ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2409 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2409 ************************************ 7 Dec 2001 From: (Josh Mittleman) Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked us to suggest ways in which a Welsh cook in the kitchens of the Knights Hospitaller in mid-14th century Rhodes might have been identified by his Muslim acquaintances. Here is what we have found. The Hospitallers held Rhodes from c.1282 to c.1522. Before that, it was part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. During the 14th century, the order, then commonly known as the Knights of Rhodes, was at war with the Turks throughout the eastern Mediterranean [1]. So any Muslims your persona encountered are more likely to have been Turks than Arabs. Turkish names were different from Arabic names and we know very little about them. We can't offer much help on how your persona might have been identified in Turkish. However, the Turks did borrow many Arabic words and names and the Hospitallers did have operations in Arabic-speaking lands; so we'll focus here on Arabic. Choosing a historically plausible name for a traveller is a difficult proposition, since it requires considering not only the naming practices of each culture but also the ways in which one culture identified foreigners from the other. Evidence of such inter-cultural naming is always scarse, so we have to speculate to fill the gaps in our knowledge. The result, therefore, always comes with a question mark. The first step is to consider the man's name in his original language. is an English form of the Welsh name [5], pronounced \GR@-f@dh\ where \@\ represents the sound of the in or and \dh\ stands for the sound of the in . So you've already adapted your native name to one foreign culture. The common language of 14th century Rhodes was Greek, and the servants in the establishments of the Knights were local Greeks [2]. They -- or the Germans, Italians, and French members of the order itself -- would be unlikely to use a Welsh name, or even an Anglicized Welsh name. They'd have referred to you in their own languages, using forms of your name adapted to the naming conventions of their languages. Guessing what those forms would have been is beyond the scope of this letter, but it is a question that might interest you. The question we researched for this letter is "How might a Welsh cook named have been identified in Arabic in the Near East or Middle East?" In order to answer that, we looked at examples of how Arabic writers actually did identify Europeans [3]: Arabic Names for Crusaders Amalric Morri, Murri Baldwin I al-Bardawil Balian Baarezaan Bernard Barnad Bohemund Maimoun (Maimun) Conrad of Montferrat al-Markish (the Marquis) Frederick II al-Enboror (the Emperor) Henry of Champagne al-Kond Herri (the Count Herri) Howard Huaat Humphrey of Toron Honferi Joscelin Juslin Montferrand Ba'rin Raymond of Saint-Gilles ibn Sinjil Raymond II al-Sanjili Reynald of Chatillon Brins Arnat (Prince Arnat) Richard Coeur de Lion Malik al-Inkitar (King of England) Roger Rujar Roger of Antioch Sirjal (Sir Roger) Tancred Dankari Theophile Tufil William of Bures Kilyam dabur In many of these cases, the pronunciation of a European name was approximated in Arabic, e.g. for , and that's one possibility we can offer you. We have no evidence that or was actually ever rendered into Arabic, so our suggestion is informed speculation. One of our Arabic experts suggests that might have been rendered , pronounced \GHAH-feedh.\. \GH\ represents a sound not used in English; it is the voiced equivalent of the raspy sound in the Scottish word or German . Words beginning \gr\ are rare in Arabic, so that sound would likely have been approximated by the more common \gh\. The dot after the \dh\ indicates that this is an emphatic consonant, pronounced while constricting the pharynx. We don't have a good way to describe what that means for the pronunciation; our best advice is to find a native Arabic speaker and ask him to demonstrate. [It's worth noting that we've found some records from Turkish courts, written in Arabic script, which identify non-Muslims by phonetic transliterations of their given names. So this suggestion may be appropriate for your persona in Turkey, too.] Another possibility is a descriptive byname. Here we're on better historical ground: Descriptive nicknames were often used in Arabic in place of given names, and we have some examples of descriptive terms used for classes of Europeans [3]: the Englishman al-Ingles the Frank al-Ifranj the Templars al-Dawiyyah the Hospitallers al-Osbitar the Count al-Comes the Viscount al-Biskund A natural nickname for a cook is "the cook" [4], pronounced \aht-t.ahb-BAHKH\. \KH\ stands for the sound in , i.e. the unvoiced version of the \gh\ we used earlier. A less specific name is "the Frank", a term used by Arabic writers for all western Christians. It is pronounced \ahl-ee-FRAHNDJ\. We hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Julia Stampnitzky, Sion Andreas, Pedro de Alcazar, Juliana de Luna, Da'ud ibn Auda, Maridonna Benvenuti, Adelaide de Beaumont, Ursula Georges, and Talan Gwynek. For the Academy, Arval Benicoeur 7 Dec 2001 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References [1] "Knights Hospitalers", _The Columbia Encyclopedia_, 6th ed. (WWW: Bartleby.com, 2000). http://www.bartleby.com/65/kn/KnightsH.html [2] Sire, H.J.A., _The Knights of Malta_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and Seward, Desmond, _The Monks of War_ (New York:: Penguin Books, 1995). [3] Da'ud ibn Auda, unpublished research [4] Wehr, Hans, _A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic_, edited by J. Milton Cowan, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976). [5] Withycombe, E.G., _The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names_, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), s.n. Griffin.