The Language(s) of the Diaries

The language of the Joseph Mathia Svoboda diaries is English—English of a sort and larded with many (but not all) of the languages used by the Svoboda family. Joseph’s father -Anton was from Osijek in present-day Croatia and we have no idea what language his family spoke at home. He lived for some time in Vienna and clearly knew German as did Joseph. Anton was also for some time the representative of France in Baghdad and Joseph’s son Alexander was educated in French schools and it is clear that French was often spoken by Svoboda family members. Joseph’s wife Eliza may have been a native speaker of Arabic, although she was apparently illiterate. Alexander wrote his travel journal in Arabic on the way out and in English on the way back. He married a French woman, and spent his last years in Istanbul. Joseph had learned some Hindustani while in India with his brother Alexander Sandor and studied Persian for many years. As far as we know now, the Joseph Mathia diaries contain the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, and Arabic.

Joseph’s English came rather late in life (1859-62) and is quite idiosyncratic. The English we see in the diaries is for the most part a working language, closer to a written transcription of his speech than any attempt to reproduce educated written English. This is writing for his personal use, not for publication. His spelling is most often phonetic with some strange results. For example, he sometimes simply elides a letter in cases where the same letter ends one word and begins the following word as in the case of the phrase “for repairs”, which he writes as “for epairs” (diary 47, p. 367). His spellings also vary widely, for example within 70 pages in the one diary, he spells the same personal name Cavalaris, Cavallaris, and Cavaliaris and the name of a kind of boat as mahaylah, mehayleh, and mahaileh. He also uses many abbreviations with a wide variety of spellings, for example, “Monseign.” and “Monsg.” for “Monseigneur” within a few lines of each other (#50, pp. 337 & 338), and has some consistently strange misspellings such as “seewt” for “sweet” and “shaol” for “shoal”.

Other features of language include telegrams in French, English, and Arabic as well as a rich quantitative language describing such details as water temperatures, depths, cargoes, currencies, and the like.

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