AP Styebook: 'Web site' is now 'website'

Language changes are always interesting, and the AP Stylebook (print/online) has announced two changes to become the rule on May 15.

Finally, we can now write "website" instead of "Web site," according to the copy editor's bible:

Tracing the Tribe has been doing this for a long time. Now I don't need to feel so guilty about it.

However, Internet remains cap-I, Web remains cap-W, and e-mail still has a hyphen, according to recent AP Online questions.

Another change, also adopted long ago by Tracing the Tribe to prevent confusion among international readers - is to spell out the names of US states and also to write Canada instead of the province after major cities. This is the AP announcement:

AP CHANGING STYLE ON STATE ABBREVIATIONS

The Associated Press is changing its style on state abbreviations and Canadian cities to create a consistent and universal style for international and domestic use. Starting May 15, the proper style will be to spell out the names of U.S. states in all stories and datelines where a city is followed by a state name. SACRAMENTO, Calif., for example, will become SACRAMENTO, California. We also will drop the practice of including names of Canadian provinces in datelines. We will instead use Canada. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, for example, will become VANCOUVER, Canada.

Changes become the rule on May 15, for those who do not already follow the new style.

Now, if there were only one official spelling for Chanukah-Hannuka-Hanukah-Channuka, etc.

Maybe that will come next.

Boston: Hands-On Problem Solving, Feb. 21

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston will host “Problem Solving with Experts – A Research Session” on Sunday, February 21.

It begins at 1:30 pm at Temple Emanuel, 385 Ward St., Newton Centre.

Beginners as well as more experienced attendees will be able to consult with experts for help with family research.

Roundtables will feature the following topics:

-- Getting started with Jewish genealogy
-- Using immigration, naturalization, and vital records
-- Eastern European country-specific research
-- Translation of foreign-language documents (Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German)
-- Holocaust research

Admission: members, free; others, $5. Refreshments will be served. For directions, click here.

For more information, visit JGSGB.

Resource: Online 'complete' Polish dictionary

Jasia at the Creative Gene blog is doing a Happy Dance.

She stopped dancing long enough to inform her readers about a great resource for linguistically challenged Polish researchers.

She covers a new online complete Polish dictionary in her post.

I now have what I have longed for for many years... a complete Polish / English dictionary. It's not an ordinary Polish / English dictionary, it's a COMPLETE one. What do I mean by that? I mean I can look up a Polish word in any of it's glorious conjugations or cases and find out what it means. This is terrific because in the past I'd have had to know the root of a word to find it's meaning and with 7 cases in the Polish language, believe me, that was often a challenging task.

Here's an example of what I mean...

mieć = to have

Present Tense-Actual
ja mam = I have
on/ona/ono ma = he/she/it has
my mamy = we have
wy mamy = they have
oni /one mają = they have

Read Jasia's complete post and learn why she is so happy.

Then view the Online Dictionary, Polish>English, English>Polish, billed as a web-based language-learning resource, with Polish-English and English-Polish search capability. See the very detailed intro to this resource for useful information.

The site also features an interactive Polish library, with information about culture, film, literature, educational materials and more.

It should help many of us who are researching Polish ancestors.

Language: Regional speech is history

Regional US dialects are investigated at the Library of Congress, as its American Folklife Center debuts "American English-Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection," as part of the LOC's American Memory collections.

There are some Jewish recordings, such as that of Samuel Arkin, then-92, born in Lutsk near 40 miles from Bobruisk (now Belarus) and living in Concord, Massachusetts. He recalled his life in Russia before immigrating, how he managed to come to America when Taft was president, and arrived in Boston.

It is a very interesting account of one person's journey from Russia to Germany, a small boat to Hamburg, a nine-day journey by ship to Boston, and continues through his working life and learning English.

There is a monologue with a then-70-year-old man of Russian Jewish background, in Savannah, Georgia who describes seeing Haley's Comet.

Recorded from 1941-1984, and most between 1968-1982, the collection's 59 audio recordings (118 hours) documents North American English diaects in 43 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and parts of Canada.

350 of the collection’s 405 recordings are available online; 148 also have transcriptions. The balance had restrictions, but may be heard in person in the AFC Reading Room in Washington, DC.

