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Ladino language

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Ladino/Judæo-Spanish
גודיאו-איספאנייול Djudeo-espanyol, לאדינו Ladino 
Pronunciation: [dʒuðeo.espaɲol]
Spoken in: Israel, Turkey, Brazil, France, Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Mexico, Curaçao
Total speakers: 100,000 in Israel
8,000 in Turkey
1,000 in Greece
300 in the United States
150 in the Bosnia and Herzegovina
[citation needed]
unknown numbers elsewhere, steady decline in all those places
Language family: Indo-European
 Italic
  Romance
   Italo-Western
    Western
     Gallo-Iberian
      Ibero-Romance
       West Iberian
        Spanish
         Ladino/Judæo-Spanish 
Official status
Official language in: none
Regulated by: Alliance Israelite Universelle
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: lad
ISO 639-3: lad

Ladino is a Romance language with a vocabulary derived mainly from Old Castilian, Hebrew, Turkish and some French and Greek. Speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, for example, in (or from) Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Izmir.

Ladino has kept the postalveolar phonemes /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ of modern Portuguese. Castilian, on the contrary, changed both phonemes to the velar /x/; Ladino also has an /x/ phoneme taken over from Hebrew. In some places it has also retained certain characteristic words, such as muestro for nuestro (our). Its grammatical structure is close to that of Castilian, with the addition of many terms from the Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic languages depending on the geographic origin of the speaker.

Ladino is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel), who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music. In some countries, especially expatriate communities in Latin America, there is also a danger of extinction due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian.

Contents

Name

The name "Ladino" is a variant of "Latin". The language is also called Judæo-Spanish, Judæo-Espagnol, judeoespañol[1], Sefardi, Djudio, Dzhudezmo, Judezmo, and Spanyol or español sefardita; Haquitía (from the Arabic haka حكى, "tell") refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called Tetuani, after the Moroccan town Tétouan, since many Orani Jews came from this city. In Hebrew, the language is called Spanyolit.

According to the Ethnologue,

The name 'Dzhudezmo' is used by Jewish linguists, 'Judeo-Castellano' or simply 'Djudio' by Turkish Jews; 'Judeo-Castilian' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by laymen, especially in Israel; 'Hakitia' by Moroccan Jews.

The derivation of the name "Ladino" is complicated. In pre-Expulsion time of the area known today as Spain the word simply meant "Castilian" or "Romance": literary Castilian as distinct from dialect, and Romance[2] in general as distinct from Arabic. (The first European language grammar and dictionary, of Castilian, refers to it as "nostro Latin," or "lengua ladina". In the Middle Ages, the word "Latin" was frequently used to mean simply "language", and in particular the language one understands: a "latiner" or "latimer" meant a translator.) Following the expulsion, Jews spoke of "the Ladino" to mean the traditional oral translation of the Bible into archaic Spanish. By extension it came to mean that style of Castilian generally, in the same way that (among Kurdish Jews) Targum has come to mean Judaeo-Aramaic and (in Arab countries) sharħ has come to mean Judaeo-Arabic. For this reason, authors like Haim Vidal Sephiha[3] reserve "Ladino" for the very Hebraicized form of the language[4] used in religious translations such as the Ferrara Bible, which was based on the traditional oral version.

Variants

At the time of the expulsion from the area today known as Spain, the day to day language of Castilian Jews was little if at all different from that of other Castilians. There was however a special style used for purposes of study or translation, featuring a more archaic dialect of Castilian, a large number of Hebrew and Aramaic loan-words and a tendency to render Hebrew word order literally (ha-laylah ha-zeh, meaning "this night", was rendered la noche la esta instead of the normal Spanish esta noche[5]). As stated above, some authorities would confine the term "Ladino" to this style.

Following the expulsion, the daily language was increasingly influenced both by the language of study and by the local non-Jewish vernaculars such as Greek and Turkish, and came to be known as Dzhudezmo: in this respect the development is parallel to that of Yiddish. However, many speakers, especially among the community leaders, also had command of a more formal style nearer to the Spanish of the expulsion, referred to as Castellano.

The Judaeo-Castilian dialect of Northern Morocco, known as Haketia, is the subject of a separate article.

Phonology

The grammar of Ladino, and its core vocabulary (approx. 60% of its total vocabulary), are basically Castilian. However, the phonology of the consonants of Ladino and part of its lexicon are in some respects closer to Portuguese than to modern Castilian, because both retained characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance which Castilian later lost. Compare for example Ladino aninda ("still") with Portuguese ainda and Castilian aún, or the initial consonants in Ladino fija, favla ("daughter", "speech"), Portuguese filha, fala, Castilian hija, habla. The Ladino pronunciation of s as "sh" before a "k" sound or at the end of certain words (such as seis, pronounced "sesh", for six) is also shared with Portuguese but not with Spanish. See also Judeo-Portuguese.

