.  This is called a scribal e.

In Middle English the word knight was pronounced so that you could hear the k and the n, very much as Knecht (servant, farmhand) is pronounced in German today.

Actually, knight and Knecht were once the same word.

In Middle English Knight was pronounced something like  Kaneecht where the ch is pronounced as in Scotland, or like the ch in German nicht.

Similarly, gnaw was pronounced gun awe.   You hear the g and the n, as in German Gnade (favor, grace, mercy). Or as in Saginaw.

There were several archaic graphemes in written Middle English that had survived from Old English.

Æ æ

This character, called ash (æsc) , represents the ‘short a’ sound as in cat and still survives in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Ð ð

Eth.  In Anglo-Saxon (Old English) there was a way to write the sound of the th in that (ðæt ) and also a different way to write the th in thorn þorn (Þ, þ).  They are two completely different sounds, and one of the many difficult aspects for new  English learners is to master these completely separate ideas that we take for granted.

Ð ð

This is eth, where the th is pronounced as in the.

Þ þ

The Þ is called thorn, where the th is pronounced as in think. These graphemes are very useful for explaining the difference between then and thin to someone whose language doesn’t have these sounds. A French person, for example.

I’m sorry that we don’t still employ these useful characters, but they are easily confused with d and p, so perhaps it is best that they are not in our alphabet today.

In early modern English, the word the was often written in abbreviated form   – (y^e).  This is why you see Ye Olde Publicke House, for example. That Ye was never pronounced yee, but was always pronounced the despite all of the jocular and mistaken y pronunciations that we hear today.

? ?

The letter yogh (? ?; Middle English: yo?) was used in Middle English.  It was derived from the Old English form of the letter g. This is the grapheme that was used to write the sound of that gh in the word knight that sounds like the ch in German nicht. The word night was written ni?t in Middle English. The droughte in the droughte of March is written with a ?.

? ?

This grapheme is called wynn  (also spelled wen, ?ynn, or ?en) and  it was used in Middle English to represent the sound /w/ as in west.

The International Phonetic Alphabet

In the late period of Middle English (late 1300s), the wealthy and the government began to switch from Norman French to English again, although Norman remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy.

The new English language that now emerged did not sound the same as the old, and began to sound more like the language we see in our daily lives. If you are struggling to learn this English Language that has been formed over centuries, you might want to check out something like Effortless English, as they might be able to help you learn the language quickly and easily.

There were changes in vocabulary, and the complex system of inflected endings in Old English was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken Middle English.

These changes were gradually reflected in the increasingly diverse written forms of Middle English.

The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages and also a bit earlier, perhaps,  in the Romance languages.

English had, after all, been the language of the vast majority of the English people throughout the middle ages. Only a small group of the nobility spoke Norman French. Changes in Middle English came from the people, not from the aristocracy.  From how people actually spoke, rather than from books or professors.

Norse immigrants to England also had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English, because, although Norse- and English-speakers could understand each other, the Norse-speakers’ inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English’s loss of inflectional endings.

The Late Middle English period was a time of upheaval in England. After the deposition of Richard II in 1399, the House of Plantagenet split into the Houses of Lancaster and York, whose antagonism culminated in the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487).

There was unity in England only with the coming of the Tudors to the throne under Henry VII, the victor in the battle of Bosworth Field,  the last king of England to win his throne on the field of battle.

During this period of social change, with new rulers coming into positions of power, some of them from other parts of the country or from lower levels in society, many linguistic changes occurred.

In 1473, William Caxton printed the first book in English, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.

The English language was changing rapidly in Caxton’s time (15th century) and the works he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician rather than a writer and he often faced dilemmas concerning language standardization in the books he printed.

Caxton is credited with standardizing the English language (that is, homogenizing regional dialects) through printing.

This standardization facilitated the expansion of English vocabulary, the regularization of inflection and syntax, and widened the  gap between the spoken and the written word.

Later, Richard Pynson, who started printing in London in 1491 or 1492, and who favored the Chancery Standard, was a more accomplished stylist and consequently pushed the English language further toward uniformity.

Chancery Standard was largely based on the London and East Midland dialects, since those areas were both political and demographic centers of English society.

However, Chancery Standard used other dialect forms where they made meanings clearer. The northern “they”, “their” and “them” (derived from Scandinavian forms) were used rather than the London “hi/they”, “hir” and “hem.” This was perhaps because the London forms could be confused with words such as he, her, and him. (However, the colloquial form written as “‘em”, as in “up and at ‘em”, may well represent a spoken survival of “hem” rather than a shortening of the Norse-derived “them”.)

The clerks who used Chancery Standard would, of course, have been familiar with French and Latin, which must have influenced the forms they chose.

Chancery Standard was not the only influence on later forms of English. Its level of influence is disputed and a variety of spoken dialects continued to exist.

Chancery Standard did, however, provide a core around which Early Modern English could form.

By the mid-15th century, Chancery Standard was used for most official purposes except by the Church, which still used Latin, and for some legal purposes, for which Law French and some Latin were used.

Chancery Standard was disseminated around England by bureaucrats on official business and slowly gained prestige.

With a standardized, printed English Bible and Prayer Book being read to church congregations from the 1540s onward, a wider public became familiar with a uniform language, and the era of Modern English began.

See you next week?

Ben Nieves              Sam Andrew         Bosnia 2011

_________________________________________________

The native name for Polish is polski (Polish), język polski (the Polish language), or more formally, polszczyzna (Polish).

Napisz do mnie.

Literary Polish is based on the dialects of Gniezno, Cracow and Warsaw, though there is some dispute about this.

Lubię podróżować.

Polish first appeared in writing in 1136 in the “Gniezno papal bull” (Bulla gnieźnieńska), which included 410 Polish names.

Zaczekaj chwilkę…

The first written Polish sentence was day ut ia pobrusa a ti poziwai (I’ll grind [the corn] in the quern and you’ll rest), which appeared in Ksiega henrykowska in 1270.

In Modern Polish spelling that sentence is daj ać ja pobruszę, a ty poczywaj.

Daj mi więcej szczegółów.

Polish is a Western Slavonic language with about 50 million speakers mainly in Poland.

Poważnie.

There are also significant Polish communities in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, and significant numbers of Polish speakers in many other countries, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Latvia, Romania, the UK and USA.

Rozumiesz?

Polish is closely related to Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Czech and Slovak.

This poster is supposed to say Bad Teacher, but it doesn’t.

The Polish alphabet derives from Roman letters (the alphabet we use), but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritical accents.

Jaki masz zawód?

The Polish alphabet was one of three major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Slavic languages, the others being the Czech and Croatian alphabets.

Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, Slovak uses a Czech-based system, and Slovene follows the Croatian one.

The Sorbian languages blend the Polish and the Czech alphabets.

Skąd jesteś?

The diacritical marks used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent) in the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł. 

The kropka (superior dot) in the letter ż, and the ogonek (“little tail”) in the letters ą, ę.

Jestem zajęty.

The letters q, v, x are often not considered part of the Polish alphabet.

They are used only in foreign words and names.

Nie pamiętam.

Polish orthography is largely phonemic, meaning that there is a close correspondence between the way that the language is written and the way that it is spoken. Spanish is also largely phonemic. English is not.

Nie wierzę w to.

In Polish there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs) and phonemes.

Upper case	Lower case	Phonemic value(s)	Upper case	Lower case	Phonemic value(s)
A	a	/a/	M	m	/m/
Ą	ą	/ɔ̃/, /ɔn/, /ɔm/	N	n	/n/
B	b	/b/ (/p/)	Ń	ń	/ɲ/
C	c	/ts/	O	o	/ɔ/
Ć	ć	/tɕ/	Ó	ó	/u/
D	d	/d/ (/t/)	P	p	/p/
E	e	/ɛ/	R	r	/r/
Ę	ę	/ɛ̃/, /ɛn/, /ɛm/, /ɛ/	S	s	/s/
F	f	/f/	Ś	ś	/ɕ/
G	g	/ɡ/ (/k/)	T	t	/t/
H	h	/x/	U	u	/u/
I	i	/i/, /j/	W	w	/v/ (/f/)
J	j	/j/	Y	y	/ɨ/
K	k	/k/	Z	z	/z/ (/s/)
L	l	/l/	Ź	ź	/ʑ/ (/ɕ/)
Ł	ł	/w/	Ż	ż	/ʐ/ (/ʂ/)

The following digraphs and trigraphs are used:

Digraph	Phonemic value(s)	Digraph/trigraph (before a vowel)	Phonemic value(s)
ch	/x/	ci	/tɕ/
cz	/tʂ/	dzi	/dʑ/
dz	/dz/ (/ts/)	gi	/ɡʲ/
dź	/dʑ/ (/tɕ/)	(c)hi	/xʲ/
dż	/dʐ/ (/tʂ/)	ki	/kʲ/
rz	/ʐ/ (/ʂ/)	ni	/ɲ/
sz	/ʂ/	si	/ɕ/
		zi	/ʑ/

Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds.

This occurs at the end of words and in certain clusters.

Occasionally also voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds in clusters.

Jesteś tak piękna.

