Three Studies: Fate of Sephardi Spanish in Turkey, North Africa, and the United States.

**KuriousKatKommittee** · 11-27-2019, 04:44 AM

Romero, Arias:

Judeo-Spanish is Spanish written in Hebrew alphabet with vocabulary from rabbinical Hebrew and Aramaic terminology, French, Arabic, Turkish, etc depending on the region. Word for "God" is spelled "Dio."
Judeo-Spanish has eliminated certain consonant distinctions, so that the alveolar sibilant /s/ and the interdental /θ/ are not distinguished. Judeo-Spanish also does not distinguish between the trilled or rolled r /r/ and the simple flap r /ɾ/ sounds (which differentiate the words caro ‘expensive’ and carro ‘car’ in standard Spanish).

Unlike the Sephardim of the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, whose geographical distance from Spain accounts for the preservation of most of the archaic Spanish elements in their Djudezmo variants, the geographical circumstances of the Ḥaketía-speaking community were different in that proximity to Spain has been a major factor. The year 1860 is seen as the turning point in the rehispanization of Ḥaketía, i.e. the readapting of Ḥaketía to contemporary Spanish norms.
Though most of the Ḥaketía-speaking community lived in relative isolation prior to 1860, the educated upper-classes, the well-off, and the merchants of the coastal towns in particular, maintained some contact with Spanish culture and language throughout the years.
Few remaining Sephardic Turks have mostly migrated to Israel.

Istanbul dialect
Romero, Reynaldo "STRUCTURAL CONSEQUENCES OF LANGUAGE SHIFT: JUDEO-SPANISH IN ISTANBUL" (2008)
Features:
- Judeo-Spanish syntax shows an example of assimilation to Turkish syntax, convergence, and innovation. [...] The lack of grammatical gender in Turkish affect[s] the usage of gender agreement in Judeo-Spanish.
- The structural changes that were present in the gender system were not correlated to their structural position in the sentence, but rather to the speakers who performed these sentences.
- Replacement of the feminine gender by the masculine gender, that is, taking the masculine gender as the default, has been documented previously in East Sutherland Gaelic by Dorian (1981, 124-5) and in the Spanish of transitional bilinguals in the United States by Lipski (1993, 161-2).
- The Turkish possessor-possessed order in the nouns is preferred over the Spanish possessed + de + possessor order.
- Judeo-Spanish denotes the singular number with a zero morpheme and the plural with -(e)s. The epenthetic -e- is added irrespective of gender when the noun ends in a consonant,
- Sometimes adjective placed before noun when describ[ing] a quality inherent to the noun, following Turkish (e.g. "la blanka inyeve" beyaz kâr/white snow, "la grande mar" büyük deniz/the big sea) or lessening the impact of the description (e.g "la ermoza mujer")

Istanbul dialect 2 (Gallicized Judeo-Spanish, 1930s)
• El Tiempo [Sephardi Istanbul newspaper] consistently portrayed Judeo-Spanish as a “shameful jargon,” a “bastard tongue,” and a “dying language,” promoting French and Turkish as more useful languages. According to the editors of El Tiempo, Judeo-Spanish had no literary value and it served only for “light reading,” whereas French was reserved for academic and scientific texts and Hebrew for religious scholarship (Stein 2004, 55, 59). “Gallicized” Judeo-Spanish was “cleansed” of borrowings from Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, and other Balkan languages, and in turned utilized French lexicon and syntax with Spanish morphology (Stein 2004, 69-70; Farhi 1937, 155). The result was a Gallicized Judeo-Spanish, also known as Judeo-Fragnol, spoken by the educated middle and upper classes that had access to French schooling in an attempt to identify themselves with French civilization.

