Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino or Sephardic Spanish, is a variant of Spanish that was spoken by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. It preserves some archaic features of medieval Spanish and also incorporates vocabulary influences from other languages. While once widely spoken in places like the Balkans, Judeo-Spanish is now highly endangered and close to extinction as its speakers were killed in the Holocaust or emigrated from areas where it was traditionally used. The language differs phonologically from modern Spanish in its retention of distinct sibilant phonemes and in features like the pronunciation of final vowels.

1. Judeo-Spanish, Ladino or
Sephardic Spanish: the ancient
Spanish spoken today
Some of the historical events that took place in Spain at the end of the century
were sad. XV. Also sad is the origin of the inscription that has led me to write this
entry about Judeo-Spanish: the concentration and extermination camps
of Auschwitz and Birkenau,which I recently
visited.https://www.digistore24.com/redir/384743/TayybaNoreen/

2. There I found this commemorative plaque, written in... old Spanish?,
Macarronic Spanish? It is Judeo-Spanish, Ladino or Sephardic
Spanish (or Sephardic), frequent names of spanish that speak, even
today – although in regrettable retreat– the descendants of the Jews
who were expelled by the Catholic Monarchs.
I will not go into detail here the nuances that distinguish the
different denominations (for that you can consult this article of the
Cervantes Institute),although it is worth mentioning the curious
difficulty that the Sephardim found when coming into contact, more
or less recently, with the main varieties of current Spanish. If they
call their language Espanyol,how should they differentiate it
from Spanish or Castilian? Terminological issues.
Although the specialized bibliography on Judeo-Spanish is extensive,
light articles, of a more informative nature –as is the purpose of this
one you are reading–, are not so frequent. So, this text is worth as a
small introduction for the interested party in advance and for those
who knew little or nothing about the issue until
now.https://www.digistore24.com/redir/176993/TayybaNoreen/
Contents
1. About Judeo-Spanish
1. Brief history of Judeo-Spanish
2. The fate of Judeo-Spanish
2. Linguistic characteristics of Judeo-Spanish
1. Some archaisms
1. Note on the archaicity of Judeo-Spanish
2. Lexicon due to the influence of other peninsular
languages
3. What does Judeo-Spanish sound like?
1. Consonantic differences
2. Vowel differences

3. About Judeo-Spanish
As we say, Judeo-Spanish is the variety of Spanish spoken
by the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Edict of
Granada in 1492. The status of variety of Spanish or of
different language (although very related) can be
debated, since, although the common fund is peninsular
Spanish,since before the expulsion of 1492 the Jewish
diaspora in Spain was made up of people from all parts of
the peninsula, each with a Spaniard of his father and
mother. ; In addition, since the expulsion, Judeo-Spanish
has evolved completely independently and without
contact with the rest of Spanish.
Brief history of Judeo-Spanish
Of course, the evolution of Spanish has not been so much since the
end of the century XV (and much less if we compare it with, for
example, that of the century X to the century XV), and that is why
any native spanish speaker should be able to read texts in spanish of
these dates without great problems.
The striking and interesting thing is that we can also read, with little
difficulty, Judeo-Spanish texts, current fossils – if this kind of
oxymoron is allowed – from the Spanish of that time; we must take
into account, in any case, the quasi-universal that the varieties,
dialects or languages that split from their trunk tend to be more
conservative, while the branches that remain in the tree continue
with a more accelerated evolution. This is more or less the case in