The spelling rule for the palatal sounds /ɕ/, /ʑ/, /tɕ/, /dʑ/ and /ɲ/ is as follows: before the vowel i the plain letters s, z, c, dz, n are used.

Before other vowels the combinations si, zi, ci, dzi, ni are used.

When not followed by a vowel the diacritic forms ś, ź, ć, dź, ń are used.

For example, the s in siwy (pronounced /śiwy/—”grey-haired”), the si in siarka (pronounced /śarka/—”sulphur”) and the ś in święty (pronounced /święty/—”holy”) all represent the sound /ɕ/.

The exceptions to the above rule are certain loanwords from Latin, Italian, French, Russian or English—where s before i is pronounced as s, e.g. sinus, sinologia, do re mi fa sol la si do, Saint-Simon i saint-simoniści, Sierioża, Siergiej, Singapur, singiel. In other loanwords the vowel i is changed to y, e.g. Syria, Sybir, synchronizacja, Syrakuzy.

Jestem głodny.

Phonemic value	Single letter/Digraph (in pausa or before a consonant)	Digraph/Trigraph (before a vowel)	Single letter/Digraph (before the vowel i)
/tɕ/	ć	ci	c
/dʑ/	dź	dzi	dz
/ɕ/	ś	si	s
/ʑ/	ź	zi	z
/ɲ/	ń	ni	n

Similar principles apply to /kʲ/, /ɡʲ/, /xʲ/ and /lʲ/, except that these can only occur before vowels, so the spellings are k, g, (c)h, l before i, and ki, gi, (c)hi, li otherwise.

Most Polish speakers, however, do not consider palatalisation of k, g, (c)h or l as creating new sounds.

Except in the cases mentioned above, the letter i if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents /j/, yet a palatalisation of the previous consonant is always assumed.

Niech pomyślę…

The letters ą and ę, when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel.

For example, ą in dąb (“oak”) is pronounced /ɔm/, and ę in tęcza (“rainbow”) is pronounced /ɛn/ (the nasal assimilates with the following consonant).

When followed by l or ł (for example przyjęli, przyjęły), ę is pronounced as just e. When ę is at the end of the word it is often pronounced as just /ɛ/.

Note that, depending on the word, the phoneme /x/ can be spelled h or ch.

Proszę.

The phoneme /ʐ/ can be spelled ż or rz.

And /u/ can be spelled u or ó.

In several cases such spelling changes can determine the meaning, for example: może (“maybe”) and morze (“sea”).

In occasional words, letters that normally form a digraph are pronounced separately.

For example, rz represents /rz/, not /ʐ/, in words like zamarzać (“freeze”) and in the name Tarzan.

Notice that doubled letters represent separate occurrences of the sound in question; for example Anna is pronounced /anna/ in Polish (the double n is often pronounced as a lengthened single n).

There are certain clusters where a written consonant would not be pronounced.

For example, the ł in the words mógł (“could”) and jabłko (“apple”) might be omitted in ordinary speech, leading to the pronunciations muk and japko or jabko.

A name for this might be Ponglish.

Polish is a highly inflected language, with relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject verb object (SVO).

There are no articles, and subject pronouns are usually dropped as is often the case with inflected languages.

Nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter.

A distinction is also made between animate and inanimate masculine nouns in the singular, and between masculine personal and non-personal nouns in the plural.

Porozmawiajmy.

There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative.

A word can change in Polish depending on how it is used. We have this phenomenon in English, but you may not have noticed it since English is your native language.

We have cases, but they are mostly in the pronouns.

I is in the nominative case. My is genitive, me is accusative and dative.

In Latin, the language where I originally encountered the idea of cases, I is ego. This is the nominative case.

The gentive case for the first person pronoun in Latin is meus, mea, meum.

The Latin accusative case for ego is me.

To say to me, the dative case of the first personal pronoun in Latin, one says mihi.

In German, the cases for I are ich (nominative), mein (genitive), mich (accusative) and mir (dative).

The declension of nouns in Polish has become simpler.

Now it depends on the gender of a noun (smok, o smoku – foka, o foce) (a dragon, about a dragon – a seal, about a seal) and to some extend on the hardness of a noun’s stem (liść, liście – list, listy)(leaf – leaves, letter – letters).

Two categories have appeared in the masculine gender: the category of animacy and of personhood (but, widzę but, widzę buty – kot, widzę kota, widzę koty – pilot, widzę pilota, widzę pilotów) (a shoe, I see a shoe, I see shoes – a cat, I see a cat, I see cats – a pilot, I see a pilot, I see pilots).

Traces of consonant stems still remain but almost exclusively in neuter noun stems ending in -en, -ent- (cielę – cielęcia, imię – imienia) (a calf – of a calf, a name – of a name).

For all other stems, long or short form has become characteristic of all cases.

In general, in the past endings characteristic of stems ending in -o-, -jo- and -a-, -ja- were most common.

Other word endings were disappearing.

The endings which did not cause the alteration of the stem were becoming more popular.

Traces of the lack of softness in some forms of words softened by front vowels (mainly forms ending with a consonant or ending with -i-, egz. krъvaxъ > *krwach > krwiach) have disappeared.

Often softness is the only remnant of old noun endings (Gen. kamane > kamienia) (of stone).

Powodzenia.

Declension of nouns (cases) is becoming simpler in many, most languages, not just in Polish.

It’s a natural progression.

As they evolve, languages become simpler.

It is the ‘primitive’ languages that are most complicated. Old, old languages, like Chinese, are quite simple. No gender, no number, no conjugations, certainly no cases. Very streamlined.

In English we have lost almost all of the cases.

Whom (accusative, dative) is going to disappear any day now.

Whom did you see there? is beginning to sound stilted and artificial, a sure sign of a moribund grammatical form.

Przepraszam, jestem za późno.

Adjectives in Polish agree with nouns in terms of gender, case and number.

Attributive adjectives most commonly precede the noun, although in certain cases, especially in fixed phrases (like język polski, “Polish (language)”), the noun may come first.

Most short adjectives and their derived adverbs form comparatives and superlatives by inflection (the superlative is formed by prefixing naj- to the comparative).

Verbs are of imperfective or perfective aspect, often occurring in pairs.

Imperfective verbs have a present tense, past tense, compound future tense except for być “to be”, which has a simple future będę, this in turn being used to form the compound future of other verbs.

Imperfective verbs also have a subjunctive/conditional (formed with the detachable particle by), imperatives, an infinitive, present participle, present gerund and past participle.

Perfective verbs have a simple future tense (formed like the present tense of imperfective verbs), past tense, subjunctive/conditional, imperatives, infinitive, present gerund and past participle.

Conjugated verb forms agree with their subject in terms of person, number, and (in the case of past tense and subjunctive/conditional forms) gender.

Passive constructions can be made using the auxiliary być or zostać (“become”) with the passive participle.

There is also an impersonal construction where the active verb is used (in third person singular) with no subject, but with the reflexive pronoun się present to indicate a general, unspecified subject as in pije się wódkę “vodka is drunk.”

Note that wódka appears in the accusative.

A similar sentence type in the past tense uses the passive participle with the ending -o, as in widziano ludzi (“people were seen”).

As in other Slavic languages, there are also subjectless sentences formed using such words as można (“it is possible”) together with an infinitive.

Nie znam jej.

Yes – No questions, both direct and indirect, are formed by placing the word czy at the beginning.

Negation uses the word nie, before the verb or other item being negated; nie is still added before the verb even if the sentence also contains other negatives such as nigdy (“never”) or nic (“nothing”).

In Polish, as in many languages, double negatives are standard.

Cardinal numbers have a complex system of inflection and agreement.

Numbers higher than five (except for those ending with the digit 2, 3 or 4) govern the genitive case rather than the nominative or accusative.

Special forms of numbers (collective numerals) are used with certain classes of noun, which include dziecko (“child”) and exclusively plural nouns such as drzwi (“door”).

Ile to kosztuje?

Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a number of words from other languages.

Usually, borrowed words have been adapted rapidly in the following ways:

1. Spelling was altered to approximate the pronunciation, but written according to Polish phonetics.

Two:   Word endings are liberally applied to almost any word to produce verbs, nouns, adjectives, as well as adding the appropriate endings for cases of nouns, diminutives, augmentatives or whatever ending is needed.

Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages.

Recent borrowing is primarily of international words from English, mainly those that have Latin or Greek roots.

Komputer (computer), korupcja (corruption) and many other examples.

Slang sometimes borrows and alters common English words, e.g. luknąć (to look).

Concatenation of parts of words (auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in English is also sometimes used.

When borrowing international words, Polish often changes their spelling.

Zadzwonię jeszcze.

The Latin suffix ‘-tion’ corresponds to -cja. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje.

Examples of this include inauguracja (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), recepcja (reception), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations).

The digraph qu becomes kw (kwadrant = quadrant; kworum = quorum).

Other notable influences in the past have been Latin (9th–18th centuries), Czech (10th and 14th–15th centuries), Italian (15th–16th centuries), French (18th–19th centuries), German (13–15th and 18th–20th centuries), Hungarian (14th–16th centuries) and Turkish (17th century).

The Latin language, for a very long time the only official language of the Polish state, has had a great influence on Polish.

