I am studying Ladino, aka Judeo-Spanish, partly for a project in my Spanish class and partly out of personal interest. I have a few questions about the language:
Where is the voiceless postalveolar fricative (emotion, sure, she) used? How is it similar to/different from usage in English?
Where is the voiced postalveolar fricative (pleasure, beige) used? How is it similar to/different from usage in English?
Where is the voiceless velar fricative (Chanukah, Chaim, chutzpah, loch) used? How is it similar to/different from usage in English and Hebrew?
Where are contributions from Hebrew and other non-Iberian languages most significant?
How are vowels and diphthongs pronounced? How is this different from Spanish?
Is ‘j’ silent like in Spanish? Does it use the voiceless velar fricative? Is ‘g’ ever silent like it sometimes is in Spanish?
In what other ways do the pronunciation of consonants vary from Spanish or English?
I know of one movie, starring Tom Hanks, which has some of the dialogue in Ladino: Every Time We Say Goodbye. See if your local library or small video rental store has a copy.
There is no finer exponent of the Ladino language than the mighty, mighty voice of Yasmin Levy. No study of Ladino language or culture is complete without her. Her father Isaac was a Ladino musicologist of the finest kind, and Yasmin takes the family tradition one stage further.
Positionally, Ladino /sh/ occurs initially and medially as it does in English. Ladino /sh/ does differ from English in that word-final /sh/ seems only to occur in words borrowed comparatively recently into Ladino from Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic.
In English, /zh/ doesn’t really occur in word-initially or word-finally in native vocabulary. It can be found in those positions in comparatively recent borrowings from French such as genre and garage. Ladino, on the other hand, contains plenty of vocabulary with word-initial /zh/ (note that there is some variation with /zh/ and /dzh/ in Ladino).
Both Ladino and English allow medial /zh/, though in English it’s more of a byproduct of how, in many Latinate words, medial /s/ is rendered in the presence of a following high vowel + unstressed syllable (fusion, closure).
Modern English does not use /x/ in native words, only in recent borrowings. Ladino did not undergo the same phonetic evolution that yields /x/ in Modern Spanish in words like mujer (cf. Ladino muzher). However, extensive borrowings from Arabic and Hebrew have added the /x/ to much Ladino vocabulary in word-intial and medial locations (alhad “Sunday”, hazne “treasurer”).
A quick overview suggests that word-final /x/ is rare or non-existant in Ladino. However, there may be recent borrowings from Arabic or Hebrew that have /x/ in this position. In an older borrowing, a word-final /x/ may well have dropped due to the influence of underlying Spanish syllable structure tendencies (CV syllables being favored over CVC/VC).
Detailed discussion on this at the link on top of this post.
I’m assuming you meant “is ‘h’ silent”.
In Spanish-derived Ladino vocabulary, what is now spelled ‘h’ in Modern Spanish retains the Medieval Spanish pronunciation /f/ in Ladino (Ladino foja = Mod Sp hoja). Accordingly, /h/ in Ladino shows up mainly in vocabulary borrowed from Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages. In such words, ‘h’ is not silent, but pronounced as /x/ or /h/.
As Ladino preserves a good deal of Medieval Spanish phonology, it doesn’t share the /g/ --> /h/ feature that is seen in words like Mod Sp gigante.
See the link on top of this post.
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Also, a good resource for how Hebrew letters were traditonally used to write Ladino.
Yes, I did. Thank you. When I’m talking about Spanish in English, I tend to mix up “j” and “h”. I also tend to say “silent” where I mean “/h/”. I never swap my jota with my hecha when speaking or writing in Spanish, though. I’m not sure why…
Anyway, thanks a ton to those who have contributed for the links and the extensive information. You are an immeasurable help.
Can anyone post some example phrases (and their pronunciations!) which illuminate the differences between the uses of /sh/ and /zh/ and /dzh/; and between /h/ and /x/?
I don’t grok this. What do these acronyms stand for?
Consonant and Vowel. I.e., Spanish tends towards syllables that start with a consonant and end with a vowel, thus, final /x/'s have gotten dropped from words that have been borrowed into Ladino in accordance with usual Spanish practice.
Study the Ladino orthography, especially the section at the bottom titled “Digraphs”. Note that /sh/ is spelled sh, /dzh/ is spelled dj, and that /zh/ is spelled with a j (mujer is /mu.zher/, ojos is /o.zhos/). It’s important to remember that the Ladino letter j is different from Modern Spanish letter j – it’s a “zhalapenyo” pepper in Ladino.
Note also that the Ladino letter z, when occuring before letter m, is pronounced /zh/ (mizmo = /mi.zhmo/).
OK, so once you’ve got that down pat, you can scan through the articles for occurances of those sounds.
The phonemic differences (if any, see below) between the sounds /x/ (Scottish loch) and /h/ (English hat) in Ladino will be harder to figure out from written material, as both sounds are written with the letter h. From the very first link I gave you in the first post of mine in this thread, we learn that the Ladino letter h is pronounced /x/ in words of Hebrew or Arabic origin (Ladino Alhad = /al.xat/). We also learn that in a lot of places where Modern Spanish has silent h, Ladino has retained the Medieval Spanish f. In fact, it is unclear to me whether or not /h/ is a distinct phoneme at all in Ladino – in some of the stuff I’ve been reading, it appears that the Ladino letter h can in fact be pronounced as either /x/ or /h/ without a loss of meaning.
Fetus --there’s a Yahoo! Group called Ladinokomunita whose members are interested in the presrevation of Ladino. I’m betting you can find folks there to help you with phrases and spoken samples. Join up and see.
A little more digging around and perusal of the articles I linked above suggests that word-final /sh/ does show up in some Ladino verb forms (though far less often in nouns). A lot of verb forms that would end in /s/ in Modern Spanish end in /sh/ in Ladino (cf. Modern Portugese).
Wow–thanks again for all the new info! I’ll have to check out the Yahoo group etc. Sorry I didn’t respond earlier–I don’t have Internet access at home.
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