Talk:Ladino language

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[edit] 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

[edit] 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.

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
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

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!
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 :).

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 [...]

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)

[edit] 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. ~~

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.
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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

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)

[edit] 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. Tomertalk 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)

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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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

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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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?

[edit] Example

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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)