4. the case of Judeo-Spanish, although not exactly. Later we will see
archaisms that The Judeo-Spanish preserves, but also innovations.
At this point it should be clarified that, when we talk about Judeo-
Spanish, we are not dealing with a uniform language,just as Spanish
is not uniform (as is natural in the second language with the largest
number of native speakers). Apart from what has already been said –
that its speakers came from different parts of Spain, and that at that
time the variation in the peninsula was much greater than now – the
fact that these speakers, expelled from Spain, dispersed through
different and distant territories – from Morocco to the Balkans –
contributesto the variation of Judeo-Spanish. whose various native
languages influenced their speeches.
The fate of Judeo-Spanish
The bibliography is catastrophic: Judeo-Spanish is on the verge of
extinction. In North Africa and many territories of the former
Ottoman Empire, this language is nothing more than a relic
relegated to the realm of traditional festivals, but disappeared from
everyday life, where it has been displaced by local languages.
The greatest hope for the survival of Judeo-Spanish was annihilated,
along with its speakers, by the Nazis during World War II. The health
of the language was quite stable in territories such as Thessaloniki,
Istanbul or Smyrna, but in the face of barbarism most of the
survivors emigrated to Israel, New York or San Francisco, where
the new generations are forgetting this language of peninsular
origin.

5. Linguistic characteristics
of Judeo-Spanish
So far we have been looking at rather historical issues, issues that
must be taken into account in order to fully understand the
linguistic characteristics. So let's go with them.
We have seen that the Jews settled in Spain were expelled in 1492,
but this animosity towards them was not sudden, which possibly
caused the Jews to create their own private communities, also for
religious and ethnic reasons; this would lead to a
certain impermeability of Judeo-Spanish against the influence of the
other varieties of Spanish that, little by little, would converge in a
more uniform
language.https://www.digistore24.com/redir/418824/TayybaNoreen/
Despite this, and without contradicting the previous paragraph, it
seems that Judeo-Spanish and Spanish differed little between
speakers of one variety and another in the same area and at the
same time.
By the way, in the beginning, Judeo-Spanish was written mainly
with Hebrew characters. It was from the century XIX that the custom
of using the Latin alphabetspread, although with an orthography in
its own way,more or less comparable to the differences between
British and American spelling. There is currently no official or
particularly uniform spelling.

6. Some archaisms
At the time we saw common words between Spanish and
Portuguese,although in this language they are in daily use, while in
that they are authentic archaisms. We have something similar
when we compare Spanish with Judeo-Spanish.
We have Judeo-Spanish archaisms of the century XIII that already
looked archaic in spanish, such as the expression leguleya prominco
or lonninco,from latin PROPINQUUS AUT LONGINQUUS, but also in
the century XX snow can be called nief, as it was said in the times of
the Archpriest of Hita, and words such
as agora 'now', mansevo 'mancebo,joven' or ambezar 'to teach'
(from where 'seasoned'?) are preserved. A separate issue is the
archaism, or rather voluntarily Hebraized Judeo-Spanish,of the
biblical texts, translationsso faithful to the original grammar that
they were difficult for monolingual speakers to understand.
The morphology preserves archaisms such as the non-addition of -y
to "soy", "estoy", "doy", "voy" (which logically leaves us
in so, estó, do, vo)and the forms, common to areas such as
Argentina, of the
type topás, querés, sos, amá,etc.https://www.digistore24.com/redir/

7. 35945/TayybaNoreen/https://www.digistore24.com/redir/35945/Tayy
baNoreen/
Courtesy pronouns are also archaic even for the
century XV: vos (verb in 2nd person) and el/e(y)a (verb in 3rd person)
for the singular and e(y)os/e(y)as (verb in 3rd person) for the plural.
The form su mersed (logically related to "your mercy" > "you") was
used, although it is currently in disuse.
Note on the archaicity of Judeo-Spanish
It is often said that Judeo-Spanish is archaic in nature, and in fact we
have just seen (and will continue to see) archaic features. Even so,
this language also has a good number of innovations with respect
to generalSpanish, whether they are 100% their own, or shared with
more minority varieties. Let's name just a few, in general, so we
leave for the rest of the article other innovative splashes:
• The phonemes /ɾ/ and /r/ (‹r› and ‹rr›, to understand us) have
been simplified into one, the percussive /ɾ/, something that
only happens in Judeo-Spanish and Creoles.
• Further simplification of the phonemic inventory,by
disappearing /ɲ/ in favor of [ni̯](espaniol)and /ʎ/ in [li̯]. Related
to the latter, triumph of Yeism,so [li̯] also disappears and only
preserves /ʝ/(kayenti 'hot'); one more step we have it when /ʝ/
is followed by a /i/, which they dissimilar by eliding the
/ʝ/(famy 'family').
• Addition of the analogue -s of the 2nd singular person of the
simple perfect past tense and
subsequent elision by dissimilation of the first s of
desinence: amastes > amates 'amaste'.
• Extension of the preposition "a" of direct object of person to all
direct objects: it kept its kazas.

