THE LADINO LANGUAGE

http://home.earth link.net/~benven/ladino.html

"You're speaking just like Cervantes," he said. I was in a cantina in Madrid in 1957. I met a man there, he was a reporter. We were conversing over a few drinks. I understood his puzzlement and had to explain. I was speaking the Spanish dialect I had learned at home. The dialect, or maybe it is a separate language, is commonly called, Ladino. More properly it should be referred to as, Djudeo Espanyol. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. My ancestors found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and settled on the Island of Rhodes. Ottoman Jewish communities flourished in Rhodes , Salonika, Izmir, Istanbul, Sarajevo and elsewhere for 500 years and there they preserved the language that they had taken with them from Spain; Fifteenth Century Spanish, the dialect of Columbus, Ferdinand, Isabella and Cervantes. To that reporter in Madrid it was as if a modern American were to meet someone who spoke the English of Shakespearean times. I grