[HANASHIR:7609] Re: ladino?

[Eric Simon <erics...>]

At 09:26 AM 12/12/00 -0500, Ellen Allard wrote:
>Can anyone tell me exactly what Ladino is, please?

The shorthand way of saying it is: 

Ladino is to Sephardim and Spanish as 
Yiddish is to Ashkenazim and German.

Both are written with the Hebrew Alef-Bet




>From Enclycopedia Brittanica:

===
also called JUDEO-SPANISH, SEFARDIC, OR SEPHARDIC, Romance language spoken
by Sefardic Jews in the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, Greece, and
Turkey; it is very nearly extinct in many of these areas. A very archaic
form of Castilian Spanish, mixed somewhat with Hebrew elements, Ladino
originated in Spain and was carried to its present speech areas by the
descendants of the Spanish Jews who were exiled from Spain after 1492.

Ladino preserves many words and grammatical usages that have been lost in
modern Spanish. It also has a more conservative sound system--for example,
f and g sounds still occur where modern Spanish has an h (not pronounced):
Ladino fijo, fablar versus Spanish hijo, hablar, and Ladino agora versus
Spanish ahora. Ladino is usually written in Hebrew characters and has a
literature of its own, including many works in translation. 
===

from another web page:

===
"You're speaking just like Cervantes,"  he said.   I was in a cantina in
Madrid in 1957.  I met a man there, he was a reporter.  We were conversing
over a few drinks.   I understood his puzzlement and had to explain.  I was
speaking the Spanish dialect I had learned at home.  The dialect, or maybe
it is a separate language, is commonly called, Ladino.  More properly it
should be referred to as, Djudeo Espanyol. 
    The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.  My ancestors found refuge
in the Ottoman Empire, and settled on  the Island of Rhodes.  Ottoman
Jewish communities flourished in Rhodes , Salonika,  Izmir, Istanbul,
Sarajevo and elsewhere for 500 years and there they preserved the language
that they had taken with them from Spain; Fifteenth Century Spanish, the
dialect of Columbus, Ferdinand, Isabella and Cervantes.  To that reporter
in Madrid it was as if a modern American were to meet someone who spoke the
English  of Shakespearean times. 
I grew up in a close knit Sephardic community in Los Angeles and assumed
that Spanish was the language of the Jews.    Not until I was in Junior
High School did I learn that some Jews did not speak Spanish, they spoke a
strange tongue called, Yiddish. 
    An even greater revelation was that our Spanish was different from that
spoken in Spain and Latin America today.   "Today we are going to learn
some words in Spanish," said my fifth grade teacher.  She continued, "The
first thing that you must learn is that in Spanish the letter ?j' is
pronounced like an ?h'".  I thought she was crazy or at least uninformed,
at home we pronounced the "j" as an English or French; "zh" or "dzh".
Sometimes it was "sh" as in the word dejar which we pronounced deshar, in
modern Spanish it is pronounced; dehar.    And some of the words were
different; we would say, aninda (yet), trocar (change), chapeo (hat) and
chapines (shoes), for the modern Spanish words, todavia, cambiar, sombrero
and zapatos.  Years later I found that the first three words were
Portuguese and the fourth was Catalan. 
Another major difference between Ladino and modern Spanish is in the word
for God.  The Spanish say Dios, derived from the Latin, Deus.   But to the
Spanish Jews this was unacceptable because Dios ends in the letter "s" and
that implies that Dios is plural.   The foundation of the Jewish faith is
that God is singular.  This concept is  reinforced every time we recite the
Shemah: "...the lord is One."  We always referred to God as: El Dio, always
including the article El. 
    Another difference is our word for Sunday.  In modern Spanish it is
Domingo.  But this comes from the Latin word for the "Lords Day."   To the
Jews Saturday is the Lords Day and we referred to Sunday as Alhát.  I found
later that this was the Arabic word for "The First Day," it is related to
the Hebrew word Ehad (one). 
When I heard about the Crypto Jews of New Mexico, I wondered if they had
preserved any elements of the Ladino dialect.  In my communications with
Crypto Jews I found many who's grandparents said El Dio rather than Dios
but none who called Sunday Alhat. 
    Other possible Ladino elements were the including of an extra "n" in
many words and of reversing the "r" with another letter.  We say muncho
(much) rather than mucho and godro (fat) and prove (poor) rather than gordo
and povre.   I found that it is very common for rural New Mexicans to add
the extra "n," but, few examples of the "r" shift. 
    Does this indicate that the Crypto Jews of New Mexico are indeed
descended from the conversos of Spain.  The linguistic evidence is not
absolute, but together with so much other evidence, it strengthens the
argument.  The strongest evidence is in the preservation of El Dio.  No
Christian would use such words. 
====

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