David M. Bunis1: Problems in Judezmo Linguistics
Revisited
Interviewed by Judith Roumani, transcribed by Gila (Martha) Griner
May 25, 2022
Judith Roumani: It’s May 25, 2022, and I am sitting here in the Hebrew University, overlooking Jerusalem, and about to interview Professor David Bunis.
Thank you so much, Professor Bunis, for agreeing to meet with Sephardic Horizons to share some of your very extensive knowledge with us . . .
David Bunis: My pleasure.
J.R. : . . . regarding the history and development of the Sephardic language as I shall call it for now. David Bunis is Professor Emeritus. That is correct?
D.B. : Yes
J.R. : . . . of the Department of Hebrew Language and Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, where we are meeting today.
I ‘d like to discuss some of the linguistic problems that you originally raised in the 1970s and 1980s and see whether, and how, your thinking about these problems has evolved since your early work.
D.B. : That will really test my memory!
J.R. : Ha, ha! Would you like to tell us perhaps a little about your background and how you got into this field?
D.B. : Ok. It is, maybe, a little unusual for a specialist in this language and culture. My parents are, as far as we know, Ashkenazim. My father is from Lithuania, my mother was born in Jerusalem, to a family that was from around 1820 in Eretz Israel. In her family they spoke Yiddish, but it was the special Yiddish of the people in Eretz Israel, who borrowed words from Arabic and Ladino or Judezmo, the language of the Sepharadim, as I might prefer to call it.
I discovered Ladino, the existence of the language, through a text book on Yiddish, Uriel Weinreich’s College Yiddish, which has a very interesting if short chapter on Jewish languages, and he talks about what he calls Judezmo. And I had been calling it after I learned about it "Judeo-Spanish." But when I began studying in Columbia University, which is where I got my doctorate, I was told the better name for it is Judezmo. That was the name that the popular speakers were calling it, and it wasn't enough for me to just rely on what they were telling me because they were Yiddishists and I would assume they would have an interest in a language name that means Jewish, and I started to investigate, and in fact it seemed to me that the popular-level Jews were actually calling it Judezmo or Jidio, meaning Jewish.
J.R. : Oh, ok. Thank you. You mentioned Uriel Weinreich . . .
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : But I see that you referred to Max Weinreich.
D.B. : Right, he was Uriel's father.
J.R. : Ah, ok. He seemed to have at that time some influence on your thinking.
D.B. : Yes, very much so. Right, because I got into the field of Jewish languages through Uriel Weinreich and then, the reading of the creative articles of his father Max Weinreich, who was very interested in Jewish languages in general in addition to very intensive and interest in and work in the field of Yiddish linguistics. In his book The History of the Yiddish Language, he’s got a chapter on other Jewish languages and how Yiddish and other Jewish languages have some common features.
J.R. : And his views about the influence of Roman La’azic (as you call it) or Italic La'az, or maybe that is Judeo-Latin?
D.B. : That’s I guess Judeo-Italian . . .
J.R. : . . . And how that influenced Jewish speech in the Iberian Peninsula.
D.B. : La'az is a word that originally means a "foreign language". It seems in the Bible, apparently, in that context, it means "Egyptian.” When the Jews were living in Egypt, they considered the Egyptian language, Laaz, a "foreign language" as opposed to their own language, Hebrew, and then over the centuries the meaning changed to the languages of the non-Jewish neighbors. So in the Mishnah it means "Greek" and, later on, in the Romance speaking areas, it came to denote Latin and its derivatives. So recognizing this, Judeo-Italian speakers, Judeo-Spanish speakers, and various other Romance language speakers, when writing in Hebrew, called their language La'az.
J.R. : Ah and you talked at that time, a few years ago, about reconstructing a putative Roman Laazic proto-language.These are your words.
D.B. : Right, there are a few linguists, especially someone named David Blondheim . . .
J.R. : Ah, right.
D.B. : . . . Who because of the shared features and the unique features of the translation languages used by Romance-speaking Jews to translate the Bible. . . . (For example, in Judezmo, we have the word "meldar" "to read", and in Judeo-Italian "meletare"), he proposed that there must have been something, some variety of Romance or Latin that was unique to the Jews, maybe not very unique, but at least it had its own special lexicon, some of the words deriving from probably Judeo-Greek, like the word/verb "meldar".
J.R. : Ah, right, right. Is there today a Roman Jewish language or dialect?
D.B. : In Italy there are some remnants of various dialects of Judeo-Italian. And as a matter of fact, when we met years ago, at the conference in Livorno, where there was a community of Judezmo- speaking Jews and also local Judeo-Italian speaking Jews, they had a special variety of Italian that was used by the Jews of Livorno.