Many Polish words (rzeczpospolita from res publica, zdanie for both “opinion” and “sentence”, from sententia) were direct calques from Latin.

Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of Poland and Germany being neighbors for a millennium, and also as the result of a sizable German population in Polish cities during medieval times.

German words found in the Polish language are often connected with trade, the building industry, civic rights and city life.

Some German words were wholly assimilated into Polish.

Handel (trade) and dach (roof)

Other borrowings from German are pronounced the same, but differ in writing schnur—sznur (cord).

The Polish language has many German expressions which have become literally translated (calques).

The regional dialects of Upper Silesia and Masuria (Modern Polish East Prussia)  have noticeably more German loanwords than other dialects.

Latin was known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries (and it continued to be extensively taught at secondary schools until World War II).

Apart from dozens of loanwords, the influence of Latin can also be seen in the somewhat greater number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English.

In the 18th century, with the rising prominence of France in Europe, French supplanted Latin in this respect.

Some French borrowings also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon.

Examples include ekran (from French écran, screen), abażur (abat-jour, lamp shade), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, luggage), walizka (valise, suitcase), fotel (fauteuil, armchair), plaża (plage, beach) and koszmar (cauchemar, nightmare).

Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the Warsaw borough of Żoliborz (joli bord=beautiful riverside), as well as the town of Żyrardów (from the name Gérard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to refer to the owner/founder of a town).

Other words are borrowed from other Slavic languages, for example, sejm, hańba and brama from Czech.

There are many, many borrowings from Yiddish. Words like bachor (an unruly boy or child), bajzel (slang for mess), belfer (slang for teacher), ciuchy (slang for clothing), cymes (slang for very tasty food), geszeft (slang for business), kitel (slang for apron), machlojka (slang for scam), mamona (money), menele (slang for oddments and also for homeless people), myszygine (slang for lunatic), pinda (slang for girl, pejorative), plajta (slang for bankruptcy), rejwach (noise), szmal (slang for money), and trefny (dodgy).

Typical loanwords from Italian include pomidor from pomodoro (tomato), kalafior from cavolfiore (cauliflower), pomarańcza from pomo and arancio (orange).

Those Italian loan words were introduced in the times of Queen Bona Sforza (the wife of Polish King Sigismund the Old), who was famous for introducing Italian cuisine to Poland, especially vegetables.

Another word of Italian origin is autostrada (from Italian “autostrada”, highway).

The contacts with Ottoman Turkey in the 17th century brought many new words, some of them still in use, such as: jar (deep valley), szaszłyk (shish kebab), filiżanka (cup), arbuz (watermelon), dywan (carpet).

The mountain dialects of the Górale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (baca, gazda, juhas, hejnał).

There are also loanwords from Romanian as a result of historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.

The cant and slang of thieves include such words as kimać (to sleep) or majcher (knife) of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world.

Direct borrowings from Russian are extremely rare, in spite of long periods of dependence on Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and are limited to a few international words, such as sputnik and pierestroika.

Russian personal names are transcribed into Polish likewise.

Tchaikovsky’s name is spelled Piotr Iljicz Czajkowski.

There are also a few words borrowed from the Mongolian language, e.g. dzida (spear) or szereg (a line or row).

These words were brought to the Polish language during wars with the armies of Gengis Khan and his descendants.

Do widzenia, do zobaczenia.

The differences between Polish and Slovak are roughly comparable to the differences between the German and Swiss German dialects (75% of the vocabulary similar or the same).

Polish and Russian have approximately the same relationship as Spanish and Italian (55-60% of the vocabulary the same or similar).

The difference between Polish and Bulgarian is about the same as that between English and Dutch (40% of the vocabulary the same or similar).

The most similar to Slavic languages are the Baltic Languages: Latvian and Lithuanian, but only 3% of the vocabulary is alike.

The Polish language belongs to the West-Slavic group of the Indo-European languages together with Czech and Slovak.

Polish emerged from the Proto-Slavic language, the mother tongue of all Slavic tribes in the past.

Polish has evolved to such a degree that the texts written in the Middle Ages are not 100-per-cent understandable to contemporary Poles and need to be read with a dictionary of archaisms.

During the Partitions of Poland (1795-1918) the Prussian and Russian conquerors tried to eradicate Polish identity, but their plans eventually failed and Poles retained their language almost intact.

Polish is used as a second language in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

This dispersal has been caused by many migrations and resettlements as well as frontier changes brought by the Yalta agreement in 1945 after World War II.

As a result, many Poles were left outside the territory of their fatherland.

Pieniądze

Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country.

Nearly 97% of Poland’s citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue.

Ethnic Poles constitute large minorities in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania’s Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, with Vilnius having been part of Poland until 1939) and is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania.

In Ukraine it is most common in the western Lviv and Volyn oblast (provinces), while in western Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border.

Polish is spoken, naturally, by Polish emigrants living all around the world, also by their children and grandchildren. The total number of speakers worldwide is about 50 million.

Moje slońce.          My sun.

Mój kwiatuszku.       My flower.

Do następnego razu…     Till next time…

Sam Andrew

____________________________________________________

One of the early contributors to an analysis of the energy component that would be used in the formula E = mc²

Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (17 December 1706 – 10 September 1749) was a mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment.

Her translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still considered the standard French version.

Émilie was intellectual and very lively. She played the harpsichord, sang opera, she had a gift for the dance and she was an amateur actress. She was beautiful, charming, and seriously intelligent.

She spoke very rapidly and read even more rapidly. When she couldn’t afford more books, she used her mathematical skills to devise highly successful strategies for gambling.

Young Émilie de Breteuil lived with her family in an apartment with 30 rooms overlooking the Tuileries gardens in Paris.

When Émilie was a child, her father, Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil, held the position of the Principal Secretary and Introducer of Ambassadors to King Louis XIV. He held a weekly salon on Thursdays, to which well-respected writers and scientists such as Fontenelle, the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, were invited.

Her father arranged for Fontenelle to visit and talk about astronomy with Émilie when she was 10 years old.

She also had training in physical activities such as fencing and riding, and as she grew older, her father brought tutors to the house for her.

As a result, by the age of twelve Émilie was fluent in Latin, Greek and German. She was later to publish translations into French of Greek and Latin plays and philosophy.

Her brothers and sisters were fairly normal people for the time, but Émilie was different, as her father wrote: “My youngest flaunts her mind, and frightens away the suitors.”

Émilie, however, had many suitors. At the age of 19, she chose one of the least objectionable courtiers as a husband, the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont. The marriage was a pro forma arrangement, and in the custom of the time, her husband accepted her having affairs while he was away.

When she was a 27-year-old mother of three, Émilie du Châtelet began perhaps the most passionate affair of her life, a true partnership of heart and mind. Her lover was none other than Voltaire, perhaps the most renowned intellectual of the Enlightenment movement. “In the year 1733 I met a young lady who happened to think nearly as I did.”

She and Voltaire shared deep interests: in political reform, in fast talk, and, above all, in advancing science as much as they could.

Voltaire wrote that Émilie du Châtelet had “a soul for which mine was made.”

Together, du Châtelet and Voltaire turned her husband’s château at Cirey, in northeastern France, into a base for scientific research with the most sophisticated equipment on the market (a rotary evaporator would have been a steal back in the day – to give an example). with a library comparable to that of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, as well as the latest laboratory equipment from London.

Émilie gave up her life in Paris for Votaire and joined him at Cirey. Thus began one of the greatest intellectual and romantic relationships of the 18th century between these two exceptional people.

The intellectual feverishness, always present when Émilie was, prompted the philosopher Immanuel Kant to sneer that such a woman “might as well have a beard,” and Voltaire himself, having received solo title-page credit for a book he privately admitted she practically dictated to him, declared that the marquise was a great man whose only shortcoming was having been born female. This may hearten the rest of us, because it proves that even great men can be stupid sometimes.

When Émilie and Voltaire engaged in their teasing, mock battling, fast talking, it was a contest between equals.

Émilie du Châtelet was the real scientist, the real investigator of the physical world, and the one who decided that there was one key question that had to be turned to at this time: what is energy?

Most people felt energy was already sufficiently understood. Voltaire had covered the seemingly ordained truths in his own popularizations of Newton: an object’s energy is simply the product of its mass times its velocity, or mv¹. If a five-pound ball is going 10 mph, it has 50 units of energy.

But Émilie du Châtelet knew there was a competing, albeit highly theoretical view proposed by Gottfried Leibniz, the great German natural philosopher and mathematician. For Leibniz, the important factor was mv². It’s the ‘per second per second’ aspect of the formula that is important. This seems to hold true for many aspects of the natural world. Forces aren’t added to each other, they are squared of each other.

Du Châtelet and her colleagues found the decisive evidence in the recent experiments of Willem ‘s Gravesande, a Dutch researcher who’d been letting weights plummet onto a soft clay floor. If the simple E = mv¹ was true, then a weight going twice as fast as an earlier one would sink in twice as deeply. One going three times as fast would sink three times as deep.

But that’s not what ‘s Gravesande found. If a small brass sphere was sent down twice as fast as before, it pushed four times as far into the clay. It if was flung down three times as fast, it sank nine times as far into the clay. In other words, we’re talking about a geometric progression and not an arithmetical one.