The survey's documentation covers social aspects of English language usage in different regions of the US, revealing differences in speech related to gender, race, social class, education, age, literacy, ethnic background, and occupational group (including the specialized jargon or vocabulary of various occupations).

The oral history interviews are a rich resource on storytelling and family histories; descriptions of holiday celebrations, traditional farming, schools, education, health care, and the uses of traditional medicines; and discussions of race relations, politics, and natural disasters such as floods.

The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations and excerpts from public speeches drawn from various archives and from the private collections of some 50 linguists, dialectologists and folklorists.

Check out the recordings.

JGSLA 2010: On our way!

Philly is over and here comes Los Angeles in 2010.

Stay tuned for the exciting events planned. There will be many innovations taking place, from website pages in various languages, to new forms of communication for prospective and registered attendees - lots of new stuff!

So now - drum roll, please - JGSLA 2010 is looking for volunteers to translate the information pages for the website into Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Farsi.

This will be for descriptive text, about 1,000 words. If you are a native fluent speaker or are at that level and feel this is something you can do well, the committee would like to get this completed over the next three weeks. Contact Pam for more information if you are volunteering to translate Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian or Farsi.

The committee has already lined up enough translators for Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Italian and German.

It should be obvious to all that JGSLA 2010 is really making an international effort.

See you in Los Angeles, July 11-16, 2010. Mark your calendars now!

Geography: Say it and repeat!

Genealogists are faced with strange place names as we conduct our ancestral search.

Not only are they hard to find on the map, but vowels and consonants are often arranged in unusual combinations and letters have curious squiggles, making localities nearly impossible to pronounce for the descendants of immigrant families.

Steve Lasky's new Museum of Family History Blog offers a peek at a section of his virtual museum. The Education and Resource Center offers four pronunciation guides to Eastern European towns.

Here, at the Museum's ERC (Education and Research Center), an effort has been made to aid those interested in learning the correct pronunciation of various town and city names, as spoken by those native to that particular country. Currently, pronunciation guides are available for Polish, Magyar (Hungarian), Lithuanian and Romanian. Perhaps a Russian language guide will be available at some time in the future.

Listen to each audio clip, and depending on your computer's media player, you may be able to pause, forward, reverse or repeat the clip. Listeners may repeat the town name after the speaker says the name.

Here are links to the four guides:

Lithuanian
Magyar (Hungarian)
Polish
Romanian

Thanks, Steve, for such a useful feature!

MyHeritage: An army of translators

Did you know that MyHeritage.com is available in 34 languages?

Although many staffers at the company are bilingual and a good number are multilingual, 34 languages means that others are needed. The site has an entire army of volunteer translators - more than 80 currently help with 30 languages.

Some of them work on Family Tree Builder, some translate webpages and some do both. Many of these volunteers have their own websites and also know MyHeritage very well.

Daniel Horowitz is MyHeritage's genealogy and translation manager - his own languages include Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English.

Among the volunteers' languages - not alphabetically - are Italian, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Estonian, Croatian, Swedish, Slovenian, Catalan, Romanian, Dutch, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Greek, Latvian, Uzbek, German, Arabic, Polish, Slovak, Afrikaans and Albanian.

Genealogy is an international endeavor. Technological innovation, new resources and cooperation are key to reaching even more people around the world.

Survey: Yiddish, Hebrew usage - LINK CORRECTION

Here's an interesting language survey produced by two researchers at HUC-JIR. I just completed it and found it fast, easy and informative. Tracing the Tribe's readers are encouraged to participate.

You are invited to participate in an interesting and entertaining survey about language. Essentially, we're asking about the spread of Yiddish (and some Hebrew) among English speakers in North America. We're turning to both Jews and non-Jews to answer questions like these: Who uses Yiddish words like "shmooze" and "daven" and phrases like "Money, shmoney"? Why do some people say "temple" while others say "shul"? Who prefers biblical names for their babies? Your responses will help us answer these and other questions, and you might learn something about yourself in the process. Please set aside 15-20 minutes, and click on this link [or copy-and-paste this long URL into your browser: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9eQwWyblG_2b8ixLqbt6QFhg_3d_3d] to participate. [THE LINK HAS BEEN CORRECTED]

Please forward this e-mail to your friends and family. We are hoping to get thousands of responses from people of all religions, ages, and regions of the United States and Canada. If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail Prof. Sarah Bunin Benor sbenor@huc.edu or Prof. Steven M. Cohen Steve34nyc@aol.com .

Jews throughout history have spoken distinctively Jewish languages. What about American Jews? Two researchers from Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion want to find out. Linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and Sociologist Steven M. Cohen are conducting a large-scale survey of Jews and non-Jews in the United States to determine just who uses Hebrew and Yiddish words and other distinctive language.

"This study has been several years in the making," says Dr. Benor, who has published several papers on the Yiddish-influenced English speech of Orthodox Jews. "Some people say that the only American Jews who speak distinctly are Orthodox, but among non-Orthodox Jews I know who are highly engaged in religious life, I've heard sentences that have more Hebrew and Yiddish words than English ones." An example: "At my /shul/, /balabatim/ /daven/ /musaf/ on /Yom Kippur/." "We want to know how widespread this phenomenon is."

Benor adds, "Three, four, and even five generations after their Yiddish-speaking ancestors immigrated to the U.S., some Ashkenazic American Jews still use Yiddishisms, like 'I need that like I need a hole in the head' and 'Money, shmoney.' Do Jews use these more than non-Jews? Do they use them only in certain situations? This survey will help us answer questions like these."

The researchers are also interested as to what extent Sephardi and Mizrahi background Americans have incorporated these Yiddishisms into their speech and how they pronounce Hebrew words. Regional accents are also studied.

They are investigating how widespread Yiddishisms are among non-Jews and how their use relates to individuals' social networks with Jews and time spent in New York. Results should be ready by the end of the calendar year. To participate, click here.

Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is the nation's oldest institution of higher Jewish education and the academic, spiritual, and professional leadership development center of Reform Judaism.

For more information, click here.

MyHeritage: Family Tree Builder 2.0

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has posted two excellent entries on working with MyHeritage.com's Family Tree Builder 2.0, a free downloadable program.

His first posting covered the basic open, upload, person and edit screens here. He focuses on the Chart and Report functions here, and he's planning another on the Book Report feature.

What should also be noted is that all information entered into Family Tree Builder 2.0 can be done bilingually. Currently, some 23 languages (including English) are supported for user interface and data entry: English, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese PT, Russian, Dutch, Greek Turkish Yiddish, Portuguese (both Portugal and Brazil, Norwegian, Danish, Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, Finnish and Afrikaans.

Pick an interface in any language, build and print a family tree in any of the languages. A translation wizard automatically translates trees from one language to another. Choose one language for display and another for data entry. There's even a virtual keyboard to enter data in any of the 23 languages.

For an interesting activity, go to MyHeritage.com. On the right side of the screen, there's a globe graphic and a drop-down box for language. Choose one and see what the homepage looks like in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Turkish and Asian languages (for the homepage, not for data entry or interface ... yet!)

Language capability is a great feature if you want to share a tree with relatives in other countries who may be more comfortable working in other languages. It also helps you see what names look like in other alphabets, which could help in research.

Learn more in a tour of the features here .

For some very recent improvements, click here. A new simple way to navigate and edit your online family tree on MyHeritage has been added. The new Modern Look focuses a family tree around a single individual and lets you add relatives quickly. It allows users to see more people at a time and get a good overview of how people are connected. The Classic (hierarchal) look, is still available and you can toggle back and forth.

Rashid Kaplanov - a mystery man

Thanks to Joel at the Ha-historian blog - he often writes on Sephardic topics - I learned about Professor Rashid Kaplanov, a Russian historian who knew 36 languages and fostered Jewish learning and culture.

His name was an immediate attraction: Such an obviously Moslem first name like Rashid with a Kaplanov (son of Kaplan)?

His obituary on January 7 in the UK Times is here.

Kaplanov carried many mysteries to the grave. What is certain is that he was one of the world's great polyglots — a scruffy, unworldly, lovable man with a prodigious memory and a mastery of 36 languages, including some of the hardest, such as Hungarian (of which his knowledge extended to regional dialects), and some of the most obscure (such as Mirandese, spoken in a small area of northern Portugal).