J.R. : Right, called "Bagit(t)o".
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : We had an article about that in Sephardic Horizons. I could send it to you if you are interested.
D.B. : Yeah, I would be.
J.R. : Yes, so, this went on for approximately 1,500 years. . . .
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : . . . That the remnants of the Roman La'azic and of Latin and Vulgar Latin were influencing Jewish speech in the Iberian Peninsula. And how did the speech patterns of the three conquerors, Romans, Visigoths and Muslims, affect the Jews?
D.B. : Eh, well with the Visigoths, we are talking about Germanic elements. I don't know if as such Visigothic had any kind of specific influence on the language of the Jews. It influenced Spanish to a certain extent, mostly in place names, but the great non-Romance impact on Spanish, and in the language of the Jews in Spain in the Middle Ages, was Arabic. And Arabic spoken by the Jews and certain Hebrew elements they wrote in the Hebrew alphabet and so on. And this of course, led to borrowings which remained in the language in Ladino and Judezmo up until the present day. For example, the basic word, the word for Sunday, "Alhad" is of Arabic origin. The Jews evidently did not want to borrow from the Spanish the word "Domingo" which they understood to refer to Jesus as the lord.
J.R. : Yes, domingo, it refers to domination.
D.B. : Yes, right. And that Jesus is the lord, which they didn't accept. So, they prefer to keep using the word "Alhad", that they had used when they were speaking Judeo-Arabic.
J.R. : Right. Would you suspect or hypothesize that in medieval Iberia men and women spoke different dialects? That the women would be less influenced by the outside, say Arabic or the beginnings of Romance languages?
D.B. : I guess it is possible. I mean, that actually makes sense because the women were probably mostly in their homes speaking with other women, except for their families and their male members of their families. It could be that, and I am basing what I said, on the situation afterwards in the Ottoman Empire.
J.R. : Right.
D.B. : The men tended to be outside, in contact with non-Jews, and this encouraged them to borrow from the neighbors' languages and the woman tended to be more conservative in speech. And it is very possible that the very same situation existed in Spain during the transition from Judeo-Arabic to Judeo-Spanish.
J.R. : Right. But we don't have any actual proof of that.
D.B. : I don't think so.
J.R. : What about the "jarchas" (Kharjas): are they supposed to be spoken by women?
D.B. : Yeah. The "jarchas.” I am not sure they particularly represent Jewish women. They were the final stanza in Romance in poems that were written either in Hebrew or Arabic. Evidently, the final stanza was from a popular Spanish song. But I don't know if any of them have been identified as particularly Jewish in origin.
J.R. : Right. Ok. So that could not lead us to any more clarity probably.
D.B. : Right. The writers were men. The writers of the poems. So, they were familiar with the songs evidently.
J.R. : Yes. Ok. I think you referred to this in the beginning but I have a question about the names of the language. In Sephardic Horizons we usually talk about Ladino because we have a more general, non-specialized public, some scholarly, some non-scholarly, and “Judeo-Spanish” and its various versions in different languages is also very prevalent, perhaps more in Europe. In America, “Ladino” still more or less reigns supreme, but your preference is "Judezmo" and I think you explained to us why. But if you want to add anything.…
And the other part of this question is: Is this a problem that will ever be resolved?
D.B. : (laughing) Good question. A controversial topic and that was something that I wasn't aware of when I first entered the field. First, before I got interested in it, I only learned about it, and my teacher, Ph.D. mentor Marvin Herzog, at Columbia, learned about it, when after he proposed that I give a course in the language, an introduction to the language, and that we call it Judezmo, there was some clash with members of the community who said NO, that is the wrong name for the language.
J.R. : Oh, what was their preference? What did they offer?
D.B. : They, I think, were using "Ladino".
J.R. : Yes, yes, right.
D.B. : Yeah, but on the other hand, I am sure you are familiar with the work of Haim Vidal
Sephiha in Paris, of blessed memory.
J.R. : Definitely, yeah. He sent us an article at one point, on that precise issue.
D.B. : I would like to see that too. I don't think I’ve seen that one.
And his argument was that Ladino only means the unique language of translation of the Bible, which is an archaic and also very literal following of the Hebrew word order and a kind of a calque, loan translation language.
J.R. : Right, right.