Thus, ‘s Gravesande established that the correct expression for the “live force” of a body in motion (today called its kinetic energy) is proportional to mv².

Du Châtelet deepened Leibniz’s theory and then embedded the ‘s Gravesande’s results within it. Now, finally, there was a strong justification for viewing mv² as a fruitful definition of energy.

These drawings are from du Châtelet’s Institutions physiques, her elaboration on the ideas of Leibniz. She finished a major commentary on Newton just before her death.

Newton and Voltaire believed that “energy” was the same as momentum and therefore proportional to velocity.

In classical physics the correct formula is , where is the kinetic energy of an object, its mass and its velocity.

Some commentators have perceived this as a precursor to the multiplier in Einstein’s mass-energy formula, and indeed is the first term in the binomial expansion of the relativistic kinetic energy expression.

Émilie du Châtelet was one of the leading interpreters of modern physics in Europe as well as a master of mathematics, linguistics, and the art of courtship, and, really, just about anything else that caught her attention.

But there was one thing she couldn’t control. In April of 1749, she wrote to Voltaire, “I am pregnant and you can imagine … how much I fear for my health, even for my life … giving birth at the age of forty.”

It should be said that Voltaire was not the father of this child to be. He knew that Émilie had many liaisons, but that didn’t affect his regard for her.

Although she might have, Émilie didn’t rage at the clear incompetence of her era’s doctors who often didn’t even wash their hands before participating in a medical procedure.

And remember that at that time there were no antibiotics and no anesthetics.

Émilie merely noted to Voltaire that it was sad to be leaving this world before she was ready. Think what she could have accomplished if she had had forty years more to live.

She survived the birth the next fall, but infection set in, and within a week she died.

Émilie was a brilliant and learned woman, known all over Europe for her translation of Newton. Her love affair and pregnancy created scandal and inspired satirical mirth. Her death was a shock to everyone.

Voltaire was beside himself: “I have lost the half of myself—a soul for which mine was made.”

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

__________________________________________________________

The Oriflamme or Or-y-flamme  (Latin aurea flamma, la flamme d’or, the golden flame) was the battle standard of the king of France in the Middle Ages.

It was originally the sacred banner of the Abbey of Saint Denis a monastery near Paris where many French monarchs are entombed.

In French, the term oriflamme has come to mean any banner with pointed ends, the form of the original.

The Oriflamme was mentioned in the eleventh century ballad la Chanson de Roland as a royal banner.

The oriflamme was first called Romaine and then Montjoie.

According to legend, Charlemagne carried the oriflamme to the Holy Land in response to a prophecy regarding a knight possessing a golden lance, from which flames would burn and drive out the Saracens.

The idea of the golden lance suggests that the lance was originally the important object, with the banner simply a decoration, but this changed over time. The flag attached to the spear became more important than the spear itself.

The Oriflamme was first used by Louis VI in 1124 and was last flown in battle at Agincourt in 1415, though a version of it remained in the Abbey of St. Denis until the 18th century.

Louis VI replaced the earlier banner of Saint Martin with the oriflamme of the Abbey of St. Denis, which floated about the tomb of St. Denis and was said to have been given to the abbey by Dagobert, the first Frankish king to be buried in the Saint Denis Basilica.

Until the 12th century the standard-bearer was the Comte de Vexin, who, as vowed to St. Denis, was the temporal defender of the abbey.

Louis VI, having acquired Vexin, became standard-bearer. As soon as war began, Louis VI received Communion at St. Denis and took the oriflamme from the tomb of Saint Denis to carry it to the combat.

The oriflamme was red or orange-red silk and flown from a gilded lance.  Here the oriflamme has fallen in battle and may be seen near the fleur de lys standard.

According to legend, the color of the oriflamme stems from it being dipped in the blood of the recently-beheaded St. Denis.

When the Oriflamme was displayed on the battlefield it indicated that no quarter was to be given, its red color being symbolic of cruelty and ferocity.

Although the azure ground (from the blue cape of St. Martin of Tours) strewn with gold fleur de lys remained the symbol of royalty until the 15th century, the Oriflamme became the royal battle standard of the King of France, and it was carried at the head of the king’s forces when they met another army in battle.

In the fifteenth century, the fleur-de-lys on the white flag of Jeanne d’Arc became the new royal standard replacing both the symbol of royalty and the Oriflamme on the battle field.

The bearer of the standard, the porte-oriflamme, became an office (like that of Maréchale or Connétable of France) and a great honor, as it was an important and very dangerous post to take charge of such a visible symbol in battle. If things went badly, the porte-oriflamme was expected to die rather than abandon his duty.

There Sir Geoffroi de Charny fought gallantly near the king and his fourteen year old son. The whole press and cry of battle were upon him because he was carrying the king’s sovereign banner, the Oriflamme. Sir Geoffroi also had before him his own banner, gules, three escutcheons argent. So many English and Gascons came around him from all sides that they cracked open the king’s battle formation and smashed it. There were so many English and Gascons that at least five of these men at arms attacked one French gentleman. Sir Geoffroi de Charny was killed with the banner of France in his hand, as other French banners fell to earth.        Froissart

Winkle:  a small herbivorous shore dwelling mollusc with a spiral shell   or   to extract or to obtain something with difficulty

I had always thought of winkle as British slang, light and trivial for ‘to get something out of a tight place, as a cubbyhole,’ as in, “Could you winkle those keys out from between the seats?”

But, then, the other day I saw a sentence:   King John was forever trying to winkle Richard Coeur de Lion out of prison in Germany.  This was a much more serious usage than I had expected.

I couldn’t winkle out why someone would use this term that seriously and in an academic context yet.

The verb is derived from the process of extracting a winkle (periwinkle) from its shell.

Little boys sometimes call their penis a winkle unless they’re in Japan where they call it a chin chin. Cin cin (sounds exactly the same) is an Italian drinking toast like Salute! So, in Japan, if you raise your cup and say Cin, cin, you will often get a big laugh.

Go vote.  It’s important.

I swore I wasn’t going to tell her, but she winkled it all out of me

In the late 16th century, periwinkle was shortened to winkle.

Antonia and Victoria managed to winkle the details out of him.

To worm out, to prize out, to pry out, dig out, extract with difficulty, force out (a shade or two different in meaning), dislodge, displace, remove, evict, uproot.

There were huge profits to be made if the scum of the earth landlords could winkle out the sitting tenants.

She winkled the garnet out from the bedrock.

He winkled that scoundrel out from his rathole.

Maybe we should try to winkle that key out of the door?

In Spanish, a winkle (periwinkle) is a bígaro, but to winkle a secret out of someone is sacar un secreto a álguien.

Surgeons use the word extirpate in a literal way, meaning, to cut out something roots and all.  She extirpated the patient’s tonsils. I’m not sure she could ever use the word winkle to describe that operation. The word seems too light and everyday for such a procedure.

From what harmonic hole did they manage to winkle this chord?

A periwinkle is a type of shellfish, shaped like a small snail, eaten as food. Germans call it die Strandschnecke. (Strand = beach).

In Greece, the periwinkle is called a θαλασσινό σαλιγκάρι. That word thalassinó θαλασσινό refers to the ocean, the sea.

In Italy, the people call the common periwinkle or winkle (littorina littorea) una litorina, that is, something that lives on the littoral edge of the water.

For the verb winkle, they say carpire un segreto a qualcuno.

Littorina littorea appears in prehistoric shellfish middens throughout Europe, and is believed to have been an important source of food since at least 7500 BCE in Scotland. 

Periwinkle meat is still collected in huge quantities in Scotland, mostly for export to the Continent, and is also consumed locally. 

Over 2,000 tons of winkles are exported annually.

This makes winkles the sixth most important shellfish harvested in Scotland in terms of tonnage, and seventh most important in terms of value. However, since actual harvests are probably twice reported levels, the species may actually be the fourth and sixth most important, respectively.

Winkles are usually picked off the rocks by hand or caught in a drag from a boat.

They are mostly eaten in the coastal areas of Scotland and Ireland, where they are commonly referred to as winkles or in some areas buckies, willicks, or wilks.

In Belgium, periwinkles are commonly called kreukels or caracoles.

Winkles are commonly sold in paper bags near beaches in Ireland and Scotland, boiled in their local seawater, with a pin attached to the bag to enable the extraction of the soft parts from the shell.

Periwinkles are considered a delicacy in African and Asian cuisines.

The meat is high in protein, omega-3 fatty acids and low in fat.

Raw snails in general are about 80% water, 15% protein, and 1.4% fat.  If you look very closely at this photograph, you will see me sitting on a pier in the West Village watching the tall ships sail up the Hudson for the Bicentennial 1976.  It was one of those historical moments, a beautiful day.

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Periwinkles are also used as bait for catching small fish. The shell is usually crushed and the soft parts extracted and put on a hook.

Color my day, let’s pick a hue.  Periwinkle blue?   Or, really, whatever hues you might choose.

Rip van Winkle Hotel in the Catskills:    The shanty on the left is the original house from 1826. The boarding house on the right was built in 1867. The place has a fascinating history.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

I think of winkles, first of all, the oyster-killing marine snails, themselves edible. Then the verb for getting the little beggars out of their shells. The periwinkle is one kind of winkle. The periwinkle is also a ground-cover plant with blue flowers. Periwinkle is fun to say and fun to see. That hue of blue looks good on you.

Winkle can also mean scintillate or twinkle.

In spite of all the crap, there will always be reasons for being happy, and the word winkle is one of them.

Winkle pickers:   Phrase used to describe shoes that are very narrow and pointy.

Roger Winkle is a practicing Cardiovascular Disease doctor in Redwood City, California.

See that little girl?  She sang with us in Central Park in 2003.  She did a good job too.

Her name is Simone and I had a lot of laughs with her.

After a hard day winkling out molluscs from the rocks near the Cliffhouse, San Francisco, she enjoys a well deserved siesta.

A winkle can be a mysterious part of your body that tells you when you’re turned on. It turns pink when it’s the most excited.

Robert Matthew Van Winkle better known by his other name, Vanilla Ice, is an American rapper, actor and television host.

Rip ran to the old inn where he once gathered with friends. But instead of a shade tree there was a pole with a strange flag adorned in stars and stripes. And the name of the inn had changed from King George Inn to General Washington Inn.

Vanilla Ice is not the same person as Andrew Dice Clay.

You know, that story by Washington Irving is very deliciously told.  It might be worth your while to reread it one of these days.  You think you know the story, and yet you don’t.

I bet Saul Bellow read it once or twice, even if he was from Chicago and loved to ride the El.

The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle is a children’s book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter. Mrs. Tiggy-winkle is a hedgehog washerwoman who lives in a tiny cottage in the fells of the Lake District.

From a review of The Third Man:   Holly himself has a lot of trouble with names, calling Calloway Callahan, not knowing James Joyce, calling Winkel “winkle.” “Winkel” means “angle” in German, with the suggestion of something crooked or twisted. “Winkle” as an English verb is the process of wriggling a periwinkle, also a “winkle,” out of its shell.

It was difficult for that chick to winkle out of her shell.

Arrancar means: to boot, to bootstrap, to break off, to extract, to pull up, to start, to switch on, to winkle, to wrench, and ‘wrench,’ can you feel it? is actually the same word as arrancar.  Arracher in French.  Un arracheur de dents was a tooth puller.

Difficult to winkle out the secrets of the universe when we can’t even see 95% of it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a Spanish professor at Harvard. He didn’t like teaching but he translated Rip Van Winkle and called it Andrés Gazul.  If he came anywhere near the flavor, atmosphere and richness of the original, his Spanish was very good indeed.

Tyler Winklevoss studied Latin and Greek at Harvard.

Audrey and her deer one winkling out a box of pasta.

I knew her sister Heather.  Believe it or not, Heather was an unusual name in those days.

A ‘wee sleekit’ mouse.

She winkled out various dirty bits out of the distributor cap and did a fine job in the motor pool.

Uh, oh.

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

________________________________________________

She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska  [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska] on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire.

Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the award in two different fields (physics and chemistry).

 

She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon.  

Curie’s efforts, with her husband Pierre Curie, led to the discovery of polonium and radium and, after Pierre’s death, the development of X-rays. 

Curie died in 1934 at the sanatorium of Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie) due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation, mainly, it seems, during her World War I service in mobile X-ray units created by her.

Her parents were both teachers, and Marie was the youngest of five children.

As a child Curie took after her father, Ladislas, a math and physics instructor.  She had a bright and curious mind and excelled at school.

When she was 11, Marie Curie lost her mother, Bronsitwa, to tuberculosis.

A top student in her secondary school, Curie could not attend the men-only University of Warsaw.

She instead continued her education in Warsaw’s floating university, a set of underground, informal classes held in secret.

Both Marie and her sister Bronya dreamed of going abroad to earn an official degree, but they lacked the financial resources to pay for more schooling.

Undeterred, Curie worked out a deal with her sister. She would work to support Bronya while she was in school and Bronya would return the favor after she completed her studies.

For roughly five years, Marie Curie worked as a tutor and a governess.

She used her spare time to study, reading about physics, chemistry and math.

In 1891, Marie Curie managed to travel to Paris where she enrolled at the Sorbonne.

She threw herself into her studies, but this dedication had a personal cost. With little money, Curie survived on buttered bread and tea, and her health sometimes suffered because of her poor diet, a diet that I followed in my own days at the Sorbonne.

Marie Curie completed her master’s degree in physics in 1893 and earned another degree in mathematics the following year.

She received a commission to do a study on different types of steel and their magnetic properties. Curie needed a lab to work in, and a colleague introduced her to French physicist Pierre Curie. A romance developed between the brilliant pair, and they began a scientific duet which would last until Pierre’s death.

Marie and Pierre Curie were dedicated scientists and completely devoted to one another, but at first, they worked on

separate projects.

Marie was fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered that uranium casts off rays, weaker rays than the X-rays found by Wilhelm Roentgen.

Marie Curie began to conduct her own experiments on uranium rays. She discovered that the uranium rays remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium.

The rays, she thought, came from the element’s atomic structure.This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics and Curie herself coined the word radioactivity to describe the phenomena.Marie and Pierre had a daughter, Irene, in 1897, but their work didn’t slow down.

Pierre put aside his own work to help Marie with her exploration of radioactivity. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898.

They named the element polonium, after Marie’s native country of Poland.

They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende, and called that radium.

In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element.

Marie Curie made history in 1903 when she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in physics.

She won the prestigious honor along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity.

With their Nobel Prize win, the Curies developed an international reputation for their scientific efforts, and they used their prize money to continue their research.

They welcomed a second child, daughter Eve, the following year.

In 1906, Marie suffered a tremendous loss. Her husband Pierre was killed in Paris after he accidentally stepped in front of a horse-drawn wagon. Despite her tremendous grief, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution’s first female professor.

 

Curie received another great honor in 1911, winning her second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. She was selected for her discovery of radium and polonium, and became the first scientist to win two Nobel Prizes. While she received the prize alone, she shared the honor jointly with her late husband in her acceptance lecture.

Around this time, Curie joined with other famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to attend the first Solvay Congress in Physics. They gathered to discuss the many groundbreaking discoveries in their field.

Marie Curie experienced the downside of fame in 1911, when her relationship with her husband’s former student, Paul Langevin, became public. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin’s marriage. The press’ negativity towards Curie stemmed at least in part from rising xenophobia in France.

Among the false rumors the right-wing press spread about Curie was that she was Jewish, not truly French, and thus undeserving of a seat in the French Academy. The “right” wing.  What a misnomer. In every country, in every period, they seem to be wrong about so many things.

Mathematician Emile Borel, scientific director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, sheltered Curie and her daughters even when the minister of public instruction threatened to fire him for sullying French academic honor.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Marie Curie devoted her time and resources to helping the war effort.

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She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname “Little

Curies.”

After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research. She traveled to the United States twice— in 1921 and in 1929— to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw.

All of her years of working with radioactive materials took a toll on Curie’s health. She was known to carry test tubes of radium around in the pocket of her lab coat.

In 3511, it will be finally safe to handle Marie Curie’s notebooks which are now wrapped in lead.

In 1934, Curie went to the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, France, to try to rest and regain her strength. She died there on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia, which can be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.

Marie Curie is the most famous female scientist of all time, and has received numerous posthumous honors.

Curie also passed down her love of science to the next generation. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie followed in her mother’s footsteps, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.

Joliot-Curie shared the honor with her husband Frédéric Joliot for their work on their synthesis of new radioactive elements.Today several educational and research institutions and medical centers bear the Curie name, including the Institute Curie and the Pierre and Marie Curie University, both in Paris.

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

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When I was eighteen, I used to take the bus from the University of San Francisco downtown to 450 Sutter Street, the medical building.

I was interpreting for some of the doctors in the 450 Sutter  building.

The physicians would occasionally treat braceros and other Hispanic patients.

I assisted those patients in accounts of their injuries, mostly received while doing agricultural work, or becoming embarazada, pregnant.

The words the patients used to describe their medical problems were, of course, simple, direct and basic. They didn’t talk like doctors, and I interpreted their actual words rather than  using the Latin and Greek terms for the anatomy that the medical personnel used.

When I asked, “¿Dónde le duele?” (Where does it hurt?) the braceros didn’t say, “I fell out of the tree and hurt my rabadilla (coccyx),” or “My ano (anus) is sore.”  They used the word culo (ass) for both situations. A farola is a lamp stand or lamp post.

I knew the word culo ever since I had heard one Guatemalan say to another, “Dale una vuelta y metételo en el culo.”  (Turn it around and stick it up your ass.)

So, in learning medical Spanish, it might be best to learn the basic words for the anatomy and the learned terms. That way, you can talk to both patients and the doctors.

The good news is that scientific, learned terms are quite close to each other from language to language. Almost all of the scientific terms in any language are recognizable to an English speaker.

Common terms differ most from one language to another.  The word here that would change the most from one language to another is ‘leg.’

