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January 28, 2006
History et al.
History is what people of the past chose to tell us about their past
History is an impression of the past
History is the only version of the past we have
History is the subjective take on what happened
Nothing written can be objective, this includes history.
History is the science of forcing your view of what happend in the past on other people
...
I had a brush with celebrity: had Chelo Kabab with some of the most well known scholars of Iranian history and literature today. One of them has been writing for the past 55 years!
Life is good... ό βίοσ κάλοσ έστι
Greek is hard... ή 'Ελλινική δίσκολη έστι...
Posted by Khodadad at 06:22 PM | Comments (2)
January 22, 2006
The Curious Case of St. James!
I have been reading a little too much early Medieval Spanish history lately, a little more than I should comparing with the time I should put into reading for my exams. I have to say that the formation of the Christian kingdoms after the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula is most interesting.
Anyway, one of the things I have fallen into is the case of the Order of Santiago, a popular religious/military order among the Spanish dukes and kings. What is for me interesting is that in the "traditional" English language histories of Spain (by this I mean those that tended to Anglicise everything), the Order is called "The Order of St. James", thus equating Santiago with St. James.
Now, we know that James is a weird rendition of Hebrew Jacob (Which, in the Hebrew of 2000 years ago was pronounced Ya'kub). Now, if you ask why, I can tell you that James comes from Old French James (prn: Yames) and that one from Latin Jacomus (prn.: Yakomus). Not to get too technical here, but the change from b<->m was common in Latin and Greek borrowings from the eastern languages (c.f.: Old Persian baga-bazu to Gr. Megabizes), so Yakub to Jacom(us) is not very unusual. I am not sure at what stage the unvoiced velar (the 'k') fell out, but since it is intervocalic, I bet if I was a better etymologist, I could have found a law for it!
So, that solves the Jacob to James problem, right? Now, let's get to St. James and Santiago.
Okay, everyone (even I, whose Spanish borders zero) knows that Santiago is alternativaly written San Diego. So, if our "saint" takes his bows and leaves, we are left with James and Diego being the same person.
Well, no one is going to tell me that "d" has changes from "j" (I know the case of Soldier and "soljer", but we are still talking about Diego and Yames...). So, what on earth does Diego have to do with James? How did this happen? James, the same Old French Yames, went to Spanish as Jaime; so, logically, we should get St. Jaime for St. James. Then why Diego?
Well, people do make mistakes, so we should always consider that. In these cases, you should be either like an investigator and look for alternative evidence and other suspects, or you should go with the "desperate times require desperate measures" motto and have a wild guess. I opted for the former and went to find other renditions of Jacomus in other languages. Lo' and behold: in Welsh, Jacomus became Iago!
Okay, Welsh is Celtic, and has things in common with Galician, the language of a province in Northern Spain where, incidentally, the first autonomous Christian knights formed a kingdom called Asturias. This is also where the relics of St. James, en route from the Holy Land, supposedly washed ashore, and based on which the Order of St. James was founded.
Now, let's put these together: St. James's relics wash ashore in Galicia. What might people have called James at the time? Saint Iago (if we imagine they gave him the same name as their Welsh cousins...)? I think everyone can walk the rest of the story from here, but for the sake of the posterity, I shall spell it out.
Saint Iago, when pronounced, becomes Santiago! There we have it! Santiago is Saint Iago! Now, Diego is obviously a mistake as I said before. People thought Santiago is San Tiago (which is actually the Portuguese pronunciation of San Diego) and they reconstructed the name Diego based on that. Diego is a made up name.
I am realising that this was too much boring history and etymology for a blog, but I had to write it down somewhere before I forget! Thanks for reading.
Posted by Khodadad at 11:49 AM | Comments (8)
January 20, 2006
"I Spy"?
This has now become a new outrage at the UCLA, the fact that a group, using an official sounding name, is encouraging the students to spy on their teachers and offers money for it as well. What has been concerning everyone is that the group is encouraging something that is illegal by the university regulations: selling the notes and lectures of the professors without their permission.
As a friend of mine said: Senator McCarthy's ghost is now very happy!
