Judezmo — the language also known as Ladino, Spanyolit, and Judeo-Spanish — is a
Jewish language composed of Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic and Arabic, and Balkan
elements, which arose in medieval Spain and evolved after the Expulsion of the
Jews from Spain in 1492, primarily in the Ottoman Empire.
The present book is a
comprehensive, university-level Hebrew-language introduction to Judezmo, as
written in the traditional Rashi alphabet. It includes a structural and
sociolinguistic overview of the language and the literature created in it from
the Middle Ages through the modern era, a rich anthology of reading selections,
linguistic analysis, exercises to reinforce the active acquisition of the
language, a detailed chart of the verbal system, and a bilingual dictionary.
The
reading selections, presented in order of difficulty, were taken from the modern
Judezmo literature and press of the past 200 years, and from the rich Judezmo
oral literature — including proverbs and sayings, folk songs and ballads,
stories, jokes and riddles. The reading selections introduce the reader to the
captivating cultural and social world of the Judezmo-speaking Sephardim in the
modern era. The linguistic analysis includes a description of the Judezmo sound
system, the Hebrew-letter and Roman-letter writing systems used to transcribe
it, and a morphological and syntactic analysis of the linguistic structures
appearing in the reading selections, designed to provide the reader with a
thorough introduction to modern Judezmo in its diverse regional and stylistic
forms.
The book is meant for individual study as well as group use, and assumes
no prior knowledge of any language except Hebrew.