D.B. : Rachel Bortnick, when she established "Ladinokomunita", she also heard from Professor Sephiha, and a few others, that they are using the wrong name for the site because that is not the name for the usual Language that people speak and write. And they turned to me and asked what I thought, and I said: well, I had to point out that Rabbi Abraham Palacci, who was the Chief Rabbi of Izmir in the late 1800s. himself said: " the Ladino that we speak (el ladino ke avlamos)” and, this was in direct opposition to what Sephiha was arguing, I think what Sephiha missed, it's that Ladino refers to the Romance of the Jews in opposition to Hebrew and because Rabbi Palacci was talking about the use of the Romance of the Jews in opposition to Hebrew that was what enabled him to use the term that way and to speak about speaking Ladino. Still, as I said, I prefer the term Judezmo, because i think it is a kind of popular name for the language, represents the name that was used by maybe even the majority but not the majority today. It would have been, I suppose, in the generations of the grandparents or even great-grandparents, but evidently it was used for quite a while before the switch to names like Judeo-Spanish.
J.R. : Right, right. I suspect that it will never be resolved.
D.B. : Right. I doubt it.
J.R. : But anyway, it brings in other topics that enlighten us about the language. Something else you mention is a "Language Atlas" in your earlier writings.
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : A "Language Atlas" is needed. So, I am wondering, do you still think it’s needed, and is it possible?
D.B. : Well, at that time, in a way, I solved the problem for myself by writing an MA paper, that was the topic of my Masters Thesis at Columbia.
J.R. : Oh.
D.B. : A “Dialect Atlas of Judezmo” but after working on it and bringing it to a certain degree of completion my adviser suggested that I stop, I had done enough, and move on to my Ph.D. project. Which I did. So I was never able to finish it, but at Hebrew University I had a doctoral candidate called Aldina Quintana.
J.R. : I know the name.
D.B. : Yes, she actually has been working on "Dialect Geography and Judezmo'' in Germany, and when she came to Israel she became a doctoral candidate of mine and she actually wrote an excellent "Dialectology of Ladino''. So, that has been done.
J.R. : Ah, ok. I was going to ask, how does one deal with the declining numbers of native speakers this late in the story? And how do you get your information now?
D.B. : Yeah, that is a problem that people are working on; specially young people who’ve become terribly interested in the language, and are offering online courses, I think maybe some of them without any payment required. And they are trying to generate a new generation of speakers of the language or at least passive people who have a passive knowledge of it. So, it is kind of artificial. There are very few children born today speaking any kind of Ladino. A rare exception is the case of the young historian Devin Naar in Seattle, Washington.
J.R. : Yes, yes, yes.
D.B. : Who is raising his children partly to speak Ladino.
J.R. : Right. That's amazing.
D.B. : But I think that is quite a unique situation and if there would be many more like those children, then the situation would improve.
J.R. : Yes. It is not like the situation of Eliezar Ben Yehuda right? Eventually, people were likely to come along.
D.B. : Yeah, It shows you the importance of having a state.
J.R. : Right. What about lexical variation between different regions and countries. Would you like to illustrate it a little bit?
D.B. : That is, also, kind of a controversial topic. I remember some people from the radio program, the Ladino program, in Israel, saying that from time to time they practically go at each other with knives when they have to decide on which name, which word to use for a particular concept because let's say one comes from Izmir in Turkey and the other from Istanbul and they find it very hard to agree on the same word for whatever concept. I guess a lot of it is a certain different pronunciation of words. But that is not so common anymore because people are more or less adapting the pronunciation of the Jews of Istanbul and Salonika. They're different from one another. The people from Salonika by tradition have the "F" sound at the beginning of words where those in Istanbul and Izmir don't have it. It comes from "F'' in Latin.
J.R. : Right. And Bosnia too.
D.B. : Right, and Bosnia too, right.
J.R. : Well Rachel Bortnick, or Rashel, usually says: most people said it like this but in Izmir we always used to say this. She does try to mark the differences.
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : Well, when we get to present-day variations: are they the result of variations that existed pre-exile in Iberia or are they the result of post-exilic influences of new languages, or maybe both?
D.B. : It is hard to know but some of them might even have originated in Iberia before the expulsions, maybe the difference between having the sound "e" or "i" and the sound "o" or "u". Let's say when it is not stressed at the end of a word. The use of "F” or the absence of "F" so that in some places like Bosnia people would say "fiju" for son, in other places they said "Iju", for example in the Island of Rhodes, in Istanbul and Izmir: "Ijo". So that might tie into certain differences that already existed before the expulsions and also partly might tie into the way Spanish developed but that didn't influence the Jews after the expulsions probably but …. (interruption by JR)
J.R. : Well Castilian became a national language just about the same time the Reconquista was finished and the Jews were expelled, and there was I think the grammar of Nebrija that standardized to some extent, and all these things were happening at the same time. Then, the Jews left, disconnected themselves by necessity, and became exposed to very different languages. More Arabic in Morocco, which gives us "Haketiya", and Turkish, and then also Italian, Greek, and French. I am sure other languages too.