Example:
Benuta: Sha meldamos agora ("So, let’s read now")
Ezrá: “Un grande sinistro devastó el mas grande edifisio sanitario de muestra sivdad” (“A great fire destroyed the biggest hospital in our city”
Benuta: Ke kiere dezir esto, Ezrá? ("What does this mean, Ezrá?")
Ezrá: Kien save, Benuta; no mashkareí nada... El Dio ke los fieda alos djornales ke eskriven tanto enfrankeado para no pueder morder ni una palabra. ('Who knows, Benuta; I wasn’t able to grasp anything… May God strike the newspapers that write so “Frenchified” that I’m not able to bite a single word.') (Bunis 1999, 471-2)

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North African dialects
ALICIA SISSO RAZ "ḤAKETÍA: DISCOVERING THE OTHER JUDEO-SPANISH VERNACULAR"
Features:
- In addition to Hebrew and Aramaic, some vocabulary from Iberian Arabic (alḥad "Sunday, jbar "current events" or "news"), English (atornar, "to come to the defense of someone"), Portuguese (preto "bad"), Turkish (karpuz "watermelon"), Greek fasulada "dish made with beans").
- Gradual replacement of their Spanish vocabulary with the local Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect was characteristic to the Sephardim who settled in central and southern Morocco while the communities in northern Morocco have retained their language, which gradually evolved to the Ḥaketía vernacular.
- The ordinances for the expelled Sephardim in Morocco composed by the Sephardic rabbis of Fez,
were initially written in Spanish. But, Spanish vocabulary has been gradually replaced throughout the years with vocabulary from the local Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect. Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect still
contains Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary. Benharroch estimates the number of Spanish words still in use in Judeo-Moroccan Arabic at a few thousand.
- The syntax of Ḥaketía usually follows contemporary Spanish rules with a number of exceptions—archaic patterns that still linger, intentionally spirited sentences with an unconventional word order, old patterns in aphorisms, expressions, etc. E.g. the common greeting to welcome someone in Ḥaketía is "venido bueno" (bienvenido)
- Borrowed vocabulary in Ḥaketía is hispanicized.

Examples (Ḥaketía):
1. El tipad aburacado que se topó en la kaisería fue una berajjá lebattalá (La tetera agujereada que se encontró en mercado, fue inútil.)
2. La madre y la hiĵa shabonaron todo el ashuar nuevo que (La madre y la hija lavaron todo el ajuar nuevo que se compró.)

[***][*]ssaba ‘Saturday’[*]beraha ‘blessing’[*]minha ‘an afternoon prayer,’[*]kadoz ‘holy,’[*]guay 'woe'

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US Judeo-Sephardi
Andrés Enrique Arias "Judeo-Spanish in the United States" (2014) http://cervantesobservatorio.fas.har...-united-states
Ethno-Cultural Background:
• Historical settlements include New Brunswick (New Jersey), Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Montgomery (Alabama), Miami, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. New York (1920s) had a population of about 25,000 Sephardim (Armistead and Silverman 1981: vii).

• Because of the large number of single males among the first waves of Sephardic immigrants, cafes became an important gathering place where the Sephardim enjoyed food, a glass of raki (an anise-flavored alcoholic drink), or a cup of Turkish coffee, and where they played cards after work (Ben-Ur 2009: 154).

• The Sephardic Jews who arrived in the early decades of the twentieth century were mostly self-employed small businessmen, usually from very humble backgrounds. They [made] a living by selling flowers, fruits and vegetables on the streets. They also worked as shoeshine boys, waiters, or wardrobe managers for cinemas and theaters. In many cases, these peddlers, showing persistence and skill, established their own businesses: vegetable vendors opened grocery stores, street shoe-cleaners created shoe-repair workshops and shoe stores (Angel 1998: 94, Donnell 1987: 123-24), and so on. [D]uring most of the twentieth century mass culture, the education system and the institutions of the United States promoted cultural homogenization, the elimination of differences, and the adoption of the identity, [American English], and values of the Anglo-American majority (Harris 1994: 201-202).

• [M]any Sephardim preferred to settle in Hispanic neighborhoods or to work with people of Hispanic origin (Ben-Ur 2009: 155).

Features:
- [B]lurring of dialectal differences as a result of contact between Sephardim of different geographical origins, strong interference from English and American Spanish at all linguistic levels, and several structural symptoms of language decay (individual variation, large lexical gaps, hesitation and insecurity
when speaking).
- [B]orrowing of words from Latin American Spanish.
- The use of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ in standard Spanish (/ixo/ hijo ‘son’ or /muxer/ mujer
‘wife’) is found instead of the traditional Sephardic pronunciation (/iʒo/, /muʒer/), where /ʒ/ is pronounced as the initial sound of the French je ‘I’.

Examples: