Liturgical Hebrew as Quasilect, Liturgical English as Sociolect; bārūḵ ʾattāh YHWH

• In Event: Linguistic Interpretations

Abstract

What can we learn from how a single, identical Hebrew phrase, so familiar that it is a metonym for all of Jewish prayer, gives rise to incredibly diverse English renderings? This paper looks at translation of uniform, formulaic blessings in bilingual Hebrew-English prayer books from 1940 to the present day, spanning the breadth of religious and socio-cultural outlooks. I show how this little-studied corpus of Jewish text belies the special nature of liturgical language, and how this register of Hebrew-English language combination, so ubiquitous in Jewish communal life, conveys meaning in a particular and important manner.

Drawing on the work of Glinert (1993), I explore how liturgical Hebrew constitutes a quasilect in anglophone Jewish communities, and, with reference to Benor (2009), how segments of liturgical translation could be considered an example of Jewish English. In light of the work of these contemporary scholars of Hebrew and Jewish languages, there is clearly much to learn from the study of prayer-book Hebrew and English.

Additionally, by analysing the phenomenon of transliteration as/within translation (i.e. instances of UNTRANSLATION), I raise the importance of the sound of language as a key defining feature of both liturgical Hebrew quasilect and liturgical Jewish English. This topic, though well discussed in Christian liturgical scholarship (see Hodgetts, 1983; Hammond, 2015), has yet to be fully realised with regard to Jewish prayer language.



References:

Benor, Sara. ‘Do American Jews Speak a "Jewish Language"? A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness.’ in The Jewish Quarterly Review, Spring 2009, 99/2, 230-269.

Glinert, Lewis. ‘Language as Quasilect: Hebrew in Contemporary Anglo-Jewry,’ in Glinert, Hebrew in Ashkenaz; A Language in Exile. OUP, 1993:249-264.

Hammond, Cally. The Sound of the Liturgy; How Words Work in Worship. SPCK, 2015.

Hodgetts, Michael. ‘Sense and Sound in Liturgical Translation’ in Worship, 1983, 496-513.

Author

• Sarah Grabiner, University College London (UCL)