Could you tell us a little bit about the extent of the use of Hebrew and Aramaic.I know you studied this and you suggested, many years ago, that perhaps they are less prevalent in Judezmo than in Yiddish.
D.B. : That's certainly what it seems like when we speak with people today. The literary language that we have from after the expulsion in the 16th century into the 19th century was primarily the language of the rabbis and there we find a very rich component of borrowings from Hebrew and Aramaic. So, it's very hard to know how people actually spoke. It's possible that when some rabbis actually lectured in the synagogues they also used the Hebrew and Aramaic words and it is very possible that most people understood them. They had a passive knowledge but they themselves might not have used them. Texts from the late 19th century that tried to imitate popular speech show more Hebrew than we find in today's language. So, it might be a generational difference that as the tradition, the religious tradition, went into decline and people studied Judaism less and Jewish texts in Hebrew. Maybe that went along with the decline in the use of Hebrew elements in Ladino and also, a certain kind of philosophy that the Jews evidently learned from the French; that you shouldn't mix languages. If you speak a kind of Spanish don't mix in elements from Hebrew or Turkish or Greek. Keep it Romance. Since the Jews of the Ottoman Empire didn't have firsthand contact with the Spanish, what they tended to turn to was Italian and French.
J.R. : Yes, because of the Alliance schools and the Italian schools in some places.
D.B. : Right. So, that enabled them to replace Hebrew words with Italian or French words.
J.R. : Yes, with interesting spellings.
D.B. : Right.
J.R. : Could you talk to us about "Fusion Elements"? When several languages come together to form one word. I’ve heard of a lot of words that contain two languages. Some examples I have here. "Enharemar", to put a herem or to excommunicate, with a Spanish beginning and ending, and Hebrew in the middle. "Taburaji", mischief maker, "tabur" is from Hebrew...
D.B. : "Tarbut raah" is the origin.
J.R. : Oh, "tarbut raah" but it became “taburaji”, with a Turkish ending, there is really no Spanish in that word.
D.B. : The only way Spanish can enter is if you pluralize it.
J.R. : Taburajis.
D.B. : Right. The "s" ending is the Spanish element.
J.R. : That's three languages. Then, this word: "Purimlikes", that has Purim in Hebrew; "lik", diminutive from Turkish and the ending "s" in the plural.
D.B. : "Lik" in Turkey is added to words to indicate something that is related to it. So, something that is connected with "Purim", the Jews added "lik" in order to turn it into the word “present.”
J.R. : I see, it is not diminutive.
D.B. : No, no.
J.R. : Did you have any favorite "fusion" words that you can mention?
D.B. : Well, one word I like is "pismonji" because it is known from the 18th century, and it refers to men who did singing at weddings and so on. They would sing "pizmonim" and they would be called "pismonjis", which has the Turkish ending "-ji" which is for a person who does something, a profession; and the "s", Spanish plural marker "s" at the end of the word. And another nice word is “benadamlik”. “Benadam”, person; “lik” what the ashkenazim call mensh, to show
“benadamlik”, I guess in Yiddish it’s menschlichkeit, being a mensh.
J.R. : Yes. I thought the “lik, ik” was a diminutive like the Spanish “ico”, but it is not.
D.B. : It is something else.
J.R. : Have any of these words entered into Hebrew today? Do we hear any of them in Modern Hebrew?
D.B. : What you hear in Hebrew, maybe not as much as when the great migration of Jews from Turkey came to Israel in the 1950s, is the ending “iko” and feminine “ika”. So Moshe is still often called “Moshiko” and Sara, “Sarika”. So that is the diminutive ending that you are talking about. That is still used in Israel. That is one of the elements from Ladino, structural elements, that enter Hebrew.
J.R. : Have you been watching The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem?
D.B. : No. I haven’t gotten into that yet. I did see The Club.
J.R. : Ah, yes. That was the 1950s and the other one is set in the 1920s to 1940s. So it is worth listening to it. I would like to hear your opinion later on.
Are there swear words which have come to Hebrew from Judezmo? It must have swear words!
D.B. : Well, there is an expression that is pretty well known to Israeli Hebrew speakers which is “de mi kulo”, pardon me for saying, but it means something of low quality, literally meaning “from my behind”. But that is an expression that did catch on. I don’t know how many young people today use it or even if they know of it.
J.R. : I will ask my Hebrew teacher and see how she reacts to it.
Then, you wrote in the 70s and the 80s that native speakers have not made efforts to preserve the language. You probably wouldn't agree with that today.
