Judeo-Romance Languages - Judaeo-Spanish (Paperback)

Chapters: Judaeo-Spanish. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 52. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Judaeo-Spanish, (-) commonly referred to as Ladino, and known locally as Judezmo, Djudeo-Espanyol, Djudezmo, Djudeo-Kasteyano, Spaniolit and other names, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. As a Jewish language, it is influenced heavily by Hebrew and Aramaic, but also Arabic, Turkish and to a lesser extent Greek and other languages where Sephardic exiles settled around the world, primarily throughout the Ottoman Empire. Currently, speakers are almost exclusively Sephardic Jews, principally those in or from Thessaloniki (Greece), Istanbul, Mexico and Izmir (modern Turkey), all localities into which the Sephardim re-settled centuries ago. Judaeo-Spanish has kept the postalveolar phonemes and of Old Castilian, which both changed to the velar in modern Spanish; it also has an 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 Spanish, with the addition of many terms from Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian and Bosnian depending on the geographic origin of the speaker. Like many other Jewish languages, Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of language extinction because most native speakers today are elderly, many of whom had immigrated to Israel where the language has not been transmitted 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 dialect levelling, that is, assimilation into modern Spanish. Today, especially in Israel, the la...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=1891075