Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish
bbc.com
bbc.com
In a country where Muslims are a majority (just barely, 50 point something percent), the Synagogue mentioned in the article is in dead center of the capital with absolutely no security needed.
Edited to add: Too bad they don't have basic democratic rights. According to our constitution, the minorities can't run to be one of our three presidents (yes, three)[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-why-saraj... (paywalled original, I've read non-paywalled Bosnian translations).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejdi%C4%87_and_Finci_v._Bosni...
Mancare in Italian is to miss/need/be lacking, and although mancar in modern Portuguese is to limp, archaic Portuguese used it in the Italian sense.
> I had to listen carefully to understand, hearing words like fazer (to do) and lavorar (to work) that sounded more like Portuguese and Italian than modern Spanish. I heard sounds like "dj" [dʒ] in the word, djente (people), “z” [z] in the word roza (rose) and “sh” [ʃ] in the word pasharo (bird) that don’t exist at all in modern European Spanish.
Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
____
Not related to the article but something I always found odd: In Italian, 'morbido' means 'soft' (used to describe food, among other things), while the English 'morbid' is translated as 'macabro'. Italian etymological references say this is due to the softness of diseased muscles, and it somehow just became 'soft'. All of the other Romance languages use the term in its original meaning.
I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
How do you say "you" in Ladino? Is "usted" (possibly from Arabic "ustaad") used, or do they use an Italian or Portuguese cognate?
Maybe. But this is not generally agreed upon by Romance linguists. The more generally accepted etymology connects to the name of the Biblical Maccabees. The OED says:
"The Middle French word occurs first in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says ‘Je fis de Macabré la dance’: this is apparently a claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. In form the word might be a popular alteration of Old French Macabé Maccabaeus (examples of Judas Macabré(s) occur at the end of the 12th cent.): see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus for investigation of the range of forms and spellings attested in Middle French for both the present word and for words and expressions independently derived from the biblical proper name. As regards meaning, it may be connected with the late medieval liturgical dance or procession called chorea Machabaeorum in Latin (Besançon, 1453) and in Middle Dutch Makkabeusdans (15th cent.), which has been explained as arising from 2 Maccabees 7: Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch suggests also the association of the liturgical office of the dead with 2 Maccabees 12:43–6 in the Vulgate (verses 43–5 in the King James Bible) as a reason for a link between a cult of the Maccabees and the dance of the dead tradition in art and literature. In Middle French the metaphor aller a la dance De Macabré ‘to die’ is found in the 15th cent.
A less likely explanation is that Macabré was the name of the artist who painted the picture which suggested the first poem on the subject.
There is no evidence to support the theory that the word derives from Arabic maqābir, plural of maqbara cemetery (Moroccan colloquial Arabic məqāber, plural of məqebra tomb), or from Syriac meqabberēy gravediggers. For summaries of further explanations which have been advanced see Trésor de la langue française at macabre, Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus."
You might enjoy, as I did, this explanation of why X is the unknown quantity in Algebra: another case where "sh" got marked as 'x' which is pronounced the same as 'j'. https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_why_is_x_the_unknown
It's a bit of a just-so-story without much in the way of evidence though though, so there's a rebuttal here https://gizmodo.com/why-we-use-x-as-the-unknown-in-math-1657...
It's actually interesting how the left and right have such a strong figurative meaning to them, left being bad (sinister, gauche, etc...) and right being... well, righteous. It's embedded deeply in our languages.
There are a few possible explanations here, regarding sinister:
French also uses “manquer”, and there are traces in spanish (such as a manco being a person that lacks an arm).
Meanwhile French "manquer" and Italian "mancare" seem to come "From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *man-ko- (“maimed in the hand”)."
Actually we still have "manchot" in modern French to mean one-armed which I always assumed came from "manche" (sleeve) but seems to actually have a different etymology.
That's all sourced from the wiktionary by the way.
"Sleeve" in Portuguese is "manga", which in turn is also the word for mango, the fruit. The Latin "manica" meant "sleeve", while the name of the fruit originally comes from an Indian language, into English, via the Portuguese.
Etymology is quite the rabbit hole!
More italian matches:
* fazer -> fare (which is irregular and declined like the verb was "facere") * roza -> rosa (with a [z] sounding s) * djente -> gente (with both dj and g sounding [dʒ])
Nope, in (Brazillian) portuguese "mórbido" means morbid, like in english, and never means soft (suave, macio).
http://www.istanbulsephardiccenter.com/
But their TW account tweets a word a day and it's awesome:
https://twitter.com/sefaraditurkey
Mos ambezaremos un biervo en Judeo-Espanyol kada dia / Her gün bir Judeo-Espanyol kelime öğrenelim. Let’s learn a word in Judeo-Espanyol every day /Aprenderemos una palavra cada día
I've read some Ladino and the only immediately apparent difference is the spelling and a few foreign words that have entered the language. They don't speak in formal polite form (as opposed to Latin American speakers of Spanish), so in that regard, it's closer to Castilian Spanish.
For example, what happens to orthographic G before I or E? I think Ladino has [ʒ] there.
Does the orthographic X become [x] or is it [ʃ]? eg. How would they say Quixote, with a "sh" sound?
Many years ago I found some recordings on the internet and I think it had both of these "old" features. And maybe some new ones, there was something funky going on with nasal consonants, eg. "muestro" for "nuestro".
Interesting, I once came across the original spelling of Mexico: Mejico. In Brazil today they call it "Meshy-ko."
Similarly in English, many of features that the British like to look down their noses as "Americanisms" were invented in Britain.
Another similar story I heard about English is non-rhotacism in the northeastern US. The British took north america pronouncing all the Rs. Then they dropped some. Then some northeastern cities did too. At least, this was the simplistic version I heard.
(Another favorite part of the OP works is the discovery of "lost" puns and dirty jokes due to pronunciation shifts.)
Similarly related, there's the interesting belief/possibility that a time travelling Elizabethan-era speaker of English would feel more kinship to the sometimes maligned contemporary US Southern accent than most other contemporary English accents.
Guessing it was one of constant contact, the Spanish were active sailing back and forth busy looting the Americas, while the Bosnians had lost contact. In the old days, sailing was probably much more efficient than horseback across a mountainous continent. Why didn't they sail over to Croatia? Not sure, perhaps Ladinos weren't active at the coast? Also, religion probably divided them from most Spanish.
yeísmo is also present, which is at present just about absent in Spain, except perhaps from the older speakers in the south.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arb%C3%ABresh%C3%AB_people
I thought the Moors were from Morocco / Mauritania (NW Africa), and Arabs are from Arabia (between NE Africa and Asia)?
I've played several games of CK2 starting in 1066 Spain, it's a real race to consolidate both the split northern Christian kingdoms and the smaller Muslim realms in the south. Marrakesh starts out small, but it's pretty good at consolidating too, and ends up being quite a problem to deal with...
That same year this was written:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram%C3%A1tica_de_la_lengua_ca...
In addition to Castilian and Aragonese, you also had, among others, the Galician language, the Asturian and Leonese languages, and of course in the once-Muslim lands not only Ladino but also Mozarabic (which parallels Ladino in a few ways: Ladino is a close relative of Castilian spoken by Jews in Muslim lands, while Mozarabic is a close relative of Aragonese spoken by Christians in Muslim lands).
Nationalism and nation states. We live in a nationalist world. All places and all people are politically divided into nations. Nationalism is so dominant that we barely think of it as a thing.
Anyway.. ladino & it's speakers are descendants of refugees from the spanish reconquista and inquisition period. It's generally seen though a christian/muslim lens, but this isn't the only way of seeing it. It was also a rise of nationalism.
Muslim spain was part of a multi-ethnic empire. Post reconqista spain was an early form of nation state, with a national ideology. No room for minorities. Jews got the boot first, muslims followed. Refugees of an empire-to-nation-state transition.
In the Ottoman empire (where most refugees went) remained multi-ethnic. That's what empires are. This continued until the empire fell. From that point, the transition to nationalism is stark.
In what became turkey, there was no more room for Greeks or Armenians. Kurds were told to (melting pot) be Turkish. In the (many) other nation states that emerged from the ottoman empire (eg, iraq, syria), jews were effectively exiled in the mid-20th. Christians are now leaving. Cities & regions are dividing into homogenuous ethnic enclaves.
No room for minorities in an ethnic state.
Europe went through the same thing. The two wold wars moved europe from a collection of multiethnic empires to homogenuous national states.
History repeats over and over. When emperise gives way to nations, minorities suffer. Cultures die.
So, i'm suggesting, the reason that ladino (and 6,000 other minority languages) are dying is the absolute victory of nationalism in the 20th century. Nationalism has no room for minorities, their culture or their language. These things wither in nation states. Ladino, with its 600 years of history will die too.
It can't survive in the former ottoman empire because 90% of ladino speaking communities had to integrate or leave (just like the Spanish ultimatum that started it all). Most went to Israel, another national home, another place where ladino can't survive.
The contribution of Arabs to Spanish culture is enormous but that doesn't hide that in medieval times, almost everybody (including them) had barbaric customs.
What I did say was that they were multi-ethnic. Even with all the pogroms, jizra and other forms of discrimination, numerous minorities existed. Empires were multi ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and such.