You can probably figure out what estómago means without even looking it up because it is close in form to stomach, but how about barriga or panza?  Barriga o panza mean belly or paunch, as in Sancho Panza. The learned words don’t change much from language to language, but the words that the braceros used when I was interpreting for them to doctors were sometimes not even in the dictionary.

I like how Hispanic speakers say ‘toes.’   Fingers of the feet, dedos de pies.  By the way, I think there’s a spelling mistake up there. ‘Left’ in Spanish is izquierdo.

Learning the common parts of the anatomy in Spanish can be a labor of love, since the street words for the anatomy of a human being are often more vivid and descriptive than the Latin/Greek terms.

‘Face’ in Spanish is la cara, but el rostro is also used. Rostro comes from Latin rostrum, which means ‘beak,’ so this word was originally street slang in Latin. Someone speaks publicly from a rostrum, which often looks like the beak of a bird.

El brazo is the arm. Un bracero, then, is someone who uses his arms for working. The word comes from brachium in Latin. When you embrace someone you are enfolding her in your arms.

La muñeca is the wrist, but it is also a doll.  It is so important for the hand to be completely flexible that there are many bones in the wrist.

I fell off of a motorcycle once and broke my arm. The doctor said I broke a navicular (ship shaped) bone, but there is no navicular in the wrist. There is a navicular in el pie, the foot. Sometimes I wonder about doctors. He meant one of the small bones in the wrist, but he couldn’t be bothered to use (learn?) the correct term.

Muñeca is from a pre-Roman language, possibly pre-Indo-European. Compare Basque muno (“colina”). The original meaning was ‘protuberance’, from which both senses of ‘wrist’ and ‘doll’ come. Compare Spanish moño (“a bow, ribbon”) and muñón (“stump”).

Everything you are rests on the astrágalo.  All of your life. From Greek ἀστράγαλος.

In some animals the astragalus are so nearly cube shaped that these cuboids were the very first dice, so when a gambler says, “Roll them bones,” he once was speaking quite literally.

El tobillo is the word for ‘ankle.’   From Latin tūbellum, a diminutive of tūber (hump, bump, swelling, protuberance).

Words to live by, for anyone:   No deje que nadie le diga que hay cosas que no debe aprender o saber.   Don’t let anyone tell you that there are things that you don’t need to learn or to know.

Venga acá.     Come here.

The calf, or gastrocnemius, is called la pantorrilla in Spanish.

Probably neither one of them got much sleep.

¿Está mejor?   Is it better?    ¿Está peor?   Is it worse?

Trabaje primero por la gente, no por el dinero.   Work first for people, not money.

La rodilla is the ‘knee.’

In Spanish, the knee, la rodilla, is seen as a wheeled, rolling thing. El rodillo is a platen. Remember the platen?  It was that thing you rolled a piece of paper onto when you used a typewriter, or maybe you never did?  The word rodillo can also mean a rolling pin.  There is a notion of rounding, rolling here. La rodilla.

Un rodeo was once the time when the cattle were rounded up for the winter and put into the barn. Riding horses and roping calves can be hard on las rodillas, the knees, both las rodillas of the cattle and las rodillas of the herders.

La vejiga  (órgano que recibe la orina de los riñones)     bladder  (organ that receives urine from the kidneys)

Piense bien antes de beber. Es más  difícil después.  Think hard before you drink.  It’s more difficult afterwards.

El muslo is the thigh.  This looks like a descendant of the Latin musculum. Did you know that musculum (muscle) means ‘little mouse?’  The Romans thought that the muscles looked like mice jumping under the skin.

El hígado        the liver         hígados is colloquial for ‘guts, courage.’

Notice how large the liver is, and that it has a right and left lobe.

The liver is larger than the stomach.

Some good foods for a fat liver: artichokes, garlic, papayas, beets, limes, cucumbers, celery, carrots, ginger.

Love this kind of liver logic:   My liver is sick and I’m going to punish it.

El corazón…………………………..the heart

Your heart beats seventy times a minute, day and night all your life. That’s some kind of miracle, isn’t it?

Don’t smoke. Keep away from obesity. Exercise. No to stress. Look at life optimistically. Alcohol in moderation. Laugh a lot. A healthy, balanced diet. Watch your diabetes. Control hypertension and cholesterol. Breathe deeply. Enjoy the little things in life.

¿Cuales son las cosas más importantes que afectan la salud y el bienestar de su gente hoy en día y en el futuro?  What are the most important things that affect the health and well being of your people, both today and in the future?

The Greeks thought that the navel of the world was at Delphi.  They made a stone to cover the navel which they called omphalos. I think maybe the Spanish word for navel, el ombligo, is related to this Greek word.

For the Romans, a boss in the center of a shield was called an umbo, and a little umbo was an umbilicus, the direct ancestor of el ombligo.

The Spanish version of ‘staring at your navel’ is rascarse el ombligo, scracthing your navel.

El pene    el miembro     penis   member     Happiness is a voluntary muscle.

¿Qué papel tienen los curanderos y parteras?  What rôle do healers and midwives have?

El útero    the uterus, womb    A more interesting word for ‘womb’ is la matriz, the matrix.

A ‘rib’ is called la costilla in Spanish. When you accost someone, you are literally coming up close to their ribs.

In Latin the word for rib is costa, side.

El pezón is the nipple.  Self examination of the breast. Visual inspection.  Look for changes in skin texture. Nipple secretion. Atypical fullness and/or wrinkling. Retraction or cracking in the nipple.

El pezón is derived from a Latin root *pecione, a derivative of peciolus, petiolus from *pediciolus, diminutive of pediculus, dimunitive form of pes (“foot”).

El seno o el pecho. Both of these words mean ‘breast,’ but I have the impression that el seno refers directly to the breast itself, where el pecho can also mean the chest generally. Seno is derived from sinus (curve, cavity, bosom; curve, bowl for serving wine, curved or bent surface, bending).  Pecho is from Latin pectus.

¿Cuántas madres amamantan a sus hijos?  ¿Son estos niños más sanos que los que no reciben leche de pecho?  ¿Porqué?  How many mothers breastfeed their babies? Are these children more healthy than those who are not breastfed? Why?

In pectore (Latin for “in the breast/heart”) is a term used in Catholicism to refer to appointments to the College of Cardinals by the Pope without revealing the names of the appointees (reserved by the Pope in his bosom, in pectore).

Other than its religious meaning and origin, nowadays in pectore is basically used to refer to either something kept hidden or unrevealed or an expected, but still not official, appointment to an office (especially in politics).  The Italian version of the phrase – in petto – is also commonly used.

El moretón    bruise, black and blue mark

El cuello is ‘the neck.’ You can see the relationship of the word to collar.

La nuca, the nape of the neck

Cuando usted prueba una nueva idea, siempre empiece con poco.  When you try a new idea, always begin with a little bit. Go slowly.

El hombro is ‘the shoulder.’  Hombro is probably derived from humerus.

El mareo   dizziness, nausea, seasickness  El mareo can mean ‘annoyance’ when used colloquially.

‘The back’ is la espalda.     From Latin spatula (“broad, flat piece”)

There is an idiom tener buenas espaldas which means ‘to have broad shoulders,’ so I’m thinking that espalda originally meant shoulder, especially since the French for ‘shoulder’ is épaule.

Dar la espalda means ‘to turn your back on,’  so the title of this pamphlet means Don’t turn your back on your back.

Embarazada     pregnant     El embarazo can mean embarrassment, obstruction, awkwardness as well as pregnancy, so not such a good concatenation of ideas there.

La cintura is ‘the waist,’ and el cinturón is ‘the belt,’ but the title of the film above means ‘chastity belt.’  The language is Italian, though, so ‘chastity belt’ in Spanish would probably be el cinturón de castidad.   From Latin cinctūra.

A related idiom is meter en cintura, which means ‘to bring someone to reason.’

La cadera is ‘the hip,’ from Latin cathedra, from Ancient Greek καθέδρα, from κατά (katá, “above”) + ἕδρα (hédra, “chair”).

La rabadilla is the base of the spine, the coccyx.  Rabo means ‘tail,’ and rabada means ‘hindquarters, rump.’

¿Qué ocurrió?        What happened?

‘Elbow’ in Spanish is el codo, which is derived from Latin cubitus  (elbow; elbow; forearm; ulna; state, action of reclining, lying down).

A biblical measure was the cubit, which was the length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger.  From Latin cubo, cubare, cubui, cubitum ”to lie down.”

Las nalgas is one way of saying ‘buttocks.’    If life turns its back on you, grab it by the ass.

Por favor quítase la ropa.     Please take off your clothes.  Please undress.

Sam’s Vagina Monologue      Las vaginas: The word vagina began to be used in the late 17th century.

Vagina is derived from Latin where it means literally a sheath, scabbard.

I see the word vagina used literally this way when I read Caesar who of course talks about the weapons his soldiers use.

Vagina is also the source of the word vanilla. Think of the shape of a vanilla pod.

In all countries there are many slang words for vagina.  In Spain people often say coño (cunt).

Of course there are many other words:  toto, chocho, chichi, chumino, conejo, higo, chiral, papo.

The Spanish also use the word almeja (clam) for vagina.

In Cuba the main street word for vagina is papaya.

