Yevanic language

Yevanic, also known as Judæo-Greek or Romaniyot,^[3] is a Greek dialect formerly used by the Romaniotes, a group of Greek Jews whose presence in the Levant is documented since the Hellenistic period. Its linguistic lineage stems from the Jewish Koine spoken primarily by Hellenistic Jews throughout the region, and includes Hebrew elements. It was mutually intelligible with the Greek dialects of the Christian population. The Romaniotes used the Hebrew alphabet to write Greek and Yevanic texts.

Origin of name

The term Yevanic is an artificial creation from the Biblical word Yāwān referring to the Greeks and the lands that the Greeks inhabited. The term is an overextension of the Greek word Ἰωνία (Ionia in English) from the (then) easternmost Greeks to all Greeks.

Current status

There are no longer any native speakers of Yevanic, for the following reasons:

• The assimilation of the tiny Romaniote communities by the more numerous Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews;
• The emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel;
• The murder of many of the Romaniotes during the Holocaust;
• The adoption of the majority languages through assimilation.

The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek. They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial which they transcribed in Hebrew letters.

Literature

There is a small amount of literature in Yevanic dating from the early part of the modern period, the most extensive document being a translation of the Pentateuch. A polyglot edition of the Bible published in Constantinople in 1547 has the Hebrew text in the middle of the page, with a Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) translation on one side and a Yevanic translation on the other.^[4] In its context, this exceptional cultivation of the vernacular has its analogue in the choice of Hellenistic Greek by the translators of the Septuagint and in the New Testament.^[5]

See also

• History of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire

References

Further reading

• Balodimas-Bartolomei, Angelyn, Nicholas Alexiou. 2010. “The Inclusion of Invisible Minorities in the EU Member States: The Case of Greek Jews in Greece.” In Changing Educational Landscapes, 155-182. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-90-481-8534-4_10.
• BimBaum, Soloman A. 1951. “The Jewries of Eastern Europe.” In The Slavonic and East European Review, 29(73), 420-443. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204248.
• Connerty, Mary C. Judeo-Greek: The Language, The Culture. Jay Street Publishing, 2003. ISBN 1-889534-88-9
• Davis, Barry. 1987. “Yiddish and the Jewish Identity.” In History Workshop, 23, 159-164. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288755.
• Gold, David L. 1989. “A sketch of the linguistic situation in Israel today.” In Language in Society, 13(3), 361-388. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2995164.
• Krivoruchko, Julia G. 2011. “Judeo-Greek in the era of globalization.” In Language & Communication, 31(2), 119-129. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530910000388.
• Naveh, Joseph, Soloman Asher Bimbaum, David Diringer, Zvi Hermann Federbsh, Jonathan Shunary & Jacob Maimon. 2007. “Alphabet, Hebrew.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1, 689-728. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE%7CCX2587500876&v=2.1&u=new67449&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&authCount=1.
• Spolsky, Bernard, Elana Goldberg Shohamy. 1999. The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology, and Practice. Multilingual Matters. UK.

External links

• Jewish Language Research Website: Judeo-Greek
• Yevanic Language Endangered Languages Project Website