When those empires gave way to modern nation states (or earlier precusurs, like Spain and Portugal), multiculturalism died. This is the story of the 20th century.
The process is still ongoing, particularly in ex-ottoman states..
There are arguably good and bad things about empires. Multiculturalism^ is a trait of empires. Groups like the spharadim, small communities with their own customs, beliefs and language, exist because empires existed.
Btw... this is not new. King Cyrus, Alexander & Genghis Khan's Empires are notably remembered for their multiculturalism.
^Real multiculturalism. I don't hate melting pot migration, but I don't count it as multiculturalism.
Agrarian empires like the Roman one were absolutely massive, juggernauts that just couldn't be stopped. Yet the Middle Ages were a period of small, warring nations, with comparatively much smaller empires arising. Warfare slowly civilized to the point where the common people barely felt the sting.
The peace of Westphalia took place in 1648, creating the notion of an international system law that was bigger than the individual agreements penned between states.
The Napoleonic France of the 1800s represented a sharp break from this world, almost a repeat of the old juggernauts.
What caused empire to stop working and the polities to get ever smaller? I think the answer belongs in what your parent was getting at, people coalesced into ethnic communities and just wouldn't participate in the building of empire anymore. So existing empires broke up and nation-states arose.
The classic 20th C nation-state went hand-in-hand with 20th-C warfare: it needed both massive industry, and every single man. The Ottomans and other relics of earlier times fell apart under the stress of such wars; the states that survived were those with a strong identity. Such identities were partly fostered for this very purpose.
But we seem to have moved on from this, war is again a profession of a few (plus high-tech weapons), conscripting the millions would be of no use. And in parallel our ties to nations are weaker than before, both whether we'd fight for the flag & conversely whether the country is interested in safety nets etc. Our economy is also much less nation-based: GM in its heyday was quite unlike Apple. He calls this emerging form a "market state".
Earlier forms also fought very different wars, he argues that Westphalia (and Waterloo) were among a series of such transitions, each entailing changes to what states are legitimate, and what kind of wars they fight.
Anyway if this sounds interesting then his book "The Shield of Achilles" is cautiously recommended. Someone really needs to write a condensed version... but if you're willing to skip a bit, the ideas are great.
I'm not really sure what drives it, honestly. I'm just talking observationally, about what kind of polities ended up emerging, however they emerged.
We are now living in an era of near absolute nationalism. Polity & nation are nearly synonyms for our generation.
I agree with the criticism that 14th-15th century Spain was not really a national state, but (like you) I think that the distinction is mostly a matter of convention. I'm calling it a proto-nation state.
The emerging Spanish language, culture, and pre-existing religious identity became a core part of what Spain is. Minority languages, customs and religions became a (literal and metaphorical) heresy. They were eventually all given the same ultimatuum as the Jews (again, metaphorically and literally), assimilate into the mainstream religion, language and culture or leave.
- The pressure of mendicant orders.
- The pope.
Some of these processes are literal decrees, banning practices, languages or people. Some are less legible, like "soft power" in modern terms. I'm interested in the long term results, which was (in the case of Spain early on, and many/most places subsequently) a decisive change from multiculturalism (like the sephardi community of Bosnia represents) to national monoculturalism.
That is, over the centuries societal pressures and dynamics were such that a more monolithic identity succeeded a patchwork of language, dialect and culture.
My argument (I suspect we disagree) is that Spain was an earlier example of something that happened widely in the 19th, 20th and is still ongoing: Nation states emerging from empires and advancing towards cultural homogeneity, to the detriment of multiculturalism which existed under most empires.
When Turkey "emerged" this involved a similar process, expulsion (and worse) of Armenians & Greeks, and conformity pressure on other minorities.
A similar thing happened in Poland, which was barely more than 50% polish speaking catholic when my grandmother was born there, and is 9X% polish catholic now.
When Ireland emerged from Britain, migrations and border gerrymandering ensured "Irish Catholic" homegeneity.
But, it is also true that empires tended to be pluralistic, in that different cultures lived within them for very long periods. Nation states value cultural cohesion and national homogeneity, and pluralism has, in many cases, ceased when nations succeeded empires politically.
Compare nearly any central or austrian european capital in 1900 or 2000. They became far more homogeneous. Take ottoman cities (Cairo, Istanbul, bagdad...), pluralism reversed. It some cases (eg Istanbul), it receded fast and hard. In others, it took longer.
If Sephardi Jews who take up the Spanish Law of Return don't seem attached to Ladino, it's because they're a self-selected group who have decided not to take up the more famous Law of Return.
Because Ladino speakers remain an Other in the European diaspora and can therefore draw on more minority-language support, etc., they have a way to maintain their identity that they would not have if they made aliyah.