David Pollack writes:
“My girlfriend’s grandmother spoke Ladino. Her family was originally from Spain and moved to Greece following the Spanish expulsion of 1492. What features of Hebrew does Ladino have? Is it like Yiddish, where most of the vocabulary is from the surrounding gentile language with Hebrew making up a smaller percentage of the vocabulary?”
There is indeed a significant Hebrew vocabulary in Ladino, or Judezmo, as it has been more commonly called by its own speakers. (The word “Ladino,” although adopted by the outside world as a term for the now close to extinct Judeo-Spanish once spoken in Greece, Turkey and the Balkans, has generally been used by its speakers to refer, more narrowly, to the archaic language of old Judeo-Spanish translations of the Bible.) This vocabulary includes not only words referring to Jewish religious practices and rituals, but also everyday words and expressions having to do with ordinary life, sometimes with phonetic or lexical changes, or with Spanish prefixes or suffixes added to them. To take just a handful of examples, one finds unchanged Hebrew words like haver (“friend”), sakana (“danger”) and azpan (“insolent”); changed Hebrew words like balabaya (“housewife,” from Hebrew ba’alat bayit) and dibur (“promise” or “commitment,” from Hebrew dibbur, “speech”); semi-Hispanicized words, such as seheludo (“intelligent,” from Hebrew sekhel, “intelligence”), and mazaloso, “lucky,.” from Hebrew mazal, “luck”). And there are partially Hebrew idioms like azer kavod, “to respect” (from Spanish hacer, to make or do, and Hebrew kavod, “honor”), and dar edut, “to testify” (from Spanish dar, “to give,” and Hebrew edut, “testimony”).
Yet all in all, the proportion of Hebrew words in the vocabulary of Ladino is significantly lower than that of Hebrew words in Yiddish. In Yiddish, this has been estimated to be 10% or more, depending on the subject and the speaker; in Ladino —or at least such is my impression after leafing through Dr. Elli Kohen and Dr. Dahlia Kohen-Gordon’s Ladino-English/English-Ladino Concise Encyclopedic Dictionary — it’s probably 2% or 3% at most. Not that all the other words are Spanish; like Yiddish, which has a large stock of Slavic words in addition to its original German vocabulary, Ladino has a sizable Turkish lexicon. (All Ladino-speaking areas were part of the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century.)
Why is the Hebrew component in Ladino so small? That’s probably the wrong question, since my guess is that a look at other Jewish languages spoken in the past — Judeo-Italian, Judeo-French, different dialects of Judeo-Arabic, etc. — would show Hebrew vocabularies on the scale of Ladino’s. The better question is probably this: Why is the Hebrew component in Yiddish so large?
I know of two answers that have been offered to this question. One of them might be called the Khazar theory. Basing itself on the belief that Eastern European Jewry was originally formed from a merger of two different elements — a larger, Western-Yiddish-speaking one migrating eastward from Central Europe, and a smaller one, speaking Khazar (which was a Turkic language), migrating westward from the destroyed Jewish kingdom of Khazaria in the Volga basin — this theory holds that when the two met, Hebrew, or at least many Hebrew words, served as a lingua franca between them, so that even after the Khazar Jews switched to speaking Yiddish themselves, this Hebrew component remained prominent.
There are, however, two main problems with this theory. The first problem is that we have no proof that there ever was a significant Khazar contribution to Eastern European Jewry — and if there was, why don’t we find at least some Khazar words in Yiddish, too, when in fact none can be identified? The second problem is — Ladino. That is, since Ladino was also a language that came to be spoken by two population groups that merged — the Spanish exiles and the local Greek-, Turkish- or Slavic-speaking Jews living in the areas in which they settled — who eventually adopted their language? Why wasn’t Hebrew used as a lingua franca by them, too? Why would it have functioned in this way in one case and not in the other?
That leaves us with the second answer, which might be called the “Jewish learning theory.” Eastern European Jewry, this theory goes, was far more Jewishly educated than any other Jewish community in history; not only did it have an elite yeshiva system that was unique both the quality and quantity of its students, but it also had a system of heders and adult study groups for ordinary Jews, which made them more literate in basic Jewish texts than Jews were elsewhere. And since these texts — the Bible, the Mishnah, the prayer book — were all in Hebrew, even ordinary Jews knew a great amount of Hebrew and used it and understood freely in their Yiddish speech, which thus absorbed a great amount of its vocabulary over the centuries.
This second theory is almost certainly the correct one. Although Jews, throughout history, have been an unusually literate people, Jewish literacy in Eastern Europe, in terms of both the simple ability to read and write and what this ability was used for, was amazingly high even for Jews. This is what gives Yiddish its special place among Jewish languages, of which it is in a sense the most Jewish of them all. The Jewish texture of Ladino, though it was spoken by Jews for centuries, isn’t quite as rich or thick.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.
