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stranger
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So a ghetto has something in common with a jetty, a jetée, and any and every subject. . .
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Carpal Tunnel
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I wish it were possible to discover how the name of a small island in the harbour of Venice became the name of a shamefully widespread form of segregation.
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from the AWAD:
Venetian getto is the word for a foundry for artillery. As the site of such a foundry, a Venetian island was named Getto. Later when Jews were forced to live there because of persecution, the word became synonymous with cramped quarters, populated by isolated people.
formerly known as etaoin...
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But etaoin, how did what happened in Venice so long ago get to be the universal term for the practice? Unless it was done at request of Church, and Rome having sent letters recommending its implementation everywhere else.
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well, we don't quite know how long ago, do we? I guess that's the first question to be answered, which may answer the second. I guess I didn't think it too far back, but then on further consideration, it could be quite awhile. hmm...
formerly known as etaoin...
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"The first Jews were allowed to settle in Venice only in 1385, when the city was involved in a war against neighbouring Chioggia and needed loans from the Jewish money-lenders.
But racism persisted, and in 1516 Venice's ruling council confined all the Jews in a smallen getti, or foundries."
But that still doesn't give any clue as to how the word spread so far.
P.S. I found a site about Jewish history in Venice. Persecution elsewhere in Europe led many Jews to come to Venice. It seems possible that when persecution in Europe seemed less active, Jews from from Venice moved into Europe and took the word "ghetto" with them.
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What *I want to know is how the h got in there. If the Latin j became a soft g how did it get hardened to a gh? Certainly the Jews in question were Sephardic and wouldn't be affected by the Germanic tendency to keep the g hard and there's no reason for it to be hard from its Latin root (it wasn't even a g in the first place), so what's the story?
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The Venetian Council passed the law, and must have used the word. I saw the foundry just called "geto". No clue as to where the "h" came from. And each of the European and Levantine Jewish factions were represented. I'm sorry I didn't keep the History URL. I'll find it again, I've little else to do at the moment.
P.S. According to tradition, the name "ghetto" is derived from the Venetian word "geto", meaning foundry which was pronunced with a hard "g" by the German Jews, who first settled here. The first zone assigned to the Jews was called "Ghetto Nuovo" because there was a new foundry there; "Ghetto Vecchio", named for the old foundry, was the second zone granted to the Jews, after 1541; finally, "Ghetto Novissimo" was the area given in 1633.
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stranger
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stranger
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I believe "getto" in Venetian originally meant a casting (or the foundry where castings were made). I've never seen the reference specifically to an artillery foundry, though.
The area of Venice where the Ghetto later was located originally had a foundry, but I think it was for coining--that is, a mint. (The famous Zecca, or mint of Venice, is a later building in another part of the city.)
It's worth noting that the original Jewish Ghetto in Venice was a source of great pride to the Jews of Europe. Venice was a very international and tolerant city (there were also resident communities of Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Germans--including Lutherans, after the Reformation--in fact, Venice was excommunicated more than once by the pope, in part because of its lax attitude toward heretics.) There were Jews in Venice from a very early date--I think much earlier than 1385 (the first Jewish cemetary was permitted in an outer island of the city in 1394).
The Venetian Jews were transferred to the area called the Ghetto from other scattered quarters of the city around 1500, because the city government sought to protect them from persecution (mainly by militant Franciscan monks) by consolidating their community and guarding it (with protective walls and a guarded gate). So the original purpose of the walls was not to enclose or isolate them, but to keep marauders out. The Jews of Venice could, I believe, own the land where their homes were, within the Ghetto precinct. Harsh though this may seem to us, it was very progressive at the time. In fact, Jews suffering persecution in other European cities sought to have ghettos constructed on the Venetian model. Only later did the district become rundown, and that was in part because of a booming population that could not expand because of the walls. So they built tall apartment buildings, and the district grew cramped and somewhat wretched.
As to the "h": Italian and Venetian pronounce getto with a soft g, and ghetto as in English, with a hard g. German Jews who came to Venice and settled in the Ghetto (where there is still a handsome 16th c. German, Ashkenazic-rite synagogue) tended to pronounce "getto" with a hard g.
Venetian dialect also tends to drop double consonants from Italian, so the name is sometimes spelled Gheto or Geto in old documents.
Other words given to English by the Venetian dialect:
sequin (from zecchino, a small Venetian coin (from zecca, mint) arsenal (from darsena, which is a Venetian borrowing from Arabic; I think the word means wharf or harbor)--and BTW, this is a toponymic word too, since the original Arsenal is the medieval shipyard of Venice; the name only later became a word for military storehouse gazette (I forget the source of this word in Venetian)
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Well, Malocchio, an impressive debut. And I certainly must want to get this off my chest as I have been thinking about it all day, and have lost the first two attempts to post it here. This format is maddening for a rookie, but I'll forge on, as the ghetto I am interested in representing is the one 'here and now'.
My birthplace, the City of Angels is currently the murder capitol of the United States (20 homicides in 2 weeks; most of those in South Central), and I am not comfortable with that in the year 2002. And the new police chief has had to take over a public high school in the city as there have been so many assaults and rapes during the school day. Where budding new AWADies should be blossoming, children cannot even be assured of their safety at school.
And that brings me to the music that has been sweeping the local hip hop radio stations of late. Tupac Shakur's new (posthumous ) double cd, Better Dayz. While I find much of it abhorrent, the misogyny, violence and homophobia is almost more than I can take, I have teenagers in my home, and I work with hundreds more young people, and I am telling you they are absorbing this stuff, so some of us better pay attention.
This is not for the faint-hearted. There is a plethora of the "n" word and the "f" word, and all kinds of other things that AWADies are not likely to be all that comfortable with, and I certainly am not. But if you can get past that, there seems to me to be something more there. These are someone's children, acknowledging that they are trapped in a cycle of destruction which they desperately long to escape. I assure you, this music is wildly popular and emulating 'thug-life' is a way for middle class youth to rebel. It's just not quite that innocuous for those actually trapped in he ghetto.
So, if you want to venture in, surely it will make you sad or angry or disgusted, or all of that. But I am telling you, it is more prevalent that we may wish to think.
The lyrics are at the links below. I think it all sounds better as rap, with music, but I can't give you that. I have picked a couple of pieces that I think are almost palatable. I don't recommend the others as I myself am deeply offended by the sensibility, but you can all make your own decisions as to what you wish to explore.
I recommend two lyrics, 'Thug Mansion', and 'What do you believe in'....to get a sense of what is going on....
http://www.ohhla.com/anonymous/tupac/better/thugznas.2pc.txt
http://www.ohhla.com/anonymous/tupac/better/who_do_u.2pc.txt
So, on to better dayz....
Maria
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