kurwa/color(ed) revolution

[victor steinbok]

Two bits on NPR this afternoon--probably Weekend Edition, but I am not sure.

First, David Rakoff, reading from his book (I came in late, so have no
idea which one), had the line, something like, "The mother knew that
the word "kurva" has entered the English language and meant basically
a "whore", thus not to be spoken [in polite company]". I am not
certain of the wording, but, I am sure, the point is conveyed quite
accurately. I've mentioned "kurwa" a couple of times here--basically
an Yiddish/Polish word, with no obvious direction of derivation
(Wilson chimed in last time it came up). Rakoff's pronunciation, on
the other hand, was distinctly anglicized--he pronounced it "kirva"
(like "curve", but with a slight secondary stress on [a] to prevent it
from being a neutral [@]) . The [v] is fairly sensible by the
Yiddish/Polish standards, but certainly not the [@:] in the first
syllable.

While GB has 14000 raw hits for "kurwa" (and web search shows 4M), I
could found only two (through partial scan) that actually applied--one
in UD and one in Current Approaches to Formal Slavic Linguistics
(2002). The rest are mostly in Polish or references to the practice of
shifting cultivation, also known as "Kurwa". There are also some
[East] Indian names, including some that lend themselves to
businesses, such as the the Kurwa Eye Center in Arcadia, CA, and Kurwa
Hotel in Sweden. The version "Kurva" also pops up in UD and in
Hungarian dictionaries--which might suggest common Yiddish origin for
both Polish and Hungarian, or simply something that happens to have
been a dialectal variation in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in
the area that included Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Galicia and
Silesia. Well, according to Google, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian,
Czech and Slovak have "kurva" == whore; Hungarian, Slovenian "kurva"
== bitch, Polish "kurwa" == whore, Lithuanian "kurwa" == fucking.
Given that Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian Jews spoke Ladino and not
Yiddish, it seems more likely that the word migrated from Slavic
languages both into Yiddish and into Hungarian, perhaps through
Yiddish.

Previously, I've tracked it down, in English, only to Yiddish
dictionaries/glossaries and only on the Yiddish side. It might have
popped up in some books that included a good amount of NYC Yiddish,
but I don't recall any specifics.

The second bit came up in the discussion of false confessions ascribed
to "democracy activists" in Iran. Of course, all the confessions are
written in Farsi by the security personnel, so whatever it is that
they say in Farsi we can only know in translation (mostly). But the
main point is that the interrogators ascribed to the suspects that
they worked to achieve a "velvet revolution" or a "color revolution".
The woman leading the story (I don't keep track of anchors and
reporters, most of the time), repeated the phrases several times in
the discussion, not always in reference to translations of the
"confessions". A couple of times she said "colored revolution". At
this point, I am not sure which one was the dominant, but I believe it
was "color".

In any case, these are examples of both expressions in the wild. Both
are translations, but integrated into the context. After all, getting
onto NPR is almost like getting into the NYT ;-)

VS-)

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