I’m reading Hugh Nibley’s memoirs from his experiences in WWII, compiled by his son Alex (a fine filmmaker who presented at several sessions of Sunstone last year). They are entitled Sergeant Nibley PhD. Nibley was not your ordinary grunt; he had served a mission in Germany in the 1920s, had a Ph.D. in ancient history from Berkeley, and had been a professor of Claremont. The following charming vignette (from pp. 251-53), which I read on the train this morning, illustrates the continued interplay of the life of the mind even during one of mankind’s darkest hours:
We were on our way to 6th Army Group headquarters when we stopped in the village of Domremy where Joan of Arc grew up. While we were there we witnessed a celebration. The children came parading down the street singing, “Premier, dernier, premier, dernier.” “Beginning, end, beginning, end.”
“De quoi?” I said. “Of what?”
“De l’anee, monsieur!” It was the beginning and the end of the year that the children were celebrating. It was March 30 when we were in Domremy, and what I was seeing was actually an ancient Roman rite of spring. At the first of spring all the boys would go around the city and chant in this same way. It was called a “quest song.” And when they’d come around and chant the quest song, the people would have to give them a good gift if they wanted to prosper for the year. These are very ancient year rites and I’d written on that subject, so I was enchanted on this beautiful day when the children sang “premier, dernier.” So I staged a sparsio. I’d published an article on the ancient Roman custom of the sparsio where the king goes among the people and disperses gifts. That’s what sparsio means: “I scatter or disperse.” The king throws things to the people as you would scatter grain over the fields, and what he’s doing is planting, sowing the seeds of good fortune and prosperity among the people. Well, in Domremy I had some candy with me, so I sprinkled it to the children like an ancient king performing the sparsio. Boy, were they delighted! And this was as it should be, because they had been going around singing the quest song to welcome the first day of spring.
[Hugh's published study on this topic is Hugh Nibley, "Sparsiones," Classical Journal 40 (1945): 515-43; cf. n. 104; reprinted in The Ancient State, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.]
May 9, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I have the book too, and I have to say, I hope Nibley’s command of ancient languages was better than his German, which was terrible (or maybe he had undecipherable handwriting).
A few examples:
“Wozelbest der Kaiser muss” p.5
“Swartzabgestumpftegermane” p.17
“Eibe dein fluss” p. 136
Some of the stories are good, however. One of my favorites is the “Eibe dein fluss” one where Nibley and his buddy are sent to execute a prisoner and realize that the prisoner had helped the friend’s family escape Nazi Germany.
May 9, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Kevin:
Not having read Dr. Nibley’s study of the subject, I am nonetheless wondering if Sparsiones is the origin for the trinket distribution in the typical Mardi Gras parade? (…First thing that came to mind.)
May 9, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Peter, keep in mind that Hugh didn’t write it at all, it was based on dictated stories that were tape recorded. So the form of the written German probably comes from Alex.
Mondo, my guess would be yes. Throwing rice at weddings is another modern derivative of the ancient practice of dispersing sparsiones.
May 9, 2007 at 3:09 pm
re 1 Peter LLC,
So was Nibley not really as fluent in all of those languages as advertised?
I have no doubt he was really smart, but those of us who have served foreign-speaking missions know how hard it is to master one foreign tongue, let alone half a dozen or so.
May 9, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Good point. My first and third examples came from his dictated memoirs, so I should be fair and give him the benefit of the doubt (although still very sloppy of Alex to have done the transcription himself if he doesn’t speak the language.).
The second example, referring to Goebbels, is from one of his letters, however, and isn’t the only mistake from the written sources. I pick on it not because of a minor misspelling, but because it’s nonsense as a physical description of a person.
Well, that’s what I wonder myself. I’ve always read Nibley’s work assuming he knew what he was talking about. But with the tiny insights into his command of German that this book provides, my confidence has been shaken somewhat, though I realize I’m looking at a few examples in an informal context addressed to an English-speaking audience. At the same time, many of his references to other languages seem equally off the cuff and are addressed to a similar audience, such as the sparsio explication above.
