Listening to the Languages of the People
eBook - PDF

Listening to the Languages of the People

Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French

  1. 300 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Listening to the Languages of the People

Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French

About this book

This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Laz?r ??ineanu (1859-1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was among the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame.

Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, ??ineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the language of Rabelais. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an "intruder, " into his old age.

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Yes, you can access Listening to the Languages of the People by Natalie Zemon Davis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Front matter
  3. Title page
  4. Copyright page
  5. Contents
  6. Note on Transliteration
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. Part One: Romania
  10. Part Two: France
  11. Abbreviations
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index
  14. Back cover