Governor Mitt Romney visited Miami as a quick stop on his presidential campaign. Part of the media tour included an interview for Radio Mabí with Carlos Santana. The nine-minute phone interview ended with giggles from Santana and the translator. Why? Romney used the word papaya which is Cuban slang for vagina.

In México some street words for vagina are concha, panocha, pucha, papaya, pepa, verija, cachucha, guayabo, chocho, la pepita, chango.

Guatemala: cuchara, cutusa or cotusa, pupusa.  Honduras: verga, pupusa, cuchara, cuca, pepa.  Nicaragua: bicho, mico.  Costa Rica: mico, panocha.   Panamá: micha, cuca, araña, tontón, chucha.

El Salvador: pupusa, cuca, mico, torta.

By the way, I always thought that the word tortilla (a little torta) was Mayan or Aztec as the thing itself is.

But the other day I was reading Ovid’s story of the flood, and I found this sentence:  Cava tortilis buccina sumitur illi, quae crescit in latum ab imo turbine: Buccina, quae, ut concepit aëra medio ponte, replet voce littora jacentia sub utroque Phoebo.

(The hollow spiral trumpet is taken by him, which increases in breadth from the lowest twist: Trumpet which when it was conceived in the middle of the sea filled with its sound all the shores lying under the Sun.)

So, tortilis was the Latin word for spiral and the Mexican word for the spiral corn tortilla.

No se preocupe.       Don’t worry.  You don’t have to worry.

Es imposible hechizar a una persona que no cree en la hechicería.

It is impossible to bewitch a person who doesn’t believe in sorcery.

Haga todo lo que no le produce el dolor.      You can do anything that does not cause pain.

Si tiene una enfermedad muy extraña, no le eche la culpa a una bruja, no vaya a un centro mágico, sino busque ayuda médica.

If you have a very strange affliction, don’t blame a ‘witch,’ and don’t go to a ‘magic’ center. Seek medical help.

Cuando una persona está ‘hechizada,’  ¿es cierto que se alivia si los familiares lastiman o matan a la bruja?

When someone is ‘bewitched,’ is it certain that this spell which has been cast will be alleviated if her family injures or kills the witch who did it?

¡MENTIRA!   Nunca hace provecho perjudicar a otra persona.

LIE!  Never take advantage of a situation to hurt another person.

¿Entiende las instrucciones?      Do you understand the instructions?

¿No cree que necesita una inyección?

You don’t believe that he needs an injection?

No, solamente tiene un resfriado. El solo va a sanar. Debe descansar, comer bien y tomar muchos líquidos. La medecina fuerte no le hará provecho pero sí le puede hacer daño.

No, he just has a cold. It’ll get better by itself. He should rest, eat well and take a lot of liquids. Any stronger medicine will not be an advantage for him and may harm him.

No debe quitarse el vendaje.     Don’t take off the bandage.  Don’t remove the bandage.

Sólo cuando la gente se hace responsable de su propria salud y la de su comunidad, se pueden realizar cambios importantes.

Only when people become responsible for their own health and for that of their community can important changes be made.

El bazo      spleen   Bazo can also mean yellowish brown.

Un dibujo vale más que mil palabras.

A drawing is worth more than a thousand words.

¿Tiene Usted (Ud.) o ha tenido Ud. alguna vez destellos de luz?  Do you have or have you ever had light flashes?

Las personas pueden captar aún mejor las historias que tienen mensajes importantes, si ellas mismas las representan en vivo, en forma de teatro.

People can better understand stories with important messages if they themselves act out the drama of these messages in a play.

El tórax se refiere al pecho y los órganos que se encuentran ahí.  The thorax refers to the chest and the organs found there.

Haga visitas cordiales a los hogares, sobre todo a los de las personas que tienen problemas que no les permiten visitar al puesto de salud o que no participan en las actividades de grupo.

Make cordial visits to homes, especially to those where people have problems that won’t allow them to visit the health center or to those who don’t participate in group activities.

En una escala de 0 a 10 donde 0 no indica dolor y 10 indica un dolor intenso, ¿ cómo diría Ud. que es el dolor?  On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain you have ever felt, how would you rate the pain?

La convivencia, la cooperación y el cariño son las claves de la salud.

Living in harmony, cooperation and affection are the keys to health.

Inclínese Ud. hacía adelante.    Bend over forward.

Para muchas enfermedades los remedios tradicionales son tan buenos como las medicinas modernas – o hasta mejores. A menudo son más baratos. Y a veces son menos peligrosos.

For many infirmities home remedies are as good as modern medicines – or even better.  At least they are cheap and at times are less dangerous.

Recuéstese Ud.         Lean backward.

Ningún contraveneno casero (sea contra víbora, alacrán, ubar, araña u otro animal venenoso) tiene fuerza curativa más que la pura sugestion.

No home anti poison (whether it be against snake bite, scorpion bite, spider or any other poisonous animal bite) has any curative power other than pure suggestion.

Dé Ud. una vuelta.       Roll over.  (Give yourself a turn.)

Los remedios caseros ayudan a aliviar algunas enfermedades, pero otras deben curarse con la medicina moderna, como por ejemplo, todas las infecciones graves.

Home remedies help to alleviate some diseases, but other illnesses should be treated with modern medicine, such as, for example, all serious infections.

Enderécese Ud.      Sit up.

Do you remember that Ud. stands for Usted?  Usted is the formal ‘you’ in Spanish. Once upon a time Usted was a shortened form of Vuestra Merced, Your Mercy. Does Your Mercy wish for your crossbow now?  This is why Usted is in the third person.  This is similar to Does Your Majesty wish her soup tureen now? which is also a third person usage, although it is more difficult to see that in English, where verb conjugations have almost disappeared.

We address a duke as Your Grace. Same idea, and the verb is also in the third person. Has Your Grace been here before now?

Las enfermedades como pulmonía, tétano, fiebre, tifoidea, tuberculosis, apendicitis, enfermedades causadas por el contacto sexual y fiebre del parto deben tratarse con medicinas modernas lo más pronto posible.

Diseases like lung disease, tetanus, fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, apendicitis, fevers in childbirth and diseases caused by sexual contact should be treated with modern medicines as soon as possible.

Acuéstese Ud. boca abajo.   Lie on your stomach.  (That is, prone.) Notice a cultural difference here. Lie prone is lie with your mouth below.

Lie supine is lie with your mouth above.  That is, on your back.

No pierda tempo intendando curar estas enfermedades, pulmonía, tétano, fiebre, tifoidea, tuberculosis, apendicitis, enfermedades causadas por el contacto sexual y fiebre del parto, con remedios caseros.

Don’t waste time trying to cure these diseases with home remedies.

Siéntese Ud.       Sit down.

En caso de una enfermedad grave, generalmente es mejor usar la medicina moderna – con la ayuda de un trabajador de la salud, cuando sea posible.

In case of a serious illness, it is better generally to use modern medicine – with the help of a health care professional whenever possible.

El médico ha pedido que se le haga un examen de los senos.   Your doctor has ordered a breast examination.

Respete las tradiciones de su pueblo y desarrolle su labor en base a ellas.

Respect the traditions of your people, and develop your work on their behalf.

La apoplejía es el deterioro repentino de la circulación en uno o más vasos sanguíneos que suministran sangre al cerebro.

A stroke (they called it ‘apoplexy’ in the 18th century) is a sudden impairment of circulation in one or more of the blood vessels that supply blood to the brain.

Sobre todo, procure no hacer daño. Use un remedio casero sólo cuando sepa que no es peligroso y si conoce bien su uso correcto.

Above all, do no harm.

Use a home remedy only when you know it is not dangerous and if you know its correct use.

Este web log intenta ayudar a la gente a atender sus problemas más frecuentes de salud.

This web log is intended to help people with their most frequent health problems.

See you next week?

Sam Andrew                  Janis Joplin      Roy Markowitz

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We Are All Related.

Not only are we related to other people, we are also related to all other known life on the planet.

If you are ever at a party and some bright person says, “I am related to Janis Joplin,” hold up your hand and respond cheerfully, “I am too!”  You are, you know, and more closely related to her than you might think.

I read this the other day:    Every American president is in some way related to our nation’s preeminent Founding Father George Washington.

Of course this is true.  This is one of those statements that masks the fact that we are ALL related to every American president, to George Washington and to each other.

It’s just a matter of numbers.

I have written elsewhere, and it only seems to be common sense, to realize that we are all incredible winners just to be here.

Think about it.  You are the result of millions of couplings, all of them successful.

Your ancestors lived long enough to procreate, and I am talking about all of your ancestors going all the way back to something like 3.5 billion years ago.

You are the happy result of a long, long chain of lucky chances, felicitous opportunities, good weather, excellent timing, timing down to the second, timing down to the split second.

You have two parents.

And each parent has two parents, so you have four grandparents and eight great grandparents.

You can see that it doesn’t take a long climb up the family tree for you to be connected to a large number of people.

We’re only talking about parents here. Not uncles, aunts, cousins and other collateral relatives.

I have written about Samuel David Andrew, a man who fought in the Civil War, and who lost an arm at the battle of the Wilderness, one of the many Sam Andrews in our family going back for hundreds of years.