Posted by Khodadad at 08:56 PM | Comments (5)
January 17, 2006
What is a historian?
"Most people now take it for granted that history writing is distinctive from other kinds of non-fiction wriring, that history is a discrete discipline of learning, and that the goal of the historian is to uncover, record, and explain the past. Unlike 'literature'. which is produced in the creative and the imaginative mind of the fiction writer, history writing is held to be subject to commonly shared rules and conventions of evidence and argument. This is why the historian, unlike the novelist or poet, has to be trained. During his apprenticeship (the Ph.D.), the historian-to-be acquires the skills and the techniques of the trade, such as the ability to read a foreign language or a documentary style, along with attitudes towards evidence and argument - in short, his approach and temprament. He then begins to produce work, and although his idea may accord with or differ from the received wisdom, they are almost invariably expressed within an accepted idiom, such as the examined thesis, reviewed monograph or article, whose conventions reveal the underlying principles of his profession, and distinguish it from other kinds of written narrative."
Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography, Cambridge Universty Press, Cambridge and New York, 2003. p. 83
Posted by Khodadad at 10:05 PM | Comments (3)
January 09, 2006
O-Hum
I just got the brand-new O-Hum album, called Aloodeh. O-Hum are an Iranian rock band who have been very popular among the young Iranians for the past 5 years. They were not allowed to officially release their first album and their EP in Iran, so they "released" them by putting them online and letting people download the whole thing. As a result, there are many O-Hum albums going around, all of them home-burnt(!!). Now, Aloodeh is their first official release, and it is a good one for that.
It is an album of college-/pop-/hard-rock, with a good bit of Iranian-sims thrown in. Use of Iranian instruments (donbak, ney, etc.) is more pronounced, as is the case with Iranian rhythms re-created on guitar and synthesiser. The lyrics are of course from Hafez and Mowlana (Rumi), by now a standard O-Hum practice and a distinguishing feature of their music which I sadly hear they are planning to give up for the next album.
The first track (Darde Eshgh: Pain of Love) is a great openning, starting slowly and then pacing up to a fast, rock beat with great lyrics. The second one (Manbar: Podium) is also great, although it loses breath in the middle with a less than interesting guitar solo.
Like all good albums, there are tracks that you should skip (number three here!). They are either so great that the average intellect cannot grasp it, or they are just unfinished businesses. But they show how the artists were trying to work and sometimes reveal the whole intended spirit of the album (think Metallica's "Holier Than Thou" in the Black Album!), but musically "they do what a hoover does"!
The title track (#4) is a noble effort to have an industrial/Nine Inch Nails type song on this album, but the whole thing suffers from the fact that the members of the band are spread over three continents and the principal song-writer/singer/producer (Shahram Sharbaf) has been having a love-affair with his keyboard and its pre-programmed sounds! The result is "NIN meets Prodigy" which I am not sure if it is a good thing. It also has an obvious engineering and mastering problem which should have been easy to solve.
The rest of the album is a mix, too slow for my taste at times (I am a metal-head historian, thus, only two tracks of touchy, feely songs allowed in a 12 track album!), but that is a matter of personal preference. The music is great and the beats are interesting. Tracks six, seven, nine, and eleven are bound to be the best ones in the album, after track one of course.
The whole work suffers from several things, one of them I think is limited musicianship. I think more than one guitar should be used, and the solos should also be better thought of and presented. Nirvana-style vocal line solos are fun, and they were nice in Darvish (which I still think is the best O-Hum track), but in the long run, other than nice riffs, you need convincing solos.
As a whole, I think this is a great album. I listened to it twice, once as an Iranian who understands the lyrics and is trying to figure them out from among the non-Iranian beats and unusual singing, and once as a non-Iranian who does not understand the lyrics and just cares about the music. Both times, O-Hum comes out good, artistic, and entertaining. All in all, I will give this album four out of five stars and encourage everyone to go to CD Baby and buy a copy of it. It is a breath of fresh air in the bland music of today!
Posted by Khodadad at 07:30 PM | Comments (1)