Talk:Judaeo-Spanish

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Various

Ladino is not the name of the spoken Judeo-Spanish language. The names for the spoken language are : Judezmo, Judio, Jidio, Judeospañol.

Ladino is the name of the artificial language produced by literal translations from Hebrew into Judeo-Spanish.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.58.10.235 (talk) 17:37, 29 March 2003 (UTC)

You should include those data. But the defition of Ladino is debatable. Some scholars use it as you do. The founders of LadinoKomunita don't. You could state both views (I'm tired) -- Error 06:34, 1 April 2003 (UTC)

In case anyone is wondering, LadinoKomunita is a Yahoo! chatgroup, accessible here Tomer ^TALK 09:38, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

The correct view is somewhere down the middle. 'Ladino' is now commonly used to refer to the spoken language itself amongst Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Egypt, and other areas. Pavlvsrex 08:56, 21 March 2004 (UTC)

Like Old Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish keeps the /S/ and /Z/ palatal phonemes, both changed to /x/ in modern Spanish. But unlike Old Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish has an /x/ phoneme taken over from Hebrew

I would guess that it was /G/ and /J/ that changed into /x/ in modern spanish!— Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.68.1.29 (talk) 16:43, 7 March 2004 (UTC)

g before e i and y is the same as /j/, the voiced palatal apicodental phoneme...which merged with the medieval spanish "sh" sound, which was written as "x". The modern spanish /x/ is a phoneme found in most spanish dialects, although it doesn't actually always have anything to do with the medieval palatal apicodental fricatives. In puertorrican spanish, for example, the word for "wristwatch", pronounced /rre 'lox/ in most dialects, is often pronounced /xe 'loh/. If the article is going to talk about "modern spanish /x/" in that context, it should clarify that it is referring to the real academia's standard pronunciation. Tomer ^TALK 03:51, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

What exactly are "the /S/ and /Z/ palatal phonemes"? These are not IPA symbols, so what are they supposed to refer to? Cbdorsett 10:35, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

the palatal /s/ is English "sh". palatal /z/ is the voiced equivalent, as in pleasure, treasure, azure. it's incorrect to refer to them as palatal /s/ and /z/ of course, since /s/ is s and /z/ is z, regardless of what you say about them outside the slashes. My guess is that whoever wrote that originally either didn't know the IPA symbols or didn't know the unicode to represent them. Tomer ^TALK 03:51, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Could it be ASCII IPA? --Error 00:51, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have also found out that in the Dolomites region (the Frontier between Italy and Austria), there is a dialect that the locals call "Ladino". I heard it when I went to Selva-Wolkenstein on Feb-2004 -- but I have to say that it have NOTHING to do with the Ladino being described here :). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinnecco (talk • contribs) 16:43, 5 April 2004 (UTC)

That's Ladin. -- Error 01:10, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes... That is "Ladin" in English. But Ladino in Italian and Ladina in Ladin. Like Português is Portuguese in Portuguese. I heard many (even English speakers) in the region reffering to Ladin as "Ladino" (this is why I ue the quotes above). Go to google.com and search for Dolomites + Ladino and you will find some pages, like this one: http://www.altabadia.org/winter/content.asp?L=3&M=5731. Maybe is worth mentioning on the Ladin page:

Ladin: (Ladino in Italian, Ladina in Ladin, etc.)". Not to be confused with Ladino as the Judeao-Spanish dialect [...] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pinnecco (talk • contribs) 12:07, 6 April 2004 (UTC)

---

Somebody has set Judeo-spanyol as the native name. That is not the native name. Judeoespañol is a recent erudite Spanish name for the language. The native names, as the article says, were spanyol, hakitia or others. --Error 00:13, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't have a source for this and can't be sure, but given that the Ladino word for Diós (God) is "Dio" (and the derived Adiós is 'Adio' in Ladino), might this mirror the (Hebrew?) practice of not spelling God's name for fear of erasing or defacing his name? (In English we sometimes see the construction 'G-d'.) Perhaps this should be mentioned in the article if it can be sourced. If true, would it not be an instance of the correct spelling of a word being an intentional mispelling of the word in the parent language? Certainly, that is uncommon. And does this raise the possibility that the correct spelling could itself become insulting to God and then have to be abridged to "Di", and then "D" and then finally ""? :-) Dandante (talk) 18:52, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the origin is more straight forward; Christian Castilians or 'Romans' use Dios which might sound like a plural, whereas Jews, and presumably Moors, used el Dio to highlight that they definitely imply a singular.
I think this deserves to be included in the article along with the words for Saturday; not el sabado but sabbat, and Sunday; certainly not el domingo but rather el echad - which both mirrors Arabic and sounds like One/Unity/Unique from the Hebrew. (NB not sure about what spelling to use but thats always arguable). M@T arragano (talk) 12:32, 11 May 2009 (UTC) MoSheR/Moises/Morris/Moses ben Khaim/Haim/Vita/Harry bar Yudah de Tarragona/Tarragano ;-)

FWIW, I heard the name Ladino from both my Askenazi parents and from my Hebrew school teachers in the 1970s in New Jersey. There was no mention of other names for the language. Nor have I encountered the contruction "Judaeo-Spanish" outside of academic environments and Wikipedia. Dvd Avins (talk) 23:33, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi. I found this wikipedia article very interesting and well done. I have some question about the references. I read the ladino is actually 'spoken' in different countries, among them Greece (about 1300) and Italy (1.000-500). Where, precisely? In Greece are they in Thessaloniki still? And in Italy? Can you, please, suggest me the sources of those data? I am very very interested to understand the consistence of the communities you refer. Actually in Italy they are not recognized as a minority language.( Are sure you sources do not split the information on Ladin communities, even deeply endangered) ?and where they are actually settled. Sorry form my english... and maybe also for my talking here... it is my first time in wikipedia. m.francescaMafrasta (talk) 20:47, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Scripts

"The usage of Greek and Cyrillic alphabets was also found in the past, but is rare nowadays." I've never heard of this happening, though it makes sense a priori; does anyone have a quote? - Mustafaa 07:38, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

There is a link in Español en cirílico that leads to a missing Geocities page. And the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy.

However I found another indirect mention:

Remarks-in-Progress On Rav Danon and the Stolac Tomb By Stephen Schwartz Haverford College November 10, 2002: There was no tradition of latinized Sephardic printing in Salonika, where fonts were Hebrew, Greek, or (at the end) Turkish; in Turkey, the tradition of printing Judeo-Spanish in Latin letters emerged with the latinization of Turkish under Mustafa Kemal.

-- Error 01:20, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Mustafaa 05:37, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

The page entitled Aljamiado refers to the Ladino language as one written in an Arabic script. I'm not an expert, but I think this should be researched, and if it is found to be true it should probably be mentioned. ~~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Militantsalmon (talk • contribs) 09:39, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Illustration and Map Desirable?

I wish there were some illustrations of Ladino texts, not that it is essential, but perhaps of a nice manuscript? Also some more detailed mapping of the area where Ladino was used in the Ottoman Empire. One is particularly curious about the situation in Romania, and the Balkans outside of Salonika in general.--FurnaldHall (talk) 18:48, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Koine

While proper "koine" is "Koine Greek", it is used also for a language resulting from the merging of related dialects. Maybe that usage is not usual in English. Lingua franca has connotations of pidgin, incomplete language. Is there an English word for "language resultant of dialect mixing"? -- Error 01:13, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Koine is the correct English term for such a language. However, it's rarely used that way except among linguists, so I guess I can see why one might want to avoid it. - Mustafaa 01:16, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Disambiguation?

I am not satisfied that having the language article at "Ladino" and other meanins at "Ladinos" is the best arrangement. What would people think of moving this article to, say, "Ladino language"? Other suggestions? Pondering, -- Infrogmation 05:30, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I liked it more when it was Judaeo-Spanish --Error 00:22, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that Ladino is the more common term; it gets over twice the Google hits of Judeo-Spanish. Wikipedia article naming conventions state that common names should be used. Jayjg ^(talk) 03:58, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

OK - so 'Ladino' has two meanings (Judeo-Spanish and Ladin). Isn't that what disambiguation pages are for? It seems quite logical to put one at "Ladin language" and the other at "Judeo-Spanish language". After all, all the other langauges are found at "X language" Cbdorsett 06:48, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• • No, Ladino doesn't have two meanings in English, (1) Ladino is Djudeo-espanyol, (2) Ladin is the romance language spoken in Northern Italy. The italians call Ladin by Ladino in Italian . 66.65.199.49 22:02, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

There are also the different groups of people known as Ladinos.--Error 01:32, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Well, not all of them. Latin is regularly moved and there are endless debates. The outcome is always that the word "language" should only be in the title if it requires disambiguation from a more common sense of the word without being accompanied by "language". Many language articles have added "language" regardless just to fit in, so the system is not so smooth. — Hippietrail 08:42, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I am in favor of moving it to Ladino language. While Ladino is certainly the name for the language, that it has other meanings requiring articles of their own is sufficient reason for me to make Ladino a disambig page. Making the Ladinos page the disambig is a non-solution to this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TShilo12 (talk • contribs) 00:27, 26 March 2005 (UTC)

This seems to make sense; disambig at Ladino, and Ladino language moved to Ladino language. Many (most?) language articles are named that way. Jayjg ^(talk) 01:12, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Jayjg, I tried to move it, but bcz Ladino_language is already a redirect to Ladino, it won't let anyone but admins make the move. I'm changing the wikilinks that point to Ladino but should point to Ladino_language so that they point to the new page, and hopefully you can take care of moving Ladino to Ladino_language before someone overzealously undoes my changes as double-redirects. Tomer ^TALK 04:50, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Mentioned in Media

Maybe it's not very encyclopaedic, but the distinction between Ladino and Spanish formed a major plot point in an episode of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" entitled "A Murderer Among Us". Bovlb 22:27, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)

Hey fellow wikiphile Bovlb and Law and Order viewer! SPOILER WARNING!I'm watching that episode of Law and Order right now: "A Murderer Among Us"! It's one of my favorite episodes. To the rest of the wiki community it's about an anti-semetic husband who was killing Jews and the clever, albeit unfortunate plan, of his wife to stage her suicide as a murder in order to hopefully get the police to see the connection to a much larger string of unsolved murders involving Jewish men. Turns out the wife's parents from Argentina were actually Jewish and spoke Ladino. That's the basic synopsis but the episode is a much deeper episode, so check it out. --La-Tonia Denise Willis —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.165.24.15 (talk) 02:29, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Ashkenazi speakers of Ladino