May 9, 2007 at 8:10 pm
John, he really was amazingly fluent in an amazing number of living and dead languages. When you consider he was able to remember most of the up through he 80′s and into his 90′s that is doubly amazing.
May 10, 2007 at 12:14 am
Clark Goble, with all due respect, you seem to be recycling the same hearsay that I question.
I have no doubt that Nibley was smart, but, well, in the Mormon Church people can get carried away with how “fluent” people are in foreign languages. I don’t really think returned missionaries, for example, are all that fluent. Of course, fluent is a word that gets kicked around a lot; I guess it depends on what one means by the word.
May 10, 2007 at 6:54 am
Does anyone know where Nibley served his mission? I thought it was Germany, but I may be mistaken. If it was Germany, I’m wondering where.
May 10, 2007 at 7:08 am
Peter LLC –
You wrote:
Some of the stories are good, however. One of my favorites is the “Eibe dein fluss†one where Nibley and his buddy are sent to execute a prisoner and realize that the prisoner had helped the friend’s family escape Nazi Germany.
For those of us who don’t have the book, please tell how the story ends.
May 10, 2007 at 8:13 am
John, I have sometimes checked up on Nibley, something I am capable of doing because of my own training. While he sometimes made mistakes, and had awful spelling (something that happens when you study foreign languages), I have more often than not come away convincd he knew his languages. I’m certain he was stronger in some languages (such as Greek) than others. Many of the languages he studied had no “fluency” as such because there are no modern speakers of the language.
I know he had bad spelling, because I’ve seen some of his handwritten papers and notes.
May 10, 2007 at 8:15 am
The upshot was that the prisoner wasn’t executed. Arrangements were made for him to get a job instead. But if his family hadn’t have helped that Jewish family escape the Nazis, he would have been a goner for sure.
Yes, Hugh served his mission in Germany. The book makes occasional allusions to Hugh being at specific places where he had served, but not being knowledgeable about German geography I would have to try to look these up to recall where exactly they were.
May 10, 2007 at 8:20 am
Oh, I just thought of another modern example of sparsiones: the end of the movie Sense and Sensibility, when the groom throws gold coins into the air for the children to gather. There’s a touch of humor to the scene, as the money grubbing older relatives, though affluent, rush in to try to grab some of the coins.
May 10, 2007 at 10:06 am
One of the book’s graphics is a map he used with a number of towns circled centering on Bruchsal, which is in southwestern Germany in Baden-Württemberg near the French border. I don’t know how many missions were in Germany at the time, 1927-1929(?), and there’s only a few pages in the book covering the period, but he apparently stayed in the general area.
May 10, 2007 at 11:20 am
His bio notes that he spent time in Cologne, Ludwigshafen, Frankenthal, Bruchsal, Karlsruhe, and Basel.
There were two missions at the time: the German-Austrian (his mission) and the Swiss-German.
May 10, 2007 at 11:49 am
Regarding Nibley’s fluency, please read the editor’s comments (John Gee & Michael Rhodes) in the new edition of ‘Message of the Jospeh Smith Papryi’. They compare Nibley’s translation with current knowledge of Egyptian and are impressed with its accuracy.
May 10, 2007 at 9:11 pm
John, fair enough, although perhaps in ancient languages fluent is a bit more pinned down. Folks I knew who could speak the languages were impressed with Nibley. That’s all I can say.
May 10, 2007 at 10:53 pm
I have found this conversation very interesting, and I’m not sure how much I can add to the discussion, but I thought I’d clear up one point. Hugh actually served in the Swiss-German mission, not the German-Austrian mission. His mission president was Fred Tadje, whom Hugh called one of the few great men he ever met.
As for Hugh’s fluency, I can only speak to what I know. I did my mission in France and was a French major as an undergrad, and I remember being distinctly unimpressed with Hugh’s French *accent*. But he both read and understood French better than I did. My Hebrew is not great, but I found Hugh exceeded my modest second-year level. My German is practically nonexistent, so I cannot speak to that. Hugh was a polyglot, so his ability to work with multiple languages came largely from the fact that languages are derivative. With Greek and Latin, which Hugh studied, one can do a lot in other many other languages.
From working on the biography, I discovered that Hugh had a program of rotating through languages he was trying to acquire–I believe the rate was like one each week. This program dated as far back as his mission (there is one letter where he confessed to feeling guilty for studying Greek instead of doing missionary work). So he would spend a week on Greek, then a week on Hebrew, then a week on Latin, etc. (I seem to recall his system worked from oldest to more recent languages, so Latin came weeks before French, but I could be wrong on this detail.) This could also explain any problems with spelling and grammar you note, since these are likely to get a bit jumbled in the process of moving constantly between languages. (I know this from experience, since my French was always getting in the way of my Hebrew learning.)
My impression was that he was very competent reading many languages, and probably could get by if you dropped him off in a market in just about any Western city (he never did Eastern languages), but I doubt any one would mistake him for a native speaker.
The amazing thing about Hugh was not his level of fluency–many were and are better in any particular language than he was–but his ability to work competently in so many languages. I know there were problems with some of his translations, but his ability to make connections between cultures by using texts in many languages was breathtaking, imo.
Thanks for a fascinating discussion. I’m back to lurkdom.
May 10, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Boyd Peterson,
Thanks for your insights. I loved the biography you did.
May 11, 2007 at 7:22 am
Hugh actually served in the Swiss-German mission, not the German-Austrian mission.
Sorry, that was definitely my error (not the bio’s). Looking again at page 85, I mixed up Sloan Nibley’s mission with Hugh’s.
May 11, 2007 at 9:39 am
Re: fluency in languages
It’s important to distinguish between reading, writing, and speaking. A third of a century after my mission (to Central America), I can read Spanish better than I can write it, and I can write it better than I can converse in it. (Sadly, 33 years ago I was generally fluent in all three aspects.) I find the same is true for the other languages I have dabbled in over the years.
There is a big difference between reading a text in a foreign language and correctly composing a sentence in real time in that same language. I can pick my way through the Greek New Testament if I have my textbooks (lexicon, etc.) handy, but right now I could no more compose on the fly a given sentence in koine Greek than I could jump over my house. (I’m working to change that, but it will take some time.)
Just something to keep in mind. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster
Adventures-in-Mormonism.com
May 13, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I have to agreed with your comments, Bruce, regarding the defining of “fluency” and the fact one can be fluent in reading or speaking or writing but not all three. Yet, one is still fluent in one or more of those elements of any language (including English if I dare say).
I served my mission in Southern Germany back in the mid-70′s and continue to work on keeping myself semi-fluent in speaking and reading.
Yes, there are returned missionaries whose “fluency” in a language was found lacking at the end of their mission, let alone years after returning. However, I have had the experience of dealing with a number of us who not only obtained true fluency in our particular language (try being told that you not only talk in your sleep but are speaking in German in your sleep) but have sought to keep it because it is a reminder of the peoples and the lands we came to love during our two years of service.
Mit Liebe,
Sam Kitterman Jr.
June 15, 2007 at 8:50 pm
One last observation of interest (well, to me, anyway). A few weeks ago, I happened upon the website for “Puerta del Sol”, a Spanish audio magazine. The website has a Spanish competency evaluation that you can take (30 or so questions, mostly multiple choice). I passed it with 82%, and the website informed me that I “must be a native speaker of Spanish.”
That, of course, is ridiculous (I submitted a message to that effect) — but it demonstrates that under those circumstances, I could make the right choice (out of those presented) relatively consistently. If instead of a multiple choice (one right, 3 wrong answers), the test asked me just to fill in the blank, I suspect that my score would have been in the low teens. QED. ..bruce..