D.B. : Right. It’s amazing to see, and it could be that people who were working at the time, have retired since then, and are devoting all of their free time to trying to preserve and propagate Ladino. And that’s a new phenomenon, relatively new and it’s not only something for the native speakers and the descendants to be encouraged by, it’s also encouraging the young people. Not necessarily even connected to the community through family. Also, to get into taking an interest in preserving Ladino.
J.R. : Yes, it’s amazing.
D.B. : It is amazing.
J.R. : It’s wonderful. And the internet of course is the main medium for these connections. So, people can participate in that “vijita de alhad” which is shown in Buenos Aires, and you have people participating from all over the world. And I suppose the Corona pandemic situation of the last two years has made this one of the few activities that people could do.
D.B. : Yes, and really showing us what we can do without necessarily being together in a classroom, in a particular institution. We can be in touch with people all over the world and speak in Ladino, and talk about Ladino.
J.R. : Right. Have you heard about other languages that have had some sort of renaissance?
D.B. : I think Yiddish partly is also enjoying the renaissance. With other languages I am not really familiar but I think with those two Jewish languages. As a matter of fact, with Judeo-Arabic,
I don’t think it has had as much of an impact. And that’s maybe tied in with the political situation.
The political problem of Arabic and people in Israel, where on the one hand, the person identifies with the language and culture because of the family. And, on the other hand, is somewhat skeptical about Arabic because of the friction between the various sectors in Israel.
J.R. : Right. We have a friend in Rome who wanted to create an app for former Libyan Jews to practice Libyan Judeo-Arabic with their phones. I don’t know whether that really took off or not. Perhaps he was the only person who thought this was a wonderful idea. I am not sure.
Actually, my final question: What do you think about the efforts at standardization of the language of “Aki Yerushalaim”? It was probably one of the first institutions to try to standardize the language and spread to the Akademia de Ladino or Judeo-Espanyol. I am not sure what its exact name is.
And various manuals for studying the language also. Let's see in France, where they had more
French-oriented spelling. I studied the Manual of Judeo-Spanish of Marie-Christine Varol, and there is one by Matilda Kohen Sarano, which probably falls in a different system, probably Aki Yerushalaim. What do you think about all of this?
D.B. : Well, the French system I guess is very good for people in France, but outside France I think the native speakers are not used to it. And it is also a bit problematic because you have to remember the interpretation of the spelling, what the linguist calls the graphemes, the symbols representing sounds, within the context of French and not of other languages. So that CH is used for the sound SH but only in the French-speaking system. The system is based on French.
J.R. : Nehama’s dictionary also does that.
D.B. : Nehama’s dictionary actually was published after his death. It uses a kind of more linguistic phonetic system, which is also hard for the native speakers. It makes the dictionary a bit hard for native speakers to use. I heard a number of complaints. It's a great dictionary in my opinion but you have to be able to switch your understanding of the graphemes. I think what people ordinarily use is that called today the Aki Yerushalaim system, which was proposed by Moshe Shaul, of Israel, born in Izmir. I think that's the system that most speakers use. I think it is easier to learn. You can write just very phonetically and it incorporates symbols from several other languages that the native speakers tend to know. I use it myself and the Ladino Authority in Israel advocates its use. And it published a booklet outlining the system.
J.R. : Right. I think Ladinokomunita uses the same thing.
D.B. : Yes, it uses the same system.
J.R. : I think it is a good development.
D.B. : Yes, I think so. Many different systems had been used before but this system is good for practically everybody. Is it good for those in France? I think even some of the people in France use it.
J.R. : Well, thank you very much. Is there anything you’d like to add, to talk about?
D.B. : Just to encourage anybody who has the free time, and the ability, to improve his or her Ladino.
J.R. : Or Judeo-Espanyol or Judezmo (both laughing). Whatever it is, do it.
Thank you so much Professor David Bunis. We really appreciate this and our readers will be very interested.
D.B. : My pleasure. Thank you. Nice speaking to you.
1 David M. Bunis has published prolifically in Judezmo/Ladino linguistics. This interview includes the title of an article he published in Mediterranean Language Review 1 (1984), 103-129. He is considered the doyen of Judezmo/Ladino linguistics in Israel and is an adviser to the Akademia del Ladino. A recent publication he co-authored is Ora Rodrigue Schwarzwald, ed., Las ortografias del Ladino (Jerusalem: Akademia Nasionala del Ladino en Israel, 2021). In 2013 he was awarded the Emet Prize for his contributions to the study of Judezmo and Jewish languages, and in 2015 was appointed an Académico Correspondiente Extranjero, Real Academia Española (Madrid).