I'm curious about the assertion that there are or were Ashkenazim, specifically in Saloniki and Kushta, who spoke Ladino/Djudezmo. I always thought Saloniki was mixed Romaniot and Sfaradi, and Kushta was mixed Mizrachi and Sfaradi...I wasn't aware of an Ashkenazi community in either city. Have I been missing something? If not, that passage should be removed from the article. Tomer ^TALK 00:58, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

Quite right. By definition, only Sephardis - ie Jews of pre-Reconquista Spanish origins - speak Ladino, and Salonika and Istanbul are both well-known for their Sephardi communities. - Mustafaa 01:18, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This is not strictly correct, as Olve well pointed out. In Salonica and some other places, the local Romaniot and then Ashkenazim were assimilated into the Sephardim, ending up speaking Ladino too. I recommend the book Sephardi Jewry. A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries by Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa (2000) ISBN: 9780520218222. It is quite informative. Regards, --Asterion^talk 00:34, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

The person who added it was Olve; you could ask him. - Mustafaa 01:20, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Yes, it is true that both Salonica (Thessaloniki) and Stambol (Istanbul) were primarily Sephardi (and, to a smaller extent, Romaniote). BUT: They both (not surprisingly) had a relatively minor Ashkenazi population as well. By the sheer outnumberedness, these Ashkenazim (also not surprisingly) learned to speak Judío-spanyol (Djudezmo, etc.) — which was the Lingua Franca of these Jewish communities. These Ashkenazi mini-communities were mirrored by the small Sephardi (and often eventually Yiddish-speaking) populations in northern parts of the Balkans, and even Central European places like Prague and Króke (Kraków) — which were gradually absorbed into the general Ashkenazi environment. It is a complex world...! :) -- Olve 06:47, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Cool! Balkan linguistic maps always end up looking like crazy quilts... - Mustafaa 21:24, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't know how representative it was, but by the time Nazi Germany invaded Greece, the main rabbi at Salonika was an Ashkenazi. Apparently, he was called and elected because of his scholar merits or something. Sadly, when the Germans established their discriminatory measures, he would collaborate (more than the Varsaw Judenrat), thinking that negotiation instead of confrontation would save his community. He died in a KZ (I think), like most of his fellows. --Error 00:51, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think that Ladino was also the Jewish lingua franca in pre-modern Israel, and that the small Ashkenazi communities there had to learn it to communicate with the majority Sephardi community. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 10:05, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Very interesting! It is true that the Sefardi community in Spain itself dates from the destruction of the First Temple, or before. Many of them refused to make Aliyah with Zerubbabel because they said, "Oy vay! Don't you know that the Temple is just going to be destroyed again?" And so for Ladino speakers to return to Eretz Yisrael in indifference to political boundaries is a very Sefardi thing to do! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alfarero (talk • contribs) 17:17, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

How much difference from Spanish is there?

I was browsing through the Ladino Wikipedia, and being fairly proficient in Spanish, I was able to understand most of it, with most of the difficulties only arrising from the somewhat different spelling system (more German-like, for example "K" where Spanish would use "C" or "QU"). But if the language were to be written with modern Spanish orthography, how much difference would be left? About what percentage of the words would be different? It deffinately seems to be a whole lot closer to standard Castilian Spanish than Catalan, Asturian, Galician, or any of the other languages of Spain are. – 172.163.54.133 07:39, 22 January 2006

With 800+ years as a literary language (using the Ladino version of the Hebrew alphabet), and with phonological differences from Castilian Spanish, including retention of phonological /ʃ/,/ʒ/,/dʒ/ and /z/; not where they would be expected in correlation to modern spanish /tʃ/, but rather where modern spanish has /x/ (Ladino has /x/ in other positions, as a distinct phoneme as well). Ladino also preserves /f-/ where Castilian has largely adopted /0-/. There is also a lexical difference between Ladino and Spanish ranging from, I would guess (ooooh!) about 15-30%, depending on the dialect. There's the crux of the matter tho...dialects comprise the majority of Ladino writings, in such dialects as Haketiya, etc. Ladino, as the article at one time made clear, is the literary form of the language, analogous to how Dzhidi is the literary form of the various Judæo-Persian languages, most of which, like the surrounding Persian dialects, are of limited mutual intelligibility. Tomer^talk 15:33, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Note: what I am about to write may not be 100% accurate, but it might serve as a good general overview for the linguistically challenged: If I can elaborate on what TShilo12 has said, but maybe in more layman's terms, if you are not familiar with the IPA check that out. There is a difference between how a language is spelled and how it is pronounced; yes if you read the examples on this page with a Castillian accent you will come up with something mostly intelligible in Spanish. But the Spanish pronunciation has changed since Ladino split off from it, for example Spanish used to have a sounds which were spelled X or SS and similar to English "sh". These today are spelled with a J and pronounced as the current Spanish J. So for example dijo was once dixo ("disho") and rojo was once rosso ("rosho"). (Side note: these also closer match the Latin spellings, dixit and russum, respectively.) You can also see that in the word México and certain Latin American place names, they keep the X, but pronounce it as a Jota. This is a relic of the fact that México used to be pronounced "Méshico". The pronunciation has changed, but today it isn't spelled with a jota like all the other instances of that change. Additionally Spanish used to have the Z sound that we have in English, kind of how in Italian the word casa is spelled with an S but pronounced as a Z; in Spanish, it used to be the same way. And, the point about the initial F made above: Spanish has many words that start with the silient "H" that historically have begun with "F": compare hongo to its root fungus, hacer to its root facere, or Spanish hablar to Portuguese falar. The point is that Spanish underwent all of the above changes and more, but Ladino didn't. Of course, Ladino underwent changes of its own. I honeslty don't know what those are. And maybe you'll notice from the example passages in the article that some of the vocabulary used is completely foreign, and that "usual" "Castillian" words are used in "unusual" ways. – Andyluciano 18:43, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I find strange the Galicisms like desenvolupar. And I read that Judaeo-Spanish has saquitos para tetas for sujetador/sostén. --Error 05:06, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

This is another relic. In 1492 brassieres were literally just that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alfarero (talk • contribs) 17:20, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Maybe I can help answer your question... I'm more or less a native speaker of Spanish (having learned the language as a wee one), and I've also studied Ladino. Standard Ladino - as taught in Marie-Christine Varol's "Manuel de Judeo-Espagnol" or other textbooks - is almost completely mutually intelligible with Standard Spanish, both as a written language and as a spoken language. To someone accustomed to hearing Spanish, Ladino sounds like Castilian Spanish spoken with a distinctly Portuguese or Galician 'flavor'. Personally, I would consider Ladino to be just another dialect of Spanish (since I can understand most conversations in Ladino without skipping a beat), but that really depends on where you draw the line between 'language' (for example, unlike other dialects of Spanish, Ladino has had its own literary tradition for centuries) and 'dialect'... There is a significant Hebrew component in the language, which can impede conversations of a religious nature, as well as some colloquial words borrowed from Turkish and the Balkan languages, which will make you scratch your head from time to time. But these lexical, morphological, and phonological differences are only slightly greater than, say, the differences between Castilian Spanish (with its distinctive "th" sound) and Argentinian Spanish (with its distinctive "dj" sound), or for that matter, upper-class Colombian Spanish (which retains word-final 's') and working-class Cuban Spanish (which drops word-final 's' all the time and uses a uvular 'r'). [If it further clarifies, I've also heard some radio broadcasts in Galician... I can say that while I find Spanish and Ladino mutually intelligible, I had trouble understanding the Galician spoken at its normal rate.] 69.154.183.193 01:41, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Songs

The first of the two songs in the article seems to be written in Spanish, not Ladino (notice the presence of ñ, ll, and x). -Kripkenstein 01:31, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Even if one understands the term Ladino to mean Judíospanyol/Djudesmo, the legitimate variation in spelling in the Latin alphabet varies greatly. “Kerido” and “spañol” are not any less Judíospanyol than “querido” and “spanyol” — they are just written in the currently more used Turkish-based transliteration system. -- Olve 15:43, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone know where i can find the song on the article's page in mp3: por una ninya? I've looked everywhere, but without succes. 82.169.98.228 (talk) 10:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Indo European?

Ladino is listed as Indo European.. Sephardi Jews aren't European...they are not the olive skin toned Europeans that can pass for Italians...that's Persians,Aryans & Celts. Sephardi Jews are Semites..racially mixed with African and Indian(India)they are Arabs pre Islam. So are Gitanos — Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.153.29.107 (talk) 07:41, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Hello Anonymous User, Language groups are defined by linguistics, not by “race”. (Let alone misunderstood interpretations thereof...!) Judíospanyol/Djudesmo (recently misnomed as “Ladino”, although Ladino is actually a method of translating Hebrew) is clearly (mainly) Indo-European in that its morphology, its syntax and the bulk of its vocabulary. Just like the Indo-European language Romani, BTW. -- Olve 15:38, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

The initial unsigned remarks above, um, sound like the poster is rather serious bothered about the issue that they represent as "Sephardi Jews aren't European...they are not the olive skin toned Europeans that can pass for Italians...that's Persians,Aryans & Celts." Anyhow, I am supposed to assume "good faith", so to the point. If by Gitanos you mean Roma ("Gypsies" see below), they are not Semites at all; not "Arabs pre[-]Islam." Rather, they are thought to have originated as migratory groups in the far northwest of the Indian subcontinent. I've read that the name "Gypsies" is thought to have its origin in their popularly supposed origin as "Egyptians," which may or may not be the information they themselves believed at the time when they entered Europe about a millennium ago. The discovery of their subcontinental origins by linguistic analysis not too long ago was perhaps a surprise to them, but seems quite sound. Turning to Olve's comments; with regard to Semites, they are not really a "race" either, though I am not sure you meant to imply this, but can really only be rationally defined as speakers of languages belonging to a particular language family (Semitic Languages, of which there are a number of sub-branches), which in turn, is part of the larger Afro-Asiatic Group. The term, which originally meant descendants of the Biblical Shem, son of Noah,has got caught up in racialist politics over the last century, as a euphemism for Jews, a perjorative for people from Semitic Language speaking areas, and perhaps as a pseudo-scientific or careless "racial" definition, so the "meaning" at this point has plenty of overtones as well. This is basically a reiteration of your own point that a language group does not give information about the race of the speakers(and "race," the latter concept, is notoriously hard to define.) As for Ladino, I think it was used as a means of everyday communication in Sephardi communities, like Yiddish among Ashkenazis, not solely to better translate Hebrew texts. --FurnaldHall (talk) 22:50, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Bias regarding orthography?