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I am an American born Sephardic Jew, learning Ladino from the 'cradle'.My parents were born in Salonica, Greece, which had a population of Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jews in greater proportin to the resident Greeks until World War II. Salonica was known as the Jerusalem of the Orient' with many Rabbincal Institutions. You may also be aware that the Yiddish speaking Jews use hebrew words which have been yiddishized in pronunciation and are sometimes unrecognizable as Hebrew, so much have they been changed. Whereas the Hebrew words we use and Spanishize, retain their correctio pronunciation... However, y our article is very interesting. Thank y ou. I recently attended a Ladino Conference in Israel at the Dead Sea. There are 200,00 Ladino Speakikng residents in Israel. We have a website on the internet where we communicate with Ladino speakers all over the world and the language is not dying...it is being t aught in Universities in the U.S., (even in Estonia it was being taught for a few years) in Israel, and in Turkey. Books are being written, new songs are being written, there are monthly magazines and periodic publications as well, so it is not dead yet! We are trying to keep it alive. There are at least 3 synagogues and many clubs in Florida where the Sephardic tradition is followed in conversation, and in continuing our traditions, culture, food, etc. Sincerley, Daisy A. Newell Boynton Beach, Florida, USA
http://www.huc.edu/faculty/faculty/jerusalmi.shtml Isaac Jerusalmi hahamisaacATaol.com 513-221-7444 x3263 Dr. Jerusalmi is Professor of Bible and Semitic Languages at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati. He received his education there and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Ordained at HUC-JIR, his teaching specialties include Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew. Education * Ordained, HUC-JIR (1956) * Ph.D., Sorbonne, France (1963)
To Tarshisha. Yiddish is a Jewish language, and SO IS LADINO! But neither one is a language of all the Jewish people. The only one that is is Hebrew.
I forgot to add that contrary to what Philologos wrote, in Ladino HAVER, though it is taken from Hebrew, idoes not mean friend (as it does in Hebrew); it means a partner in a business. In the religious sense it might also be used for the Haver of the Hevra Kadisha, as Tarshish wrote.
Philologos, despite his amazing knowledge of philology, has made some unjustified generalizations and mistatements concerning Ladino. While it may be true that Ladino has fewer Hebrew words than Yiddish, the reason is NOT that the Sephardim were less Jewishly educated, or that Ladino is any less of a Jewish language than Yiddish. (The most Jewish of the Jewish languages, in fact the only really Jewish language, is Hebrew.) Perusing a dictionary (an imperfect one at that) is not a way to judge the extent of Hebrew in Ladino. Some Hebrew-based words are not even so-indicated (or even included) in the mentioned dictionary. Only a person who knows Ladino (I am a native speaker) and Hebrew could tell, for example, that "atakanar" (to fix, to repair) comes from "letaken" in Hebrew, with the Spanish infinitive suffix, and is therefore conjugated like Spanish. A correct impression might also be gotten by perusing the glossaries, commentaries, and texts of the Ladino classics transliterated and translated by Rabbi Dr. Isaac Jerusalmi (professor at H.U.C., Cincinnati.) These will also give a glimpse of the level of Jewish learning in the Sephardic world. Unfortunately the great rabbis of the Ladino-speaking diaspora of the Ottoman Empire (without mentioning the greats of pre-expulsion Spain) are little known in the Ashkenazi world. Rav Haim Palachi of Izmir, for example, wrote 70 books in his 70-year life span, and his grave has become a shrine for many religious Sephardim. As to theories for why Ladino might have fewer Hebrew words than Yiddish, I would add one more based on historical facts. Sephardim were well-integrated in the communities where they lived. They were not restricted either in occupations, possessions, or areas of residence. Their daily contacts with their non-Jewish neighbors made their language more susceptible to the influence of their surrounding languages than to Hebrew. The death of Ladino has been declared for at least the last hundred years. I am a Ladino-speaking Sepharadi originally from Turkey, and the founder of a Ladino-only online group, Ladinokomunita ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ladinokomunita/ ) which has 850 members worldwide, many of them young people. Recently some of us attended a 3-day Ladino festival in Israel (the Dead Sea) where there were nearly 800 participants, with lectures, activities, and music, all in Ladino - hardly a sign that this is an "almost-extinct" language.
Dear Rachel -Yiddish is a truly Jewish tongue, the result of two thousand years of natural evolution and not artificial construction of Ivrit, the modern Hebrew. Dear Philologus. to the best of my knowledge, HAVER in Ladio is refferes to the HAVER of the Hevre Kadisha :-))
Sorry, I don't have anything against Ladino. Hebrew, I mean Old Hebrew is one substrata of Yiddish (Ladino too), but modern Ivrit isn't a language of all Jewish People. In fact, no family outside Israel adopted Ivrit for everyday using. Today it is English.
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tarshisha and Rachel Bortnik are the same person and she likes to chat with herself on sites to get her point across, especially in yahoo groups with multiple internet personalities. Notice that she starts talking to herself addressing herself as tarshisha when as tarshisha she hasn't posted yet. But she already had in mind what kind of chat she was going to start. But it is a fact and she also likes to stalk others through her multiple accounts.
Rachel bortnik or tarshisha is also the first to post as ( aisy Alalouf Newell Fri. May 11, 2007) She or He tends to claim that He/She attended a Ladino Conference in Israel by the Dead Sea.
and has a habit to argue when defending Ladino that Hebrew is the most Jewish languge to Him/Her.
Not to mention a few other details on the message. But what is funny it is how Ladino or Ladino that person is, suffers from multiple internet personality. anyone can claim anything on the internet, but it doesn't mean they are who they claim to be. He or She tends to ask personal question when you join His or Her yahoo groups and be careful.
BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU JOIN HER GROUPS, SHE HAS A LOT OF THEM.