Re: constructed romance languages

Steg Belsky wrote:
>
> On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 20:50:30 -0600 Eric Christopherson <eric@...>
> writes:
> >Steg Belsky wrote:
> >> On the bus home today i was thinking about this, and i got my own
> >> conromancelang idea, which i probably will never get around to
> >> (especially since i know nothing about Latin) - a Judean
> >>romancelang,
> >> influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and/or Arabic.  That would be
> >>one heck of an alternate history conEarth, too.
>
One area that will help you is to look into the fascinating linguistic
history of the Jews of Greece, who have used, in varying periods and
combinations, Greek, Judeo-Greek (Greek in Hebrew letters with some
Hebrew influence, a la Judesmo), Judesmo, Aramaic and Lord knows what
else. Apart from Arabic, you've got all the languages! There's an
Israeli ethnological journal (semi-academic) called Pe'amim, one issue
of which I have and relates to this subject, among others.

Another parallel, and one I know I've mentioned before on the list 'cos
it's one of my pet subjects, is the way that the Yiddish of the
long-established ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Palestine was
influenced by Arabic.


[...]

> Yup.  Although according to the book i read recently about the history of
> Hebrew, "Ladino" is the specific name of the dialect(?) or form of
> Judeo-Spanish that is used in Biblical translations.  The actual
> language's name is Dzhudesmo.  Hrrm...i just noticed, in some places in
> the book it calls it Dzudesmo, and in others D^zudezmo, with an
> upside-down ^ over the first Z.
Well I've always spelled it Judesmo and until someone sues me I'll go on
doing that.

I also gathered that the term Ladino was originally reserved for
religious functions, although in Israel, at least, it is now used for
all registers and uses of Judesmo.

There's another term, too, used for the Judesmo dialect spoken in
Morocco - something like Haki'a, but I don't remember properly. Maybe
related to colloquial Arabic hhaki = to speak?? (pure conjecture)


> Some things that i think are funny (but maybe only to a Hebrew and
> Spanish speaker) that i learned about Dzhudezmo from the book:
> the adjective _mazalado_, "lucky", from Hebrew mazal + Spanish -ado.
> the verb _lamdar_, "to learn", from Hebrew LMD + Spanish -ar.
> the plural noun _ladronim_, "theives", from Spanish ladron + Hebrew -im.
>
That is what I love about the Jewish Diaspora languages in general, and
this is also the essence of Tesk (my own Conlang), and the reason why,
since joining the list, I've come to see that the process I've gone
through over the 20 years since I started to develop Tesk is a kind of
proto-Yiddish one (or proto-Judesmo).  Your example lamdar is just what
I do in Tesk - if you look to my translation of your hakeves hashisha
'asar text, you'll see several examples (though more from Arabic than
Hebrew, since that's where Tesk is heading now).

> I also remember reading somewhere in the book (i can't find the page at
> the moment) that the Hebrew word _afilu_ "even" (not the
> adjective...."even" as in "not only us, but even spammers can get
> email-bombed") seems to appear in almost every Jewish language -
> Dzhudezmo, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, etc.
>
In England I once went to a lecture by a Palestinian Arab citizen of
Israel (his definition), who presented what was, to put it mildly, a
critical view of Israel. I found it vaguely amusing that he kept saying
afilu as a kind or "er" "um" substitute while he was looking for an
English word.


        Shaul