The section on orthography has the following:

"[...] the greatest proportion of speakers remaining were Turkish Jews. As a result the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet is widely used for publications in Ladino. The Israeli Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino promotes another spelling. There are also those who, with Iacob M Hassán, claim that Ladino should adopt the orthography of the standard Spanish language.

Perhaps more conservative and less popular, others along with Pablo Carvajal Valdés suggest that Ladino should adopt the orthography used during the time of the Jewish expulsion of 1492 from Spain."

There seems to be some bias against Mr. Hassán's orthography, and in favor of Mr. Valdés' spelling, considering that the former is dismissed in one sentence, while the latter gets two solid paragraphs. Especially if Mr. Valdés' proposal is indeed the least popular! FilipeS 19:54, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

As an outsider I find the orthography section very much biased or at least imbalanced. What I see is that most people who still use the language favor the Aki Yerushalayim version or some similar, plain phonetic script. This is the one used on the Ladino language site. Sometimes I see Ladino written in the style of modern Castilian with some extra characters/digraphs. But the 1492 orthography? Where is it used in reality? Does it desire a whole section?

It is also very annoying that grammar is presented with dual orthography. IMHO one style be chosen and used consistently, either the Aki Yerushalayim or the modified modern Spanish orthography.

Also it would be good to mention the southern slavic based latin transcriptions, that one can see used eg. in lyrics.

Comandanteej (talk) 14:42, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Agreed: Wikipedia articles should use a consistent script to represent foreign words (foreign relative to the language of the page). But here we are speaking of a language with multiple "native" scripts, and furthermore we are using two or three phonetic systems to represent the words. For example, I see the sound /ʃ/ spelled sh, x, and ş on the same page. This is confusing to the uninitiated reader. Correct style would be to use IPA in forward slash brackets, i.e. /ʃ/, and use one and only one native spelling otherwise. I believe the Aki Yerushalayim spelling is considered normative by many people. Their objective, anyway has been to create a normative spelling for use in Israel, to unify and move the language forward in modern times. It uses Roman letters, which are closer to the language of this page than Cyrillic or Greek. I doubt if anybody would mind if the page used that spelling, i.e. "sh." The next-best alternative would be Hebrew letters, which are used in Siddurs, for example, but are more opaque to the average reader. Alfarero (talk) 17:08, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Free text

To streamline the Portuguese language article, I am deleting the following text from it, and replacing it with a link to Ladino language:

Ladino is a seriously endangered Romance language which was spoken by Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula until they were expelled in the late 15th century, and afterwards in various diasporic communities around the Mediterranean and in the Americas. Its endangered status is due mostly to the Nazi holocaust, and to the adoption of the revived Hebrew language by many Jews during the 20th century. The phonology of the consonants of Ladino and part of its lexicon are closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, because both retained characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance which Spanish later lost. Compare for example Ladino aninda ("still") with Portuguese ainda and Spanish aún, or the initial consonants in Ladino fija, favla ("daughter", "speech"), Portuguese filha, fala, Spanish hija, habla. However, the grammar of Ladino is closer to Spanish grammar. See also Judeo-Portuguese.

Feel free to reuse it here, if you find it useful. I was based on this article, anyway. FilipeS 17:19, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Astur-leonese: fiya, fala, aúnda. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.52.151.178 (talk • contribs)

The number of Ladino speakers in Turkey

I am a 27 year old Turkish Jew from İstanbul. I, like the vast majority of Turkish Jews especially under 60, do not speak nor understand Ladino. From which source was the information taken that 8,000 people in Turkey (which would compromise a large minority of the Turkish Jewish community) speak Ladino? How accurate is this statistics, and how can you verify this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.255.230.227 (talk) 17:26, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Ladino is in serious danger of extinction

Note that the Ladino speakers are almost exclusively elderly and few in numbers, and it is in danger of extinction as it is not passed down to younger generations anymore — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.255.230.227 (talk) 15:11, 7 June 2006

Example

I added an example of ladino comparing it with spanish.81.9.221.219 15:44, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Revival?

The article Language revival lists Ladino as a language that is subject to efforts to revive it. Is this true? Are the efforts significant? I thought Ladino was pretty much in general decline. Jd2718 22:36, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Ladino is unfortunately in serious decline, dependending on the country.

Ladino is unfortunately in serious decline, likely irreversibly depending on the country. For example in Turkey it not understood by the younger generation of Turkish Jews especially, those who are under the age of 65, at all. And the elderly generation who largely know Ladino prefer to speak Turkish among each other and passed Turkish as mother tongue to the younger generations who as a result only speak Turkish. Though there is a page in Ladino in the weekly Turkish Jewsih newspaper Şalom which is likely itended for elderly readers, the rest is in Turkish. And those few who are interested in learning Ladino "learn" it in modern Spanish language courses (!) which is practically putting the nail in the coffin for Ladino. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.215.27.98 (talk) 17:00, 3 March 2007 (UTC).

Category

Of course Ladino is a Romance language, but there is no need to put this article in the Romance language category, because Category:Ladino language is already under it. --Amir E. Aharoni 17:37, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew name

According to this article, «In Hebrew, the language is called Spanyolit.» However, in Hebrew wp, the article is called he:לאדינו, it is, Ladino, and in the main language table they also use גודיאו-אספאניול (Djudeo-espanyol). So, what is the source for the "Spanyolit" sentence? --80.39.157.205 10:03, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Assimilation

Where, exactly, is Ladino running the risk of being assimilated by Spanish, if most of its speakers live in the Eastern Mediterranean region?! FilipeS (talk) 15:05, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

In Panama, where there is quite an important Turkish-Jewish expatriate community; maybe in other Latin American countries. Also, the related dialect of Haketia in Northern Morocco ran that risk during the Spanish colonial period.--Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 10:15, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

But we're talking about ridiculously small percentages of Ladino speakers, there, no?... FilipeS (talk) 15:07, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Ladino is not the name of this language, it is Judeo-Spanish

Ladino is really a calque-language of Hebrew, used to put Hebrew liturgical texts into Spanish words. It was never a real language for everyday communication. Most of the scholars agrees that Ladino was the name of the mot-a-mot translation of Hebrew liturgical texts (bible etc.) into XV. century Spanish. Between the native it was called Espanyol, Judeo-Espanyol, Judezmo or Sefaradi. The scholars also call it Judeo-Spanish. The natives speaking the language (age 60 and above) has always called it Judeo-Espanyol, Espanyol or Sefaradi. It is popularly called Ladino only between the young generation who does not speak or even understand it. So it would be much proper if the title of the page could be changed from Ladino to Judeo-Spanish and Ladino or Sepharadi would direct there. Thanks, --Universal Life (talk) 14:13, 21 July 2008 (UTC) A native speaker from Turkey,

Very true, and the point is made in the paragraph on "Name": the native name of the spoken language was "Spanyol" (in general), "Judesmo" (for the informal version) or "Castellano" (for the formal version). "Ladino" means the language of study, i.e. translationese, and "Judaeo-Spanish" is the invention of modern scholars (like "Judaeo-German" for Yiddish). The use of "Ladino" as a general term is an expansion, a bit like the use of "Targum" to mean Aramaic.

However, the title of an article is meant to be a link from how people usually think of something, and the term "Ladino" is almost always used today by non-specialists. And "Judaeo-Spanish" is sometimes used as the name of the community, i.e. Greek/Turkish/Bosnian Sephardim with a background in the language, whatever you call it. So I'm afraid we'll have to leave it. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 15:08, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm... Most native speakers without medical knowledge call the area around the navel the stomach. Nevertheless, an encyclopaedia should call this the abdomen and reserve the term stomach for the more precise use. In other words, there should be an article about “Iberian Translationese”, and it should have the name Ladino. There should also be an article about the spoken language often called “Judaeo-Spanish”. That this name is also used about the population speaking it is no more difficult to handle than the parallel cases of “Dutch”, “Swedish”, “Greek”, etc. So let’s be consistent here and give room to the real Ladino idiom, which applies to Castilian, Judaeo-Spanish and other varieties of Iberian languages. -- Olve Utne (talk) 21:16, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Regarding "stomach" and "abdomen": Why not "belly," which avoids the stiltedness of academia and is still technically correct? It was even the most common word for the region until a few decades ago. I really think subject-area experts too easily fall into the habit of using uncommon language where common will do. Dvd Avins (talk) 23:50, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Difficult one. Are we quite sure that there was never a practice of using "Ladino" for the whole range, in the same way that Kurdish Jews sometimes speak of "Targum" and Judaeo-Arabic is sometimes called "sharhh"? I'd be interested to see evidence one way or the other. My impression (possibly wrong) is that as long as it was the primary living language of the community, they thought of themselves as simply speaking Spanish (just as Americans think of themselves as speaking English, not "American English"), and that, as in older Iberian Spanish, "Ladino" was one of many terms for the language. That is, all these nuances only emerged when the language was on its way out and it was important to classify it and decide on its future development. (It's rather like the English legal use of French, where there is an argument whether it should be called "Anglo-Norman", "Norman French", "Anglo-French" or "Law French". For as long as it was really used in the courts, it was simply "French", whatever one might say about the degenerate patois spoken across the Channel.) Unfortunately, in language movements as in nationalist movements, changes of terminology designed to clarify have a way of changing the reality being described; think of the arguments about "Sephardi" versus "Mizrahi".

These mistakes do occur, and often find their way into standard usage until it is too late to reverse them. It's a bit like the word "Dari", that properly means simply "Persian" as opposed to, say, Arabic, Avestic or Pashto, but has come to mean specifically "Zoroastrian Persian" and "Afghan Persian". Another example is the Argentine use of "castellano" specifically for Argentine Spanish, though originally this only meant normal Spanish as opposed to Italian and Galician. So far as the current use of the language is concerned, especially in Israel, it's a bit hard to say that "Ladino" is wrong when it is regulated by the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino.