A longstanding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences' department of general history, he was the first Russian citizen to preside over the European Association for Jewish Studies and did much to re-establish Jewish learning, secular and religious, as a subject of teaching and research in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His family history is fascinating to a genealogist:

Born in Moscow in 1949, Kaplanov's grandfather and namesake was Prince of the Kumyks - a Dagestan Moslem mountain tribe numbering some 200,000. Dagestan extends from Chechnya to the Caspian Sea. Tradition says the Kumyk princes are direct descendants of Muhammad and another theory says they "derive from a lost tribe of Jews — the Khazars."

His grandfather, Prince Rashidkhan Khan Kaplanov had a Jewish wife and was a leader of the short-lived government of the Caucasus during the Russian Revolution. The professor's mother was also Jewish. The obituary offers more information on bothhis father and grandfather.

In the 1990s, although not observant, he became involved in the revival of Jewish studies in the FSU. His doctoral thesis at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences was “The political system of Portugal, 1945-74.”

Kaplanov began researching the Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews who had lived in Moscow after their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula, 1492-1497.

His interests included:

-The Karaites (a Jewish sect, Black Sea region),
-The Karaims (Jewish origin, Lithuania),
-The Sorbians (Slavic group, East Germany),
-18th-century Sephardic Jews' conversion to Russian Orthodox church in Moscow
-Antonio Ribeira Sanches, Portuguese-Jewish physician to the Russian court
-The Karaite pronunciation of Hebrew.

One of his languages was the unique and difficult Basque. When a Portuguese scholar asked why he learned it, Kaplanov said that the KGB was unlikely to have a censor able to read his letters in that language.

Politics apart, he was genuinely fascinated by topics that required the knowledge of many languages and obscure facts, and which allowed him to bury himself in Russia's greatest library. His background led him to identify with the languages and cultures of lost and endangered tribes and, by studying them, to preserve their memory. ... Kaplanov devoted the last 16 years of his life to the intellectual resurgence of Jewish culture among the remnants of communities almost destroyed by the Nazis and the Communists.

The professor headed the Modern Jewish history department at Moscow Jewish University, and was academic director of Sepher (Book) which he founded (1994) to promote Jewish civilization teaching in Russian universities and elsewhere.

In 2002, he was elected president of the European Association of Jewish Studies, following Sepher's success and many conference apperances in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, the UK and the US.

Proud of his Muslim as well as his Jewish roots, Kaplanov was saddened that he did not marry or produce an heir, which meant that he was the last of the Kumyk princes.

Professor Rashid Kaplanov, historian and president of the European Association of Jewish Studies, was born on January 19, 1949. He died on November 27, 2007, aged 58.

Joel and I would have liked to ask him many questions - particularly about Sephardic Jews in Moscow - but we're too late.

Steve Morse: Always improving

It's hard to keep up with Steve Morse and his One-Step website.

He's continually adding new utilities and tools, or updating and improving existing pages. There's so much here that a newcomer could get a bit lost. However, Steve has now made his site easier to use for all of us.

To avoid scrolling through the entire site, just look at the upper left corner menu of the site. Float your mouse over a category and see a drop-down menu of all pages in that category. Then just click on the item you need.

There's a new section on Genetic Genealogy and DNA, one of the fastest-growing segments of our field today. There are six DNA-related tools in this section, and you can check your page at Family Tree DNA, learn about haplogroups, build a DNA-group chart in one step, learn about migration details and see a nice migration map for each haplogroup.

For those checking for Soviet soldiers who died in World War II, Steve has added an English language front-end utility to an all-Russian database.

Those who are linguistically-challenged in Cyrillic couldn't read the directions, use the search engine or read the results (even if they got through the first two sections!). Steve has now provided help for all of this with his new utility, which offers transliteration of the results (not all fields are transliterated) into Latin characters.

While using the Russian form directly - if you can - limits the number of hits/page to 30, you can get 100 or more using Steve's form.

When I searched for my TALALAY family using Steve's form, I obtained 107 results including a large number of individuals previously unknown but probably related, as well as many from the non-Jewish branch. I recognized patrynomics of many relatives, but not the sons of those individuals, so this was a good source of new information. There were some 50 BANK entries as well, including some patrynomics I recognized.