Archaic features retained by Ladino are as follows:

  • Modern Spanish z (c before e or i), pronounced as "s" or /θ/ (as the English "th" in "think"), according to dialect, corresponds to two different phonemes in Old Castilian: ç (c before e or i), pronounced "ts", and z (in all positions), pronounced like an English "z". This distinction has been retained in Ladino: korason/coraçon, "heart" (modern Spanish corazón) versus dezir, "to say" (modern Spanish decir). (The cedilla in the character ç was invented in Spanish to represent the former of the two phonemes, though it is not used in modern Spanish.)
  • Modern Spanish j (g before e or i), pronounced /x/, corresponds to two different phonemes in Old Castilian: x, pronounced /ʃ/ (English "sh"), and j (g before e or i), pronounced /ʒ/ ("zh"). Again the distinction has been retained: basho/baxo, "low" or "down" (modern Spanish bajo) versus mujer, "woman" or "wife".
  • In modern Spanish, the choice between b and v is made in accordance with Latin etymology: both letters are pronounced as the same bilabial phoneme (realized either as an English "b" or as [β] according to position). In Old Castilian and in Ladino the choice is made phonetically: bivir, "to live" (modern Spanish vivir). In Ladino v is a labiodental "v" (as in English) rather than a bilabial.

Orthography

The following systems of writing Ladino have been used or proposed.

  1. Traditionally Ladino was written in the Hebrew alphabet (especially in Rashi script), a practice that was very common, possibly almost universal, until the 19th century (and called aljamiado, by analogy with the equivalent use of the Arabic alphabet). This occasionally persists today, especially in religious use.
  2. The Greek and Cyrillic alphabets have been employed in the past,[6] but this is rare or nonexistent nowadays.
    1. In Turkey, Ladino is most commonly written in the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet. This may be the most widespread system in use today, as following the decimation of Sephardic communities throughout much of Europe (particularly in Greece and the Balkans) during the Holocaust the greatest proportion of speakers remaining were Turkish Jews.
    2. The Israeli Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino promotes a phonetic transcription into the Latin alphabet from the traditional Hebrew script, making no concessions to Spanish orthography. The songs Non komo muestro Dio and Por una ninya, below, and the text in the Sample paragraph, are written using this system.
    3. There are also those who, with Iacob M Hassán, maintain that Ladino should adopt the standard orthography of modern Castilian, the official language of Spain. For the reasons set out in the section on phonology, this would fail to reflect the actual sounds of Ladino.
    4. Perhaps more conservative and less popular, others along with Pablo Carvajal Valdés suggest that Ladino should adopt the orthography used during the time of the Jewish expulsion of 1492 from Spain. This system is used below in the transcription of the song Adio querida. (Quando el melekh Nimrod is in a mixture of this and the Israeli system.)

    Arguments for and against the 1492 orthography

    The Castilian orthography of that time has been standardized and eventually changed by a series of orthographic reforms, the last of which occurred in the 18th century, to become the spelling of modern Spanish. Ladino, like Portuguese, has retained some of the pronunciation that at the time of reforms had become archaic in standard Castilian. Adopting 15th century Castilian (or Portuguese) orthography would therefore closely fit the pronunciation of Ladino.

    • The old spelling would reflect
      • the /s/ (originally /ts/) - c (before e and i) and ç (cedilla), as in caça,
      • the /s/ - ss, as in passo, and
      • the /ʃ/ - x, as in dixo.
    • The spelling g (before e or i) and j would be retained, but only in instances, such as mujer, where the pronunciation is /ʒ/ in Ladino.
    • The spelling of /z/ (originally /dz/) as z would be restored in words like fazer and dezir.
    • The difference between b and v would be made phonetically, as in Old Castilian, rather than in accordance with the Latin etymology as in modern Spanish. For example Latin DEBET > post-1800 Castilian debe, would return to its Old Castilian spelling deve.

    Some old spellings could be restored for the sake of historical interest, rather than to reflect Ladino phonology:

    • The old digraphs ch, ph and th (today c/qu - /k/, f - /f/ and t - /t/ in standard Castilian respectively), formally abolished in 1803, would be used in words like orthographía, theología.
    • Latin/Old Castilian q before words like quando, quanto and qual (modern Spanish cuando, cuanto and cual) would also be used.

    The supporters of this orthography argue that classical and Golden Age Castilian literature might gain renewed interest, better appreciation and understanding should its orthography be used again.

    It remains uncertain how to treat those sounds which the spelling of Old Castilian failed to render phonetically.

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