I suppose that one solution would be to rename the article "Judaeo-Spanish" (with a link from "Ladino"), keep the existing explanation of the terminological difficulties and have a section on "Ladino" (translationese); but I doubt whether we have enough material for a whole article on translation-Ladino. I'm still not sure about how to balance the requirements of historical accuracy with those of accessibility and current usage, and would be interested in views from others. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 09:50, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you check out page (or opening, really) 3 of this book ny Menasseh Ben Israel, you’ll see that he writes Ladino about the translation, which in this case is not at all the Ottoman variety, but rather translationese in (archaic) Castilian Spanish. Whereas this does not prove that he would not also call the Ottoman Sephardic vernicular Ladino, it clearly shows that this 1633/4 work uses the term Ladino specifically for “translationese”. As for whether there is enough material available for writing an article about this language code, I would say that this is definitely the case. Also, a couple wikipedias already have such articles, albeit short ones — see nn:Ladino and no:Ladino. -- Olve Utne (talk) 23:43, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Ladino is really not the name of the language. It's only lately popularised to mean so. My grandparents are native speakers and they have always called it Espanyol (Spanish), sometimes they also call it Judio (Jewish). The latter have been arised due to the Ottoman, calling it always Yahudice (Jewish Language). When I call it Judeo-Espanyol, they never object because that is the combination of the two names with which they always call it.

Dr. Gad Nassi also says that, Ladino was a liturgical language. Musevice Tarih Oluyor (Turkish)

By the way, as in the article: Ladino says, it is regulated by Alliance Israelite Universelle and not by Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino. And the former says Djudeo-Espanyol and not Ladino.

Please check these sources: El Ladino, judeo-español calco, book by Manuel Alvar, please see page 35

Judeo-Spanish
I will quote from this source:
... But along with these archaic usages, which are very understandable given the historical path of the language, there are also some genuine lexical creations based on Ladino (Judeo- Spanish calque), produced by the word-for-word translation from Hebrew into Spanish, which go back to the 13th or even the 12th centuries. All of these terms that are more archaic than the vernacular language are, via the intermediary of Ladino, a faithful reflection of the sacred languages (Hebrew and Aramaic), which makes them semi-sacred. By way of example, akunyadar/ear, which means "to fulfil the Levitical law," (i.e. the obligation found in the law of Moses for the brother of a dead man to marry the dead man's childless widow)....

Ladino is not spoken, rather, it is the product of a word-for- word translation of Hebrew or Aramaic biblical or liturgical texts made by rabbis in the Jewish schools of Spain. In these, translations, a specific Hebrew or Aramaic word always corresponded to the same Spanish word, as long as no exegetical considerations prevented this. In short, Ladino is only Hebrew clothed in Spanish, or Spanish with Hebrew syntax. The famous Ladino translation of the Bible, the Biblia de Ferrara (1553), provided inspiration for the translation of numerous Spanish Christian Bibles.

Apart from the phonetic, morphological and syntactic differences mentioned above (which are very rare, especially in the romances and proverbs), the spoken language, Judezmo (the Judeo-Spanish vernacular) does not differ much from peninsular Spanish. However, as mentioned above, Ladino faithfully reflects the sacred languages (Hebrew and Aramaic), making it semi-sacred.

In Spain, two alphabets were used, the Latin and the Hebrew. The Ladino of the Ferrara Bible was written in Gothic-style Latin characters for the Marranos of Spain, who returned to Judaism but knew no Hebrew...

There are essentially two types: liturgical and secular.

The old liturgical literature (Bibles, prayer books etc.) was written in Ladino, both in the East and the West (Morocco, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, etc.). It was not until 1730 that texts were written in Judezmo, notably the famous "Me'Am Lo'ez," a popular 18-volume encyclopedia published between 1730 and 1908. Secular literature was passed on mainly in oral form: proverbs, romances, "kantigas," tales and fables - all forms which began by perpetuating the Hispanic heritage and then took inspiration from daily life in the Ottoman Empire and northern Morocco...

According to Michael Molho, starting in Istanbul in 1832, the two modes of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino and the vernacular language) have given rise to a significant body of literature: 5,000 to 6,000 works, not including the 300 press titles which then flourished...

---

By the way, the only Sepharad community using the word "Ladino" for the vernacular language was the Thessalonikian community, before the second world war. Now most of them live in Israel. But it should be considered that, in the same way the sepharadim living in Morocco, called the language only by the name Haketia. If this name would be popularised in the popular press, would it be proper to call it Haketia?

This is the same case with Ladino.

It is called "(e)spanyol" or "(e)shpanyol" in Turkey; "(e)spanyol(it)", "(e)shpanyol(it)" or "spanyolo" in Israel; "djudezmo" (read. judezmo) in some parts of Greece, Bulgaria, Sarayevo and Romania; "ladino" (starting from 1800's) in Thessaloniki; "haketia" or "espanyol" in Morocco. Popularly, in all the regions, it is called "djudyo" (judio) or "djidyo" (jidyo) (Translation from the Ottoman term "Yahudice") and "sefaradi". Official associations and academicians call it, "Djudeo-Espanyol" or "Judeo-Español".

With respect,

--Universal Life (talk) 23:05, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Well put! Here is the chapter “Ladino” from the introductory section of my book Siddúr Limmúd:

{ {quote| In the course of the 20th Century, the term Ladino has been increasingly used for the Iberian vernacular language of Ottoman and North African Sefaradím — a language more appropriately known under its various traditional names like Spanyol, Djudío, Djudezmo, Djudíospanyol or Haquitía. This recent use of the term Ladino is not, however, the traditional meaning of the word.

Traditionally, the term Ladino is reserved for a very precise use: the literal, word-by-word translation of liturgical Hebrew into Spanish words. As such, there are Ladino texts in Castilian, in Djudíospanyol, etc.

The Ladino translations used in this book are traditional Castilian Ladino ones found in 17th Century Dutch Sefaradí prayerbooks. They follow the Hebrew text very closely, rendering, e.g., the Hebrew “vəŋal habbàyit haggadól vəhakkadóš šennikrá Šimkhá ŋaláv” as “y sobre la casa la grande y la santa, que fue llamado tu nombre sobre ella” — with a word order which very much goes against native Spanish syntax, but which matches the Hebrew syntax very closely.[footnote omitted]

As such, the Ladino text is a good way for those who know Spanish to learn some basics about Hebrew syntax (typical word order). Additionally, it is quite easy to quickly compare the Ladino and the Hebrew text, seeing in the Ladino the meaning of the specific Hebrew word/s one does not yet understand. For English-speakers who know no Spanish, the Ladino may still be of help, since many Spanish words are actually cognates (historically related words) of English ones.

Additionally, the Ladino text has been used during the writing of this siddúr as a secondary source for verifying the pronunciation, wording and order of the Jewish ritual of the early modern Western Sefaradím. Thus, for instance, transcribed forms like Rebi (רִבִּי), Elhazar (אֶלְעָזָר) and Ros-asana (רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה) tell us a lot about the traditional pronunciation of 17th Century Dutch Sefaradím; the absence of a Ladino version of the phrase tanú rabbanán shows that this introductory formula was either not used or, at least, not universally used; in the Friday night service, the absence of most elements of the Kabbalàt Šabbát service (including “Ləkhá Dodí”) shows that these were not yet considered to be part of the Friday night service amongst 17th Century Dutch Sefaradím.

The Ladino texts are given in their original orthography, with the following exceptions:

• Nasalised vowels (ã, õ, etc.) are resolved into vowel + nasal: nõbre > nombre.
• Long ſ is replaced with regular s: Iſrael > Israel.
• Double initial capitalisation has been changed to simple capitalisation: VEe > Vee.

(Source: Utne, Olve, Siddúr Limmúd : a traditional-egalitarian learning siddur based on Sefaradí, Italiani & Ashkenazi sources, and with full transliteration, translations, instructions and explanations. I: Friday night. West Hempstead, NY : Hassafon Publishing, 2006.)

}}

Seems pretty clear we are talking about the same thing here. :-) It is time that we create the article Ladino about the topic Ladino, and that the current Ladino language article be moved to a less ambiguous/misleading title. -- Olve Utne (talk) 21:55, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Olve Utne,

I also would like to say that both Turkish and French Wikipedia's changed its name from Ladino to Judaeo-Spanish (Yahudi İspanyolcası and Judéo-Espangol respectively). Turkish Wikipedia did it although the name Ladino is much more common there, than Judaeo-Spanish. And the French Wikipedia created another article called Ladino for the liturgical language.

Actually checking the history of the article, one can see that few other wikipedias also did such a change.

My parents' mother tongue is Judaeo-Spanish. And neither them neither the community around me does not use neither approve the name Ladino.

As Dr. Gad Nassi says; it is an insult to call our language by the name Ladino, a liturgical calque language.

The most common two terms for Judaeo-Spanish is (E)spanyol and Judio. Combining them was academicians' job. And Judeo-Espanyol (Judaeo-Spanish) is now the most universally accepted name of the language. And the natives accept and never object it. But Ladino is objected by most of them. And Ladino is actually another thing. (Actually there are about 30 meanings of the term Ladino in Spanish.)

Therefore, I strongly suggest changing its name to Judaeo-Spanish. (And Judaeo-Spanish never means the community, Sepharad and Sepharadi mean it.)

Cordially,

--Universal Life (talk) 14:57, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Even in the Ladino Wikipedia, it is called Lingua Djudeo-Espanyola, --Universal Life (talk) 15:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

References

Cut and paste moves

The title of this article doesn't bother me, but it definitely shouldn't have been moved by cut and paste. Doing so destroys the edit history, which is needed for Wikipedia's license. As it happens, this page was moved by cut and paste from Judaeo-Spanish to Ladino language in March 2004, so I've merged all the edit history into one place. If there is another move proposal for this article, it should go to requested moves so an admin can perform the move without losing the edit history. Thanks, Graham87 03:51, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Judaeo or judeo?

Throughout the discussion about renaming the Ladino article reference was made to Judeo-Spanish. Why was this changed to judaeo in the present article heading? The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an encyclopaedia, despite the orthographic legitimacy of the latter alternative. A Google search for Judeo-Spanish returns over 700,000 references; Judaeo-Spanish gets fewer than 10,000. If there is a well-reasoned explanation for the ae-form being used here, why does the title not use the ligated digraph that appears in the infobox Judæo-Spanish (or vice versa)? --Futhark|Talk 06:29, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Judaeo- is English. Judeo- is American. Wikipedia is neutral between the two, leaving editors to use their own personal style. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 08:42, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

The name of the language is spelled according to American usage on all appearances in the body of the article. Unless there are any objections I'm going to make the title consistent with that, moving it to what is currently a redirection heading, and using the British spelling as the redirection form. --Futhark|Talk 16:10, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

The article primarily used Judaeo prior to edits made by 69.171.160.202 in January 2010 (diff). I've reverted the spellings. –CapitalLetterBeginning (talk) 13:46, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Summary of Judeo-Spanish grammar?