Just tracing my lineage back back to Samuel David Andrew means I have to keep track of 250 people, parents, grandparents, great grandparents straight back in a line to him, and he only lived a hundred years ago.

Two hundred and fifty mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers in only eight generations back to, say, 1840.

If you trace your own lineage back to 1600, which is relatively recent, it’s the modern era, just counting your mother and father and their mothers and fathers and so on, you will find that your family tree is a bit crowded. There are now 16,384 people who are directly responsible for you, that’s also a lot of people that had to get it on with no visual stimulation from anywhere but their partner, there wasn’t any mobile porn obviously. Learn more about smartphone porn at m-porn and look at what your ancestors missed out on.

Think of all that love, all that intrigue, all that monkey business, all of those human relations, all that human intercourse.

Let’s see, half of 16,384 is 8,192.  Eight thousand, one hundred and ninety two women met 8,192 men since 1600, and they carried on in such a manner as to result in you.

That’s a lot of kinfolk. And we’re only talking about four hundred years here.

In Elizabethan England, there were, in the entire country, only about three, four million people, the population of the San Francisco Bay Area now. You could be related to all of them. You ARE related to all of them.

Samuel David Andrew lived eight generations before you.

Twenty generations before you the number of people who were amorous, lecherous or whatever on your behalf reaches 1,048,576.

Each of those million plus couplings had to be successful to result in this little boy who turned out to be Jimi Hendrix.

Each of those million plus people had to be not murdered before the magic moment of procreation that resulted in you, not diseased or infertile, not smashed flat by an errant boulder, not killed in a war, each of these million plus people had to live to an age of fertility and procreate successfully.  That’s an amazing chain of good luck.

Think about the people we have seen disappear in our own lifetimes, Jimi Hendrix being one of them. Life is fragile. It’s not easy living long enough to make the next generation.

If you look at your family tree back to the time of, say, Julius Caesar, and just count your mother and father, and all of their mothers and fathers, the number of people who have resulted in you becomes one million trillion.

You are intimately related to one million trillion people.  That’s more people than have ever lived. By far.

How is that possible?

Lots of incest.  Most of it not illegal or immoral, although there was doubtlessly much of that too.

No, when you’re related to that many people, that means that each of those people are related to that many people too, so it won’t be long before you’re engaging meaningfully with a more or less closely related person.

To put it another way, you are most likely related to the person who is now your significant other. Indeed, it would be unusual if that were not the case.

To put it still another way, if you walk into, say, Yoshi’s nightclub on Fillmore and Eddy in San Francisco, take a good look around because you are related to everyone in there.

These considerations give the phrase ‘We are all one’ a whole new meaning.

There is a family in Georgia, a big family, and their name is Bembry. Some are African American and some are not.  I am related to all of them.

So are you. Probably not as closely as I am, but they’re your kin too.

If we are related to one million trillion people counting back to Caesar’s time, and after all, that is not really a long time in the general scheme of things, we are related to everyone, not only who lives now, but who has ever lived.

Saints, scoundrels, heroes, villains, holy women, hypocrites, Roundheads, Cavaliers, Guelphs, Ghibellines, Visigoths, Suebi, they’re all family.

There was an old song that had a line, ‘Duke’s son, cook’s son, son of a hundred kings.’   Just so.

In the Middle Ages, people sang, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

Genetically we are 99.9 % the same.

You have probably read that we are 95% the same as chimpanzees, so, there you go, we are related to them too.

But humans?  It is thought that we all come from an original population of about 10,000 individuals.

We are extraordinarily alike.  There is more genetic variety in a large troop of baboons than there is in the entire human species.

Mitakuye Oyasin (All Are Related) is phrase in the Lakota language, which reflects the world view of interconnectedness held by the Lakota people.

The phrase translates as “all my relatives,” “we are all related,” or “all my relations.”

Every person on earth’s most recent common ancestor might have died less than 2,000 years ago.

There simply aren’t enough ancestors for each of us NOT to be related.

It’s quite common for people to have the same great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents.

Some geneticists believe we’re all at least 50th cousins to everyone else on this planet.

Is there a single common ancestor that every person on earth shares?

In a discussion such as this there are three different ‘common ancestors’ to consider.

There is the most recent common ancestor, a random individual who happens to be the latest person who connects to everyone.

Mitochondrial DNA is a distinct subset of genetic material found not in the cell nucleus but rather in the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell.

Female egg cells completely destroy the mitochondria in the male sperm cell shortly after fertilization, leaving only the female mitochondria behind.

Thus, there is a ‘mitochondrial Eve’ who passed down her mitochondria relatively unchanged to every human alive today.

Every female alive today will continue to pass down her mitochondria indefinitely.

Mitochondrial Eve lived about 200,000 years ago.

We know this from tracking the mutations to the mitochondrial DNA and establishing which human groups are most closely related.

What about Adam?

Only men have a Y-chromosome. Fathers pass it on to their sons, which allows geneticists to trace patrilineal descent in much the same way that mitochondrial DNA allows us to trace matrilineal descent.

Genetic evidence suggests that Y-chromosomal Adam lived about 90,000 to 60,000 years ago, much more recently than mitochondrial Eve.

Whatever language we speak, whatever color of our skin, we share ancestors who were slaves in Egypt, farmers in the Yangtse delta, horsemen on the steppes, farm women in North and South America.

A substantial proportion of men in the world are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. They carry Y chromosomes which seem to have come down from an individual who lived approximately 1,000 years ago.

Genghis Khan died ~750 years ago, so assuming 25 years per generation, you get about 30 men between the present and that period. In more quantitative terms, ~10% of the men who reside within the borders of the Mongol Empire as it was at the death of Genghis Khan may carry his Y chromosome, and so ~0.5% of men in the world, about 16 million individuals alive today, do so.

By the way, I just read today that four out of ten Americans believe that we descended from Adam and Eve ten thousand years ago.

Please let that be an inaccurate poll.

Our human family is growing rapidly.

In 1800, about one billion people lived in the world.  This number had doubled by 1930, tripled by 1960, and officially reached six billion in October 1999. The world population is now over seven billion and rapidly climbing.

Because of this population explosion, everyone alive today shares recent common ancestors.

 

The average marriage in Europe is between sixth cousins, who share a great, great, great, great, great grandparent. However, this varies a lot from place to place, and people living in isolated communities will be more closely related.

We all share the same ancestors multiple times.

The awareness of our ancestors is limited to a few generations so we have difficulty believing that all of us in the world are connected.

The populating of the planet by our ancestors was accomplished progressively outward from a region situated between the Middle East, North Africa, and East Africa. Thus, all contemporary human beings are descended from immigrants.

It is an illusion that there are races. The diversity of human beings is so great and so complicated that it is impossible to classify seven billion individuals into discrete ‘races.’

The term race refers to a difference of origin which is non-existent for humans.

Ancient peoples stigmatized ‘others’ on the grounds of language, custom, class, and especially religion, but they did not sort people according to physical differences.

The concept of race is a recent invention, only a few hundred years old.

It is worth keeping in mind that, though we are all related, each of us is unique. Eighty billion human beings more or less have lived on Earth over the time since our common origin. With the exception of true identical twins, never have any two among them have had exactly the same genetic heritage.

The number of different possible human individuals is many times greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

The problem of travel between two objects in space where even the speed of light would take years or even centuries to traverse may ulmately be solved by some kind of teleportation such as is now achieved on the photon level.

And now for some really deep and close relationships.

A light photon in Cleveland will start spinning in one direction and another light photon in Melbourne will instantly begin spinning in another direction.

These photons are said to be entangled.

Talk about being closely related.

A Combination of the Two:   Entanglement of light photons

Quantum entanglement, whereby two or more objects are linked by an unseen connection can be thought of as a pair of dice that always land on the same number.

It is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state such that when one is observed to be spin-up, the other one will always be observed to be spin-down and vice versa.

It is, however, impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed.

Measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it.

Quantum entanglement has applications in the emerging technologies of quantum computing and quantum cryptography, and has been used to realize quantum teleportation experimentally.

One of the most intriguing aspects of entanglement is this quantum teleportation, in which the quantum state of a particle or atom is transferred to its entangled partner, even if they are separated physically.

Such relaying of quantum information could form the backbone of long-distance quantum communication channels.

This network, however, is a long way from being realized.

A group of researchers have made headway in quantum teleportation, and thus communication. The team, led by physics graduate student Steven Olmschenk at the University of Maryland, College Park, succeeded in teleporting quantum information between ytterbium ions (charged atoms) one meter apart.

Quantum teleportation has been demonstrated across macroscopic distances (hundreds of meters) for photons, the fundamental particles of electromagnetic radiation, but ions are better candidates for quantum memory because they can store information for relatively long periods of time.

The fundamental advantage of quantum information systems is that whereas a conventional digital bit can be 0 or 1, a qubit can be in a so-called superposition of 0 and 1 simultaneously.

Normally, you have to collect particles that come from the object to image it, says Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “Now, for the first time, you don’t have to do that.”

Two photons need not be of the same energy, Zeilinger says, meaning that the light that touches the object can be of a different color than the light that is detected.

Thus, we are all entangled in ways that we have not even imagined. We are all related.

Sam Andrew         Your cousin

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