ITALKIAN do you know anything about this language ? It really exists. Judeo-Italian also referred to as Italkian, is an endangered Jewish language, with only about 200 speakers in Italy. The language

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Aliph

ITALKIAN do you know anything about this language ? It really exists.

Judeo-Italian also referred to as Italkian, is an endangered Jewish language, with only about 200 speakers in Italy. The language is an Italian dialect. Some words have Italian prefixes and suffixes added to Hebrew words as well as Aramaic roots.

The neologism Italkian was coined in 1942 by Solomon Birnbaum , who modelled the word on the modern Hebrew adjective ית-/אטלקי italki(t), “Italian”, from the middle Hebrew adjective איטלקי ( ITALICU[M]), “Italic” or “Roman”.

17 avr. 2018 10:55

Commentaires · 11

Hi Aliph,

Thanks for sharing, I was unaware of it! Trying to find more on Italkian makes Ladino look well-documented :-). For those wondering what Judeo-Italian sounds like:

[...]

97. Santo Dio nostro Signore,
retorna a reto lo too forore,
e no guardari a noi piccadori.

100. Pe lo too nomo santo e binditto,
lo nostro coro aiusta a dderitto,
ke te sirvamo in fatto e n ditto.

103. E remembra la prima amanza,
e trai noi de quista gattivanza,
de quista tenebri e scuranza.

[...]

Full poem at www.orbilat.com, la ienti di Sion.

17 avril 2018

Hi Aliph,

Thanks for the two links; especially the second one has a lot of linguistic detail and examples. About the Ladino doppio - apparently, the Italian one is called Ladin in English while the sephardic one gets the extra -o, but I had to wikipedia that :-). In Spanish or Italian this will indeed lead to ambiguity ... guess I will stick to Ladino in English for the moment, as "Judeo-Spanish" / judezmo do not quite have the same ring to my ears :-D. After all, we have more than one Galicia, too ;-).

On a fun note regarding endonyms, Yiddish used to be called Taytsh (Deutsch) in Yiddish, and the verb fartaytshn (= verdeutschen) means to translate (into Yiddish). Which leads to this anecdote of a man reading aloud Schiller's poem: "Zu Dionys - a mensh vos men ruft Dionysus - dem Tyrannen - a vilder melekh - schlich - iz gekumen - ..." "Vos makhstu?" asks his friend overhearing this. "Ikh fartaytsh dem Schiller".

17 avril 2018

A sample of italian Ladino spoken in the Dolomitic Valleys of Ladinia

https://youtu.be/O8XJOnfSAZc

17 avril 2018

Another remark, you are using the word Ladino referring to the Judeo-Spanish spoken by the Sepharadic descendants of the Jews who were thrown out of Spain after the catholic Reconquista but that can stir confusion!

In Italy there is a minority Romance language, spoken in some rural places in the North East like Friuli, called Ladino. Nothing to do with Judaism. It’s a vernacular language very similar to the Romantsch-Ladin which is the fourth official language of Switzerland . They are mutually intelligible.

17 avril 2018

Note: The above text is described as a XIII century poem, I am not sure how representative it is of later stages of the language. There are very marked differences between early Yiddish and the language of the golden age, for example. I was particularly surprised by the lack of words from לשון קודש in the above, but then again, it is hard to judge from one text. If somebody has more, please contribute :-).

17 avril 2018

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Aliph

Compétences linguistiques

Arabe, Anglais, Français, Allemand, Grec (ancien), Italien, Latin, Espagnol, Suisse allemand

Langue étudiée

Arabe, Anglais, Français, Allemand, Grec (ancien), Latin, Espagnol

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