The page, so far, mentions that "the core grammar is basically Castilian". However, the article (in an area that's probably out of place at the moment) then mentions how the preterite is used in Ladino (its exact wording). Thus, I think at least a summary of Judeo-Spanish grammar is in order. As such, how does Judeo-Spanish differ from Spanish in terms of morphology and syntax? --Daniel Blanchette (talk) 02:33, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Vos is missing from the conjugation table. Are the verb forms similar to Spanish "vos hablás/comés/vivís"?--88.73.60.255 (talk) 23:59, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Western and Eastern

The Spanish version of the article distinguishes Western and Eastern dialects. --Error (talk) 22:43, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Palavra

I hae introduced a Romanian reference for palavra, but has somebody proposed Mediterranean Lingua Franca as the source of the Turkish and Greek words? --Error (talk) 22:50, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Old Spanish

The Old Spanish sample seems close to original research. Which is its purported century? --Error (talk) 22:54, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it'd be interesting to know it. It seems to be a made-up. 93.156.208.160 (talk) 21:39, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

I am Spanish and I have deleted the old spanish sample because it is purely a fake text, it is almost current day Catalan. It said:

"El iudeo-hispanyol, djudio, djudezmo uo ladino es la lingua fablada per los sefardim, iudios essipulsatos de la Hispania enel 1492. Es una lingua deriuada delle hispanyol i fablada per 150.000 personas "in-communites in" Israel, la Turkaia, antica Yugoslavia, la Graecia, Maiorca, el Maruhek, las Amerikas, inter muncio altres."

Now to discredit this fake text, if you look at http://www.qudswiki.org/?query=Old_Spanish you will see a fragment of real Old-Spanish from a very famous writing of the time (El Cantar de Mío Cid). There you will see the original text in Old-Spanish besides the current spanish text:

- Current spanish "y" (and), old spanish "e", fake text "i" (current day Catalan)

- Current spanish "por" (by), old spanish "por", fake text "per" (current day Catalan)

- Current spanish "otros" (others), old spanish "otros", fake text "altres" (current day Catalan)

You will agree that there is enough evidence that this text is NOT old spanish and at the very least would require a reference if anybody doesn't agree. 130.206.5.9 (talk) 20:19, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

It does not look a all like current day Catalan. ---88.17.188.54 (talk) 18:02, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Sound Clip

Can anyone dig up a freely licensed clip of someone speaking this? Egmetcalfe (talk) 04:30, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Varika

Does anyone know anything about the sign "Varika"? It appears in the Unicode chart for Hebrew as a "Judeo-Spanish" character, but i don't quite understand what are its origins and where is it used. Any help will be appreciated. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:58, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

It's a diacritic for rashi script, used for distinction between hard and soft characters, much like the geresh in Hebrew. lad.wikipedia uses geresh instead of varika. ‬Unicode calls varika a glyph variant of rafe. When it is used, the soft pronunciation is normally indicated by a point above the base letter‬ - <gimel+varika> <dalet+varika> (A Yiddish character repertoire for IDN, page 12). I couldn't insert the actual letters here because it messes up wikisyntax. What they call "a point" looks to me like a breve. There's also a short description here but careful with that source, the whole wiki is about an imaginary world.--88.73.60.255 (talk) 00:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

It functions similarly to a raphe in Yiddish. Some info can be found here. Isaacmayer9 (talk) 21:44, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Dialect, not language

It's old spanish spoken by jews, that's all. Some phonetical, grammatical and lexical particularities don't turn a dialect into a language. Cuban is a dialect, argentine is a dialect, andalusian is a dialect, and ladino is clearly a dialect. I'm spanish and I understand judaeo-spanish songs (sung by any artist of any origin) BETTER than some flamenco andalusian songs or afro-cuban songs.

Spanish with some galaico-portuguese flavour (old spanish), some hebraic, greek and arab loans, and a yiddish (german)-based writing. That's ladino.

And yiddish is the german dialect speaked by jews and written in hebrew alphabet.Podadera (talk) 13:06, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

It depends

The distinction between languages and dialects is often blurry and is motivated by various cultural and social factors. One relatevely clear factor is the group's internal self-identification. If Ladino speakers considers their language distinct from Spanish, then it's a separate language. If Afro-Cubans would think that they speak Afro-Cuban and not just a Spanish dialect, then it should be treated as such. Another important factor is the existence of independent cultural space between languages. For example, Plattdeutsch (Low German) is almost indistiguishable from Dutch dialects, but is considered a form of German for cultural reasons; Some Norwegian dialects are almost identical to some Danish dialects, yet they are considered two distinct languages due to somewhat separate cultural spaces.

There are many languages around the world that are very close to some other languages. Danish and Norwegian, Serbian and Croatian, French and Walloon (though it's often considered a French dialect) etc. In many such cases there is a dialectal continuum between languages, when both languages claim some dialectal space as their "own".

In case of Ladino, many speakers call their language simply Spanish or Judeo-Spanish. So it would seem a border-line case. However, some Ladino dialects are quite far from Spanish, not considered Spanish by their speakers, and are heavily influenced by Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian. Neither Spanish people nor speakers of other Ladino dialects are able to understand them. At contemporary cultural events they often deliberately choose songs that would sound more "normal" from Spanish perspective, and the singers are usually Spanish people who don't know real folkish forms of Ladino.

Regarding Yiddish, it would be ridiculous to consider it today a dialect of German. Yiddish speakers view it as a separate language and don't understand German. According to German documents, Germans found hard to understand it even 500 years ago. While the connection is obvious and a very simple conversation between German and Yiddish speakers is, indeed, possible, Yiddish is different on every level and has a number of features that are typical for Slavic languages, but completely foreign to German, especially in its syntax. Laplandian (talk) 17:31, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

As for Yiddish, it would be ridiculous to consider it a dialect of Standard German, the written language. For example, Swiss Standard German and the Standard German of Germany differ so slightly that there is no real communication problem, even in the spoken form. However, traditional dialects are another matter. Some Swiss German dialects are much more divergent from Standard German than Yiddish even and retain features reminiscent not only of Middle High German, but even Old High German. In this way, Yiddish can be historically understood to be a "German dialect", however with the understanding that traditional German dialects are so diverse that it makes more sense to think of them as a family of languages. So it would be better to call Yiddish a "German language". Indeed, there are or used to be isolated German "dialects" spoken in Eastern Europe in largely Slavic-speaking surroundings whose divergence from mainstream German is quite comparable to Yiddish. So Yiddish could linguistically be considered yet another offshoot of German which developped in its own strange ways, but not necessarily much stranger than these others; an isolated Central German variety in origin influenced by bilinguality with Slavic languages and enriched with Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon, and later developping its own distinctive sub-varieties. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 11:08, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, I can say that I speak Spanish and can understand Ladino perfectly well. I am skeptical of it being an authentic separate language. Also, as to Yiddish being a separate language, I don't really speak Standard High German outside of reading the Bible and singing hymns. But I do speak both a Swiss dialect and a Low German dialect and can understand Yiddish without difficulty, though I could not speak German in that way. I would say that using Hebrew or Slavic loan words are not enough to call either a separate language. As to your contention that German speakers had difficulty understanding Yiddish 500 years ago, I would say that it was probably harder for all Germans to understand one another's dialects 500 years ago. 500 years ago, North Germans were not used to hearing, for instance, the rolled r's of southern dialects in the north. Or final st pronounced as sht as many Swiss do, in the North. With recordings and broadcasting Germans have not only shifted to a more standardized pronunciation, changing the way they speak, but have also learned to understand more variant pronunciations as they have heard more of them. The same is true in Spanish. Spanish media features speakers from South America to Andalusia, and we've learned to better understand each other by hearing it. 19th century American southerners had real difficulties understanding northern pronunciation of the exact same written language. Russian Mennonites reading the Luther Bible in High German in the old Berlin dialect of the 18th century are not understood by modern Berliners. But they are reading the same words. Mutual intelligibility is a tricky thing, and I don't see either Yiddish or Ladino to be true separate languages, though it is fun to argue about--and I hope that Yiddish speakers, Ladino speakers, and for that matter speakers of the southern and Appalachian American dialect of English pass on their unique variants to their children. The specter of a charge of anti-Semetism always lurks somewhere at the back of this discussion, which injects a little more emotion into it than it would otherwise summon.107.77.208.169 (talk) 21:23, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

As the old saying goes, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Look, if you want to put sourced material in questioning whether (either) is a language you can. Formally WMF accepts anything with an ISO 639–3 code as a language. And both Yiddish and Ladino have such codes. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:42, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Wrong fact in sample text

In the sample text it is said Judaeo-Spanish is spoken in Majorca? Any source? I mean, it's possible there's one family speaking it there, but not mor possible than one family speaking it in London or Paris.

If no source is given, I'll arrange it.

--88.17.188.54 (talk) 18:07, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Mutual intelligibility

Please make an entry here with Spanish with proper sources.Jondel (talk) 23:30, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

population

There was no ref for the population apart from a non-RS web site, so I replaced it. Please restore if the figure of 95k can be justified. — kwami (talk) 06:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

• Thank you, you're right, as I'm closely in contact with the native population, I've some knowledgable estimations (as similarly my linguist firends) but as there have been no investigation to count the native speakers, there is no proof of our knowledgable estimation. However as there is no proof, I think we can't include it in Wikipedia. Would be nice to indicate anyway, my estimation for today (including 2nd language speakers - not many though) 84,000. My friends' estimations vary between 40,000 to 100,000. --Universal Life (talk) 12:06, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Endonym

Approximate numbers of people who write (or would write) in different orthographies are such:

• Latin orthographies: 50,000 - 60,000 people
• Hebrew orthography: 11,000 - 12,000 people
• Cyrillic orthography: 10,000 people
• Rashi script: 3,000 - 4,000 people
• Arabic script: 3,000 people
• Greek script: 2,000 people

Cyrillic script is used by the people originating from Bulgaria's and Yugoslavia's Sephardic communities (though some of them prefer the Latin script, the most elderly usually write in Cyrillic and there are many publication in Cyrillic). So Lfdder, if you want to remove again the script, can you tell me why you are doing it again? --Universal Life (talk) 12:06, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

• Note, that Cyrillic users are almost as numberous as the Hebrew script users. Though they are mostly over 70s and use the language in their personal life, that's why you do not see publications online in Cyrillic. However there are tons of books from the 20th century (and before) written with the Cyrillic script. The Arabic and Greek scripts are not so prominent. I've actually checked the Cyrliic spelling from a book, before writing it. Universal Life (talk) 12:16, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Salonika?