Find this handy-dandy item in two sections: "Foreign Alphabets" and "Holocaust and Eastern Europe."

I also checked the utility for "Searching the Polish index of the Repressed" and found eight results for my grandfather's FINK family, with known given names and patrynomics.

Steve is always ready to assist users of his site who may have questions or comments. Contact him through the One-Step website; just click on his name at the top of the page.

Digitized Ladino Library at Stanford University

Thanks to Joy Rich, who noted this on one of her many lists:

Sephardic researcher Aron Rodrigue - director of the Mediterranean Studies Forum and chair of the Department of History - is a professor Jewish studies and history at Stanford University.

Rodrigue announced the inauguration of the Digitized Ladino Library by the Sephardi Studies Project at Stanford's Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Mediterranean Studies Forum.

Periodic additions are expected.

The Sephardi Studies Project will explore the history and culture of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries and develop a website to representative samples of writings in various Judeo languages of the Sephardim over the ages, starting with Ladino.

The Digitized Ladino Library introduction was written by Isaac Jerusalmi, Professor of Bible and Semitic Languages at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio: "The purpose of this Digitized Ladino Library is to place on the Internet a corpus of Ladino printed books, or even a few manuscripts, for easy access by scholars as well as students of Ladino throughout the world."

Currently online:

*Kanunnâme de Penas - the Ladino translation by Judge Yehezkel Gabbay of the first Ottoman Legal Code adopted in 1860. It appears in Hebrew characters and in Romanized form with a full glossary of all legal Turkish terms. The original Ottoman-Turkish text in Arabic characters and transliteration into Modern Turkish characters is being prepared.

*Poezias Ebraikas de Rosh ha-Shana i Yom Kippur - a popular Ladino compilation by Rabbi Reuven Eliyahu Yisrael of High Holiday piyyutim. Rabbi Yisrael was born in Rhodes, spent his life in Kraiova, Rumania and returned to Rhodes as its last Chief Rabbi. Writes Jerusalmi, "His Ladino is saturated with Gallicisms made fashionable by those educated in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, yet universally derided by those who had not been exposed to it. He even provides a brief glossary for those with no knowledge of French!"

*From Ottoman Turkish to Ladino - a unique Ladino pamphlet on morality by Gabbay (see above), the founder of the Djurnal Yisraelit.
Gabbay's Ladino had to be forced to express Turkish concepts.

*The Selihoth of the Sepharadim - self-published by Joseph Alschech in Vienna (1865), is, to Jerusalmi's knowledge, the first bilingual, Hebrew-Ladino Sephardic Selihoth book produced by Eastern Sepharadim. Its methodology is the traditional verbum e verbo or palavra por palavra approach used by Jews since the days of the Septuagint in Alexandria and continued in the various Targumim throughout the ages.

*The Song of Songs - was intended as a textbook for the study of the Aramaic Targum of the Song of Songs. The Ladino version of this Targum in Roman characters - Paraphrasis Caldaica was printed in Amsterdam (1664). Jerusalmi includes fully vocalized square Hebrew letters as well as the text in Rashi letters and Romanized versions. The Ladino version is from Salonika (1600). There is also a Ladino-English Glossary.

For much more information, click here.

Take a look at the texts and transliterations, which are fascinating.

Steve Morse adds One-Step Russian tools

Steve Morse's website offers tools for handling non-English alphabets.

Included are transliteration tools for Hebrew/English, Russian/English and Greek/ English, and also for converting between Hebrew print/Hebrew cursive.

His latest help for the linguistically-challenged is a conversion tool between Russian printed and Russian cursive alphabets.

I certainly wish this had been available when I began going through the seven microfilms of the Crown Rabbinate Records for Mogilev, Belarus. Back then, I had Russian friends write, in various handwritings, the printed and cursive forms of Talalay, Ratner, Jassen and the other families I was researching. That piece of paper went with me on every research trip, and eventually I learned how to read what I was looking for in spite of bad handwriting and damaged records.

Find Steve's latest contribution to genealogy on his site by scrolling to "Dealing with Characters in Foreign Alphabets," then "Converting from Russian Cursive to Print in One Step" and "Converting from Russian Print to Cursive in One Step."

Steve is always happy to answer questions from those who use these useful tools; find his email on his website.