Judeo-Italian languages

Judeo-Italian (or Judaeo-Italian, Judæo-Italian, and other names including Italkian) is an endangered Jewish language, with only about 200 speakers in Italy and 250 total speakers today. The language is one of the Italian languages. Some words have Italian prefixes and suffixes added to Hebrew words as well as Aramaic roots.

The term ''Judeo-Italian''

The glottonym is of academic and relatively late coinage. In English, the term was first used (as ''Judæo-Italian'') by Lazaro Belleli in 1904 in the ''Jewish Encyclopedia'', describing the languages of the Jews of Corfu. In Italian, Giuseppe Cammeo referred to a ('Judaico-Italian jargon') in a 1909 article. That same year, Umberto Cassuto used the term , in the following (here translated into English):

Other designations

* Historically, Italian Jews referred to their vernaculars as (), Hebrew for 'foreign language', 'non-Hebrew language'). The Italian Jewish rite is sometimes called , and linguists use as a description of words of Romance origin in Yiddish. This may be connected with the Germanic use of the word (literally, 'foreign') and derived cognates, for Romance peoples and languages and sometimes Celtic peoples and languages (as in English terms ''Walloons'', ''Wallachians'', and ''Welsh''): the Italian and Sephardic Hebrew script for Torah scrolls is known in Yiddish as or .
*In 1587, David de Pomis used the word in reference to the Italian glosses in his trilingual dictionary. The Hebrew title of the 1609 Venice Haggadah uses the word or () for the language of Leone Modena's translation (, ).
* Other historic descriptions are and , both of which were commonly used in the Middle Ages to mean early Italian dialects in general, i.e. Vulgar Latin varieties.
* After the institution of the Ghetto forced Jewish communities throughout Italy into segregation, the term was identified with local Jewish varieties of regional dialects.
* Another native name type is (e.g., Judeo-Florentine ; < Latin *, or an assimilation of the hiatus * < *).
* The English neologism ''Italkian'' was coined in 1942 by Solomon Birnbaum, who modelled the word on the modern Hebrew adjective , 'Italian', from the Middle Hebrew adjective (< ), 'Italic' or 'Roman'.

Influence on other Jewish languages

According to some scholars, there are some Judeo-Italian loan words that have found their way into Yiddish. For example, the word in Judeo-Italian for 'synagogue' is , closely related to , 'school'. The use of words for 'school' to mean 'synagogue' dates back to the Roman Empire. The Judeo-Italian distinction between and parallels the Standard Yiddish distinction between for 'synagogue' and for 'school'. Another example is Yiddish , from the Judeo-Italian ('gentile', 'non-Jew', 'Christian'), as differentiated from the standard Italian , meaning 'noble', 'gentleman'.

There are also several loanwords from Judeo-Italian dialects in Judeo-Gascon, due to the migration of a few Italian families to the Sephardi communities in Gascony during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Dialects

Judeo-Italian regional dialects (, ), include:
* Judeo-Ferraran () in Ferrara
* Judeo-Florentine (, ) in Florence
* Judeo-Mantuan () in Mantua
* Judeo-Modenan () in Modena
* Judeo-Piedmontese () in the region of Piedmont
* Judeo-Reggian () in the region of Reggio Emilia of Emilia-Romagna
* Judeo-Roman () in Rome
* Judeo-Venetian () in Venice
* Bagitto () in Livorno

At least two Judeo-Italian varieties, based on the Salentino and Venetian languages, were also used in Corfu
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Characteristics

All of the spoken Judeo-Italian varieties used combination of Hebrew verb stems with Italian conjugations (e.g., , 'to eat'; , 'to steal'; , 'to speak'; , 'to go'). Similarly, there are abstract nouns such as , 'goodness'. This feature is unique among Jewish languages, although there are arguably parallels in Jewish English dialect.

Also common are lexical incorporations from Hebrew, particularly those applicable to daily life. Terms from other Jewish languages such as Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish were also incorporated. Bagitto, the dialect of Livorno, is particularly rich in loanwords from Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Portuguese.

It was claimed by Cassuto that most Judeo-Italian dialects reflect the Italian dialect of places further to the south, due to the fact that since the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples, the general direction of Jewish migration in Italy had been northward.

Use in works and publications

One of the most accessible ways to view the Judeo-Italian language is by looking at translations of biblical texts such as the Torah and Hagiographa. For example, the Judeo-Italian language is represented in a 1716 Venetian Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book typically used during a seder, some samples of which are available online.

Today, there are two locations, the Oxford Bodleian Library, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, in which many of these texts have been archived.

ISO and Library of Congress classifications

The International Organization for Standardization language code for Judeo-Italian / Italkian in the ISO 639-3 specification is ; the ISO 639-2 collective language code (for Romance languages) can also apply more generally.

"Italkian" is not used by the US Library of Congress as a subject heading, nor does it figure as a reference to Judeo-Italian. The authorized subject heading is "Judeo-Italian language". Subheadings are:
*Judeo-Italian language: Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
*Judeo-Italian language: Grammar.
*Judeo-Italian language: Italy Livorno Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
*Judeo-Italian language: Texts.

The subject reference is: Judeo-Italian dialect.

LC-MARC uses the following language code: Judeo-Italian.

Assigned collective code: ta(Italian).

See also

* Italian Jews
* Judeo-Latin
* Judeo-Romance languages
* Ladino

Notes

References

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External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Judeo-Italian Languages

Languages of Italy
Endangered Romance languages
Gallo-Italic languages
Jews and Judaism in Italy