The article mentions: "Judeo-Spanish was the common language of Salonika during the period of Ottoman rule. The city became part of the modern Greek Republic in 1912 and was subsequently renamed Thessaloniki.". This is a clear piece of propaganda. The city was named "Thessaloniki" by its founder Cassander in the 3th century B.C. and it was the name of his wife and sister of Alexander the Great! The name "Salonika" is just how the city was called by Jewish people, not its actual name. If no one has anything to oppose my argument I will proceed to deleting this misinformation from the article. 00Darkrai00 (talk) 21:16, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

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Names

@Sirmylesnagopaleentheda: Thank you for the recent addition. If you look at the top part of the page at this point, you'll see a lot of repetition and inconsistency with respect to the name of the language. How do you feel about rationalizing that part of it? StevenJ81 (talk) 16:19, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 1 January 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no change to title. Overwhelming consensus is that this is the correct title for the article. (non-admin closure) -- Dane ^talk 04:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

---

Judaeo-Spanish → Ladino language – As the article notes itself, this is the name now commonly used, see WP:COMMONNAME. PatGallacher (talk) 19:29, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

• Process comment. As an administrator at Ladino Wikipedia—and I use that name here without prejudice to the discussion because it is the usual name of the wiki—I felt it was appropriate to inform the community there about this discussion. I would ask any potential closing administrator here to assume that the seven-day clock on the requested move not start until seven days from the point when I did that, which was just a minute or two ago. Thank you. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:35, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
• Question for proposer. May I ask the proposer, User:PatGallacher, why s/he is reopening the name of an article that has been stable for over eight years? (I discount the question of Judaeo- vs. Judeo-, which was a specific question substantially unrelated to the current question.) StevenJ81 (talk) 16:35, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
  • The title may have been discussed at times but as far as I can see it has never been the subject of a formal move request. Some article titles which have been stable for some time end up being moved without much fuss. "Ladino" is the term I have normally seen used to describe this language, the article itself in its opening sentence notes that this is the term usually used, and as the last contributor notes we have the Ladino Wikipedia, not the Judaeo-Spanish Wikipedia. PatGallacher (talk) 17:11, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
  • As I pointed out, I used "Ladino Wikipedia" without prejudice for this purpose. Why that name was used rather than anything else may have a technical component—or perhaps no one gave the matter a second thought when the wiki was first created. So I don't think that is going to be decisive. I do intend to object to this move, but cannot write out my reasoning just at the moment. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:26, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. For what I remember from my readings, the name Judaeo-Spanish seems to be preferred by most modern scholars, and in addition Ladino might apply only to some of its varieties, not all. --Jotamar (talk) 18:14, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

That last "argument" is really only a question (you say "might"), so can not really be an argument for or against anything. Debresser (talk) 20:53, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

• Neutral The common name is definitely Ladino, but the academic name seems to be Judaeo-Spanish. I admit that the first time I saw "Judaeo-Spanish", I had a hard time figuring out that it meant Ladino. Debresser (talk) 20:53, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. The article name was "Ladino" a long time ago, and was moved for very good reasons, discussed in the article itself: it was also discussed very thoroughly in the section above, headed "Ladino is not the name of this language, it is Judeo-Spanish". The name most commonly used by speakers was simply "Spanyol", that is, they considered themselves to be speaking Spanish: words like "Judio" or "Judesmo" could be used if it was specifically needed to distinguish. "Ladino" is one register of the language, used for translations of religious texts. One would not name an article about Judaeo-Arabic "Sharh" or an article about Judaeo-Aramaic "Targum", even though those were occasionally used as names for the languages. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 11:45, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Most of what I was going to say was already said by Sir Myles, and I endorse that completely. I would add the following specific points:
  • The discussion above may not have been a formal "request for move" in the way we do that now, but it was quite a thorough discussion all the same.
  • I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that Ladino unequivocally wins WP:COMMONNAME vs. Judaeo-Spanish/Judeo-Spanish/Judeo-Español (which are equivalent for this purpose).
  • In a related way, there is no doubt that Ladino is a common name. Many Wikipedias use a local version of Judeo-Spanish as the name of this article, and many others use a local version of Ladino. They all refer to the opposite version in the lead of the article. But it's a far jump from there to winning WP:COMMONNAME.
  • There would unquestionably have to be a redirect at Ladino language. But there already is.
  • I don't think changing the name adds any clarity at all. In both the Oxford Dictionaries (UK English) and in Merriam-Webster (US English), "Ladino" has at least one other meaning.
  • Given that Ladino is not unequivocally more common than Jud(a)eo-Spanish, the fact that speakers of the language disapprove of this name (except in its use for the one literary register) is a good reason not to prefer it. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:39, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose with everything said years ago above and everything that Sir Myles and Steven have just said above and much more...I'm a native speaker of Judaeo-Spanish (JS) and have done linguistic research about JS since 2002.
  • We almost always call the language as Español at home. Being a bit more specific, we call it Judeo-Español. In slang we call it Muestro Español (our Spanish), when we contrast it to non-Jewish languages we also call it Judyó.
  • This is not just our home but almost all homes where they speak JS!
  • Ladino is a liturgical form of the language...not spoken, only written and prayed in.
  • We have a word in JS: Ladinismo which means any expression that are not spoken but are calque-translations of Hebrew into pure Castilian Spanish (unlike our ,Spanish which contains many elements from Aragonese, Hebrew and Turkish, etc.). Thus an expression such as la noche la esta (the night the this) is a Ladinismo, a funny, not spoken register of the language...used in praying instead of saying esta noche (tonight).
  • As the bibles used to be translated using Ladino (that's word-by-word translation from Hebrew keeping the Hebrew syntax), the verb Ladinar appeared in our language. Thus when the bible was translated in Istanbul around 1739-45, it would say in its front page entero bien Ladinado (Entirely well "Ladinated").
  • The etymology of the word Ladino in our language is Latino. For us Latino means the Latin language. So ladinar or enladinar for us means to make it Latin. Only for a some ex-communities from Greece and few rare dialects, they use the term Ladino to mean the language we speak. So, yes it exists...but it's a very rare thing and as it means more than one thing, thus comes its ambiguity. The more general and accepted meaning among both native speakers and academicians is one register of the language, which I mentioned above.
  • The reason why today there's a rising popularity of the word Ladino amongst non-natives (and culturally cut-off offsprings of the speakers) are various...but one of the reasons is the relative ease of the word...and the popular sound of it, especially when compared with the independent and popular sounding Yiddish, compared to Judaeo-Spanish. (Also vice-versa, it's easier to mock Ladino than a word like Judaeo-Spanish: haha Ladino, our grandmoms' Spanish isn't Spanish, it's just corrupted Spanish mixed with so many languages.)
  • And if you read the above comments (including the ones written years ago), you'll see that an encyclopedia should use the most commonly accepted word for a language, which is JS. --Universal Life (talk) 22:05, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Name in Cyrillic

What is "Җудео-Еспаңол"? I bet this name makes no sense in languages written using Cyrillic script. Only language that has "Җ" and "ң" letters is Dungan - crown prince number 95.25.181.173 (talk) 21:12, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Question is whether Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), when written in Cyrillic orthography, uses those letters. StevenJ81 (talk) 21:33, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Presumably this language does not have a name in Cyrillic, although it does have a name in languages which use the Cyrillic script. Having a quick look at the wikipedias in these languages, this seems as fraught with difficulties as the name of this language in English, recognising several alternative names. Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and a few other languages do call it something like "Ladino", but Russian and a few others call it something like "Sefardic language". PatGallacher (talk) 15:20, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually, the language does have a name in Cyrillic. There was a community of Sefardim that ended up in Bulgaria, and I believe they wrote this language in Cyrillic. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

I removed "Җудео-Еспаңол". It was changed from "Ђудео-Еспањол" by User:Андрей Погадаев in this edit. Both spellings look unusual and both are unreferenced. Given that the Cyrillic alphabet was used in the Balkans, the "Ђудео-Еспањол" version might be the correct one, but it's still unreferenced.

If references are given to these spellings, I'll be happy to put them back. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:18, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Amir,

I have just seen this conversation.

"Ђудео-Еспањол" is the correct spelling. I have seen it used even though you know for a language whose speakers are mostly over 70 years old...it's very difficult to find references online. It's not only in the past but the reason I included it is that there are a lot of people over 75 who originated from Bulgaria and the Balkans and who naturally write Judaeo-Spanish with Cyrillic alphabet...Even though, you can't find their presence online, they do have a presence and in thousands :) --Universal Life (talk) 11:32, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I think today 75 - 80% of JS speakers write in Latin scripts while,

10 - 15% write in Hebrew scripts

8 - 9% in Cyrillic script

1 - 2% in Arabic script

1 - 2% in Greek script (For the last two, I'm speaking about extremely old people from North African and Greek descent respectively) --Universal Life (talk) 11:40, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@Amire80 and Universal Life: Amir, I think you know that UL is as much of an expert on this as we have around here, and I would provisionally trust his experience on the matter without a source—though I would probably also tag that spelling with a {{cn}} to see if someone can find one for us. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:56, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I have the pleasure of knowing UL in real life :)

I don't need a reference online. I need any reference. For example, the one from which UL knows that this is the right spelling. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:09, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Thank you both Amir and Steven. Amir, I've sent you an email with a jpeg attachment, a scan from a book in JS with Cyrillic script :) --Universal Life (talk) 18:51, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

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Naming convention

Lead: "Commonly referred to as Ladino" but is not WP:COMMONNAME? I know am I am not the only person who sees a problem with that. It's one thing if it is commonly referred to by native speakers than speakers of the English language. It doesn't matter what native speakers may call it, it is undoubtedly "Ladino" by English speakers for the same reasons why we don't call German, Deutsch. When ISO, Linguist List, and Glottolog all identify this language as Ladino and yet this article remains "Judaeo-Spanish" is awful I'm sorry and unacceptable quite frankly not adhering to what it is most known in the English-language for bias concerns regarding how it is referred to in said language. Furthermore, this article is swarmed with the term Ladino rather than Judaeo-Spanish as the main identifier for the language. Article says even, "In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language (E)spanyolit or Ladino." It is also common among younger generations as the language nears closer and closer to extinction, I've also read. Eight years of stabilization means nothing if its not right; just that there weren't enough eyes looking on. I wouldn't mind betting that in the last eight years this article has been piggybacked by publishers because of our error; happens all the time. This article should model Zarphatic language (Judeo-French) in its naming convention. Please reconsider a move; going to alert a wider audience on this. Savvyjack23 (talk) 18:06, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Objectively speaking you might have a point, if COMMONNAME were the only factor. But the truth is that from a practical perspective, this is probably a better location.

