Israel 1

Listen to Israel 1, a 42-year-old man from Tel Aviv, Israel, who has also lived in Lithuania and the United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 42

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1959

PLACE OF BIRTH: Kaunas, Lithuania

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Lithuanian (exact ethnicity unknown)

OCCUPATION: professor of  music

EDUCATION: conservatory degree

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was born in Lithuania, moved to Israel at the age of 12, and then moved to the United States at age 21. He has lived in Kansas since 1987.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject speaks Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Heather Jewell and Paul Meier

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 30/03/2001

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in the city called Kaunas, Lithuania, which is the second city in that country.  When I was born in Lithuania, this country was part of the Soviet Union; it was uh, called the Lithuanian Republic of the Soviet Union. Um, when I was 12 years old, my family and me immigrated to Israel to Tel Aviv. And, eh, I lived there until, eh — I lived there for nine years, served in the Israeli Army for three years, and the next day after I finished the army, I was in Boston, to study.  And I studied first in Juilliard, then the New England Conservatory for, uh, seven years.  And uh, since 1987, I, uh, was hired for the, the KU, and since then I’m here.

As I told you before, ah it’s a very kind of pe- peculiar, uh, linguistic mess in my, um, upbringing, because there are three simultaneous languages that I had to master.  I mean, as long as I remember myself I don’t even remember particularly studying one of those three languages, which is Lithuanian, Russian, and, since my parents were still from that old world … uh … Jewish population in Lithuania they spoke Yiddish, and so naturally that was also the language I spoke with my parents, so, since I remember myself I spoke three languages simultaneously and then when I immigrated to Israel, just to, um, make a little note, which, uh, some people, uh, don’t quite understand, is that Lithuanian and Russian is utterly, completely different languages. They have nothing in common.  Russian is a Slavic language, and Lithuanian is a Baltic language from a completely different family.  So the, those two languages have also this greatest of the difference since Russian is Cyrillic and Lithuanian is Latin.  And obviously it comes from the religion so because Russians are Greek — Greek Orthodox — and Lithuanians are Catholics.  So that’s why the Lithuanians have the Latin alphabet and the Russians have the Cyrillic.  So those two languages are totally, have no relations to — no relation to each other.  And, uh, obviously Yiddish is a language which is eighty percent German and twenty percent, I would say, probably, the country where it was …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Elizabeth Terrel

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 12/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
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• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

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