8. This article is infested with phonetic-phonological curves. Don't be
put off guard: check out the Spanish phonetics and phonology video
course. You can start right now with the video of the first class; also
the second class is free!
Lexicon due to the influence of other
peninsular languages
We have already said that Spanish, especially before the Golden
Age,had a great variation throughout the country. As the Jews who
spoke Judeo-Spanish were all over the peninsula, their speeches had
influences such as the Galician-
Portuguese ainda ,lonso (from onso 'bear') from the Aragonese
or samarada 'flare' from the lions/Portuguese. Special mention to
the Portuguese loan to get drunk,which does not mean what it
seems, but 'to be enraged' (for when a dispute like that of
"bizarre"?).
What does Judeo-Spanish sound like?
Anyone who has been to Portugal may have been troubled by how
easy it is to read Portuguese,but how difficult it is to understand it
spoken. Respecting the distances, something similar happens
with French and even with Catalan (not so with Italian). And Judeo-
Spanish? We have already seen that it is very easy to read. Will it be
equally easy for a person to understand to speak? Judge yourself:
Let's get into phonetic work with the most interesting details.

9. Consonantic differences
One of the terrors of the students of Historical Grammar in the
university is the so-known readjustment of the sibilants,a very
complex subject that we can not deal with here. We will say that,
taking into account the relative chronology,the Jews were caught in
the background, so this same readjustment was not carried out in
Judeo-Spanish, which maintains sound sibilants such as /z/,
disappeared from Spanish,or the etymological contrast of what in
Spanish is only /x/: dishites 'dijiste' /diˈʃites/, ojo /ˈoʒo/
and djente 'people' /ˈdʒente/; in addition, the phoneme /ʃ/ can
appear either by absorption of the previous /i/(cantáis /kanˈtaʃ/), or
for reasons similar to those of the ‹s› of Portuguese and some
varieties of current Spanish:thus we have edible animals such as
/peʃˈkado/ and other punchers such as /ˈmoʃka/.
We have talked in this blog about the everlasting mess of ‹b› and ‹v›
in Spanish, two letters that represent the same phoneme /b/. There
are those who say that these two letters represented two different
phonemes very old, and there are those who say that there has
never been a difference. The first makes more sense if we take into
account that in general Judeo-Spanish there is a stable difference: ‹b›
for /b/ and ‹v› for /v/; not so in Morocco, where perhaps the
influence of Spanish from Spain has neutralized the phonemes. The
/v/ is preserved even in archaic contexts such as bivda 'viuda'
/ˈbivda/ and sivdad 'ciudad' /sivˈdad/, in which in Spanish it has
vocalized and diphthongized, and even non-etymological contexts
such as cavsa < CAUSE and avtority < AUCTORITATE.

10. Vowel differences
Since Spanish is Spanish, vowelsgenerally enjoy great stability. Even
so, it is characteristic of the pronunciation of Judeo-Spanish the
elevation of the final vowels of the word, in a similar way to the
Asturianone, for example: night is pronounced /ˈnotʃi/
and little,/ˈpoku/.
Anyway, with this I think we have made a small review of what we
can learn from this peculiar language in a long time. Of course, the
interested party can always go to the specialized bibliography for
more information.
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