• If you actually look at the current page Ladino, you will see that it is a disambiguation page that goes in several different directions, and even includes another language (Ladin, ISO code lld) along with this one. I don't think this subject qualifies as the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, so the unqualified name "Ladino" doesn't work here.
• Potentially, one could then prefer to call this page Ladino language, and there is, in fact, a redirect from there to here. But if there is a COMMONNAME, it would be "Ladino", and not "Ladino language". Accordingly, WP:NATURALDIS allows us to pick another name commonly used in English-language sources, even if not as commonly as "Ladino". And Judaeo-Spanish (representing itself and its alternate spelling "Judeo-Spanish") becomes the clear choice in that case. That name is frequently used in academic literature, and it is distant enough from other possible uses of "Ladino" that it is unambiguous.

The above gives plenty of justification for the current name under WP:MOS. When you add to that the fact that the native speaking community does not prefer the name Ladino, and that to them Ladino might better describe the calque than the broader language, there are a lot of good reasons not to rename the article. StevenJ81 (talk) 19:56, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Phonology

There is a serious elementary mistake in the section on Phonology: "trilled r" and "tapped r" are described in the chart as phonemes, but in the narrative which follows they are said not to contrast. However, the phonological definition of phonemes is that they are sounds which contrast, so our description is incoherent.

A complication here is that there are three possible entities in question: "trilled r", "tapped r" and "flapped r". In our chart the phonemes are said to be "trilled r" and "tapped r", but in the narrative the sounds which are said not to contrast are "trilled r" and "flapped r", so there is not necessarily an inconsistency in the article. However, the International Phonetic Association's view is that "tapped r" and "flapped r" are the same from this point of view, and do not contrast in any language. So there *is* an inconsistency in the article.

It may be that Ralph Penny, in the work cited, has more to say about this, but I don't have access to his book. Nor do I have any specific knowledge of Judaeo-Spanish phonology. But my stronger hunch is that they don't contrast, so in the chart I've removed "tapped r" from the list of phonemes. If my weaker hunch is true, that they *do* contrast, then we would need to restore the original chart, and delete the remark in the narrative that they don't contrast.Farnwell (talk) 23:33, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

/r/ and /ɾ/ in Judaeo-Spanish do contrast in words such as perra and pera respectively (See Quintana's studies). However there are dialects that pronounce them the same. That's why we have conflicting narratives, because one narrative takes one dialect into consideration, while the other takes another one. In the dialect which is considered the main dialect (Istanbul), it does contrast. Btw, I've no idea whether to call /ɾ/ "tapped" or "flapped", however it's the same sound of /ɾ/ in Modern Spanish and Turkish. Hope it helps --Universal Life (talk) 23:56, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

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Papiamento

Should Papiamento be mentioned? Its article mentions a Judeo-Portuguese influence with a later Venezuelan Spanish influence but maybe some authors have found a Juadeo-Spanish influence. Not that it would be easy to tell from another any of the Iberian influences in Papiamento. --Error (talk) 00:13, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

If you can find a reliable source, add it. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:22, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Needs to be more than a source; remember that per WP:V we include majority and minority opinions, but not fringe views. So it depends how much support the theory has. Mathglot (talk) 15:07, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Ofra Haza

Didn't Ofra Haza sing in Judaeo-Spanish? Since she was one of the best known Israeli singers, it should be mentioned, I think. However, her page doesn't mention it. --Error (talk) 00:45, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

@Error: If you can find a source to support that, add it on both pages. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:54, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

If I remember right, she was a descendant of Yemenite Jews. I've never heard about Judeo-Spanish being spoken in Yemen. --Jotamar (talk) 18:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Place of origin didn't really determine what language Israeli artists of that area sang in. It was pretty common to learn pieces in multiple disaporic languages.--Dan Carkner (talk) 16:09, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Judaeo-Spanish vs. Ladino?

Could some people please have a look at the "Ladino" disambiguation page? The disambiguation page was recently edited ([1]) to say that "Ladino" is "not a spoken language", that Ladino is "the product of a word-for-word translation into Spanish of Hebrew or Aramaic biblical or liturgical texts", and that Judaeo-Spanish has been "referred to as 'Ladino' only in recent years in Israel". I am wondering if this manner of description may be going too far with regard to the common use of "Ladino" to refer to the spoken language, but I don't consider myself any sort of expert on this matter and would be grateful if others could chime in. Thanks. — Richwales (no relation to Jimbo) 20:43, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Overkill with "Comparison with other languages"

I read the comparison with interest, then disappointment, then a strong feeling that something is very wrong with the table in the article. Frankly, apart from the Judaeo-Spanish, Spanish, and English, all the rest is redundant (not adding anything to the article) and frankly looks a lot like original research (WP:OR). It's uncited; it clutters up the article; it doesn't help the reader understand Judaeo-Spanish any, as none of the other entries are more like the J-S than the Spanish is, and any minor points of similarity certainly aren't pointed up in the non-existent cited sources in the section; and all the other languages beyond those I've mentioned ought to go. I'd hazard a guess that an editor found the Iberian peninsula language variations fascinating (admirable in the right context) and went for a spot of OR: Wikipedia has no place for that. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:44, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, I went and looked for it based on your description, and I didn't find it as bad as you say but perhaps it could be trimmed a bit. It IS pretty far down in the article so I don't see a big problem in having a table there. IMO not all but English and Spanish should be cut, there may be some comparative purpose in having a handful of Iberian languages, but not that many.--Dan Carkner (talk) 16:06, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 7 May 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: No consensus. To quote an insightful comment by Apaugasma Yes, actually surveying the literature would be the best way to decide, but unfortunately no one here has done that, and I strongly suspect that even the literature may be relatively equally divided among the two alternatives. No such user (talk) 11:33, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

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Judaeo-Spanish → Ladino language – The name "Judeao-Spanish" is not the most common way to refer to this language. I suspect it's the primary topic of "Ladino", but adding "language" is often done for consistency. Google Scholar results as follows (since 2020, since there are a lot of results, but there are similar results for other time windows):

• Ladino language 1,000 (most of these clearly refer to the Jewish language, although there are a few extraneous results)
• Judeo-Spanish 534
• Judezmo 141
• Judaeo-Spanish 92 (status quo)

There is no other "Ladino language", so this (like the others) is a totally unambiguous term. Failing that, the article should be moved to the much more common spelling "Judeo-Spanish". (t · c) buidhe 04:09, 7 May 2021 (UTC) —Relisting. ~ Aseleste (t, e | c, l) 13:30, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support the move to Ladino language. Even if some people feel that Judaeo- or Judeo-Spanish is more technically correct as a name (whatever that means), Ladino is by far the more common way that people refer to it and are likely to search for it.Dan Carkner (talk) 05:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
• Move to Ladino without the name (language) afterwards. I believe the language is clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. I also propose to move the DAB article to Ladino (disambiguation). 110.137.163.125 (talk) 13:41, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support as per the IP suggestions right above. The first sentence of the updated lede, after the move, would also say "also called Judeo-Spanish or Judaeo-Spanish," of course (I assume). Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 14:31, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Comment: No, I had not read the old discussion. Thank you for pointing that out Apaugasma. After reading it, I understand the situation a little better. The name Judaeo-Spanish is a broader, more recent academic name that includes the narrower and more popularly known "Ladino language." It is meant to be academic, broad, and to include all the local variants of dialects spoken or written by Jews that descend from the original Judeo-Spanish culture of the centuries before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. I want to point out that the Hebrew WP link for this article goes straight to the Ladino article there, but I understand the reasons for not moving it. I hope I have summarized the arguments from the previous discussion well enough in this short attempt at a new comment here. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 17:24, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

• Comment: have !voters read the earlier discussions, from 2017 and from 2008? The last time this exact same move was requested (in 2017), it was closed with no change to title. Overwhelming consensus is that this is the correct title for the article. It seems that native speakers very much prefer Judaeo-Spanish ('Ladino' referring in Judaeo-Spanish itself to a specific form of the language only used in literal translations of Hebrew religious literature), and at least two of the opposers at the 2017 requested move appear to be such native speakers. However, I believe that Wikipedia article titles should be determined by general usage rather than by native speakers' preferences, and I can confirm that the limited academic literature I have been exposed to (mainly historical rather than linguistic) tends to use 'Ladino'. But then I'm far from an expert, and it's certainly not always the numbers that carry the most weight, so I would ask other !voters to consider this carefully. Apaugasma (talk|contribs) 16:26, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  For me, as a non Sephardic person I will not tell them how to call their language, but most common contemporary usage in English is also important for a public encyclopedia. The most precise academic language is not always appropriate, known or understood by a broad public.Dan Carkner (talk) 18:34, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  The problem is, as all the editors involved in the previous discussion will probably attest, if/when they join this new discussion, that the corpus of written/printed literature in the language is pretty vast and not-uniform. I.e., different areas of the Spanish diaspora after 1492 used the Hebrew alphabet to record and create documents in different forms, and for different purposes. Also, not all areas of this Spanish diaspora spoke the same variant of some form of Judeo-Spanish dialect. In some areas, this locas dialect was known as Ladino, but in other areas is was known by a different name. And so, the more recent academic field that is trying to collect and study this vast and non-uniform corpus of literature, and this widespread variant form of the spoken Spanish language, into a more coherent body of literature and of spoken dialects, according to the different purposes for which it was recorded, or for how the specific variant of the spoken dialect was used. Some of these variants were know as Ladino, but other were not. And so the broader category of Judeo-Spanish tries to incorporate and include all the different local uses and and variants into one, unified, all-encompassing lingustic area of study and categorization. But I will let them talk more for themselves too, again. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 23:25, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

• Comment In 2017, there was a similar discussion regarding which the correct name of the language is "Ladino", "Ladino language" or "Judaeo-Spanish". There are two arguments, first side regarding commonly used names in English, and others regarding academic scholar languages. Many of those opposer for example Universal Life are native speaker of the language, so IMO it needs a broader discussion about this page move. But, as non-Ladino speakers like me, most commonly usage name of the language is preferrable. 182.1.62.88 (talk) 22:21, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. For all the reasons already exposed in the old discussion. --Jotamar (talk) 20:41, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
• Weak Oppose based on my own experience, I would assume Ladino was the common name. However, if it isn't used by either native speakers or linguists, who is really using it? There isn't much discussion of this language in popular culture. I don't have the time to do several hours of research to have a strong opinion, but I lean towards the status quo here. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 19:12, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support Ladino for concision, though Ladino language isn't bad per se. Red Slash 23:08, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose I had first thought there was no controversy in this proposal, until I was made aware that a previous proposal to change the name had already been previously rejected, above. So I struck my first "support" for the new proposal and posted two lenghtier explanations for the reversal, after reading the arguments that led to the previous rejection. I now want to make sure that the closing Admin knows that my position on this issue is now Oppose. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 16:39, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. The 2017 RM was pretty decisive, and I don't find the new evidence presented here to be sufficiently persuasive to flip the outcome. It's worth mentioning that the Google Scholar count for "Ladino language" is without the term enclosed in quotation marks. Searching for the exact phrase brings the number of results down from 1,000 to 48. Though of course the other ~950 results include many true positives. Hits on Google Scholar or ngrams can be a useful source of signal, but, IMO, the most effective way to determine common name would be to read a sample of the highest-quality sources on the topic and tally their usage. Colin M (talk) 18:00, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support - Searching Google Scholar for "Ladino language" would only be fair if compared to the results for "Judeo-Spanish language", which also only amount to 47. Searching for "Ladino" "language", on the other hand, yields 1910 results, versus only 505 results for "Judeo-Spanish" "language" (note though that some scholars are named 'Ladino', while none are named 'Judeo-Spanish'; but it is perhaps also not very credible to suppose that 1405 hits refer to publications from scholars whose last name is 'Ladino'). I also feel that the decision in the previous RM relied too much on editors' personal preferences: native-speakers apparently much prefer "Judeo-Spanish", and a fair amount of the discussants were native speakers, so that may seriously skew results (this is a general worry on WP which tends to make me want to push back). Yes, actually surveying the literature would be the best way to decide, but unfortunately no one here has done that, and I strongly suspect that even the literature may be relatively equally divided among the two alternatives. So in the end I prefer to come at this from the point of view that, like many other editors on this talk page, I knew the term Ladino and what it stood for before coming to this article, but I had never or only rarely heard about Judeo-Spanish. It's anecdotal, and in a way also sub-optimally personal, but a crucial difference is that it's not a preference, but rather an indication of which term may be more familiar to an average educated reader. Apaugasma (talk ☿) 21:37, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Neutral, Comment Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but I see some people leaning on the assertion that the equivalent of the term "Judaeo-Spanish" is used by speakers of the language, when they are speaking in Judaeo-Spanish/Ladino or in Spanish. In other words, it has been asserted that Judaeo-Spanish is the preferred endonym. To me, that's like arguing we should retitle Hebrew language to "Ivrit" because that's the word they use in Hebrew. There's plenty of languages whose English exonyms differ from their endonyms. The question is what term is more common among scholarly sources and common use in English. Waterfire (talk) 20:43, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vocabulary

Does anyone know the origin of the Ladino word schola (school)? I'm unsure of the spelling and exact origin - Spanish, from escuela? It could be an addition to the "Selected words" section. -14:51, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Latin scholae; Spanish escuela; Portuguese escola; Catalan escola; French école; Italian scuola. I believe the closest source for Ladino is usually Spanish, or maybe a mix of Spanish and Portuguese, similar to Catalan? If my linguistic research above satisfies, it could maybe be part of the "Selected words" section? Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 17:40, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Actually, thinking a little further. If you are correct that the standard Ladino word for Latin scholae is schola, which I cannot affirm, then in this case the Ladino word is closer to the Latin original source than Spanish or Portuguese. The closest to the Latin original source here seems to be the Ladino form you give, since it is the only one maintaining the beginning schola spelling. But if you are correct, I believe it should definitely have a place in the section. warshy ^(¥¥) 17:53, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Judaeo-Spanish as a trade language?

The lead describes Judaeo-Spanish as "once the trade language of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans, and the Middle-East". Is this accurate? Any source for this? Judaeo-Spanish being a trade language used among Jews in those regions makes sense, but it's difficult for me to imagine gentile traders learning Judaeo-Spanish and using it as a lingua franca. Erinius (talk) 13:22, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

This should probably be changed to "the Jewish trade language..." You can do it, or if not I'll do it myself a little later? Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 18:14, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

I just changed it. I hope this resolves the issue? Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 18:29, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I'm still wondering if it actually was a Jewish trade language and if so, where any sourcing for that is. Erinius (talk) 19:22, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh yeah, it was the Jewish trade language all around the Mediterranean after the expulsion from Spain, throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and also for the first part of the 18th century, at least. I'll try to find the sources for it sometime soon. In the meantime, if you prefer, you can mark the sentence with the cn (citation needed) tag. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 21:36, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Erinius (talk) 01:38, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

vivir/bivir

In Spanish it is spelled vivir, but it is generally pronounced bivir. In Latin, the root for all the romance languages, the verb is spelled vivere. In Portuguese it is spelled and pronounced viver. It has been spelled here on that table as vivir/bivir for quite some time, as far as I am aware. You seem to be quite categorical that in JS it is always and only spelled as bivir, and I don't want to edit war. I still think that you may find it spelled as vivir in some documents, even though as Spanish it was probably pronounced as bivir. If the manual you refer to says that clearly, it should be referenced, with page number, etc. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 19:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I actually have an original JS document from 1659 in front of me where the word "life" (vida) is spelled precisely like that - vida, three times. It is not written/spelled bida, as one would assume it would be if your assertion that the verb "to live" is spelled only as bivir (never vivir) in JS. If I don't get a reply, I may eventually revert you back. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 19:51, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi warshy.

Thank you for your message. JS has conversely only vida and bivir, even though they both come from Latin vítam and vívere respectively. For JS, the spelling b/v actually represents two different pronunciations and are not there by convention. You know languages, even closely related ones, develop differently from each other. In Modern Spanish, the distinction between the phonemes [b] and [v] were already lost by the time of the 18th century Spanish language spelling reforms. By then, no one knew whether to spell the words with "b" or "v". The RAE decided to base the b/v spellings according to the Latin etymology of the words, instead the old Castilian pronunciation. Judaeo-Spanish, on the other hand, preserved exactly that old pronunciation, and that's how we have today bivir, bivo, bivda, bolar, boz and aboltar instead of Modern Spanish vivir, vivo, viuda, volar, voz and volver. As far as I've seen, Old Spanish texts also spell these words with "b".

However, this phenomenon (Latin v- to Old Castilian b-) exists only with a small list of words. Most words starting with "v" in Latin, remained "v" in Old Spanish, thus also both in Modern and Judaeo-Spanish. In JS we say and write "ventana, vazío, viejo, vender, vida, vino, valer, veluntad, vez, vijitar, vedre, varón, vente, vela, vos, vuestro, ver, viajar" etc. These are all pronounced with [v], like the 'v' sound in English or French. In Modern Spanish these are "ventana, vacío, viejo, vender, vida, vino, valer, voluntad, vez, visitar, verde, varón, veinte, vela, os, vuestro, ver, viajar". --Universal Life (talk) 20:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Oh, and the book uses the word "bivir" consistently, as well as all JS teaching materials. --Universal Life (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. I accept your explanations as it seems you know what you're talking about. It would be nice if you could add a ref to the book you are referring to (I assume it is the manual you have mentioned) on the item bivir at the table where this discussion started. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 21:17, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

You're welcome and thank you as well :) The book is referenced as the last item in the bibliography section of the article. I guess, it would be much easier for you to add that as a reference. --Universal Life (talk) 21:32, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I cannot add it because I don't have the book in my hands, and I had not heard about it until today. I see it in the list, but I don't have access to it. I don't know what it says about bivir, etc. You, on the other hand, wrote above: "Oh, and the book uses the word "bivir" consistently..." If you don't know how to add the ref, please give me the page number and what it says about it, and I'll add it. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 22:34, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

From the reference in the further reading section of the article it appears that the book is written in French. No problem, if it says something about the spelling of bivir, we can still use it as a source. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 22:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Oh, yes, sorry. It's just while adding a ref, I get lost with the technicalities of which details to add and which not. The book in my hands is the English translation. Bivir is given its definition and is conjugated in the present tense on page 41 (and then occurs throughout the book). The name of the book is spelled exactly: "Manual of Judeo-Spanish". It has a subtitle on the cover (underneath the title and in smaller font) "Language and Culture". Author: Marie-Christine Varol. I wish I could send you a picture of it lol :) I'll try to add all possible relevant data: --Universal Life (talk) 22:58, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

The first interior page says:

STUDIES AND TEXTS
IN
JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center
for Jewish Studies
University of Maryland
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND 1856
XVI
General Editor: Bernard D. Cooperman

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MARYLAND

The second page includes:

TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION INTO ENGLISH BY

Ralph Tarica

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MARYLAND
(United States)
L'ASIATHÈQUE
maison des langues du monde
(Europe)

2008

On the third page we have the title: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA . Also it gives the full name of the author: Varol-Bornes, Marie-Christine. The original name: Manuel de judéo-espagnol. And we have ISBN 978-1-934309-19-3. I think this is for the US publication. And for the original in French: ISBN 978-2-915255-75-1. Sorry for the wall of text. And I hope this helps. --Universal Life (talk) 23:19, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, that is all very good. First thing we should update the bibliography of the article giving the English updated edition details, instead of the original French. Once that is done, it will be easy to just refer to it in the ref, and give the page number. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 00:10, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

I've added a citation to the English edition Erinius (talk) 02:20, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much Erinius. Now with some time in my hands and with all the info already provided by Univerasl Life I can finally add the missing ref at the table where this thread began. Thank you both, warshy ^(¥¥) 00:32, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Name of language with different scripts

The infobox has quite a few orthographies with various scripts for the names of the language. A few of them were added in a modification by Ninjoust who is now apparently blocked. Do we have any reference for all of these? Moyogo/ (talk) 19:49, 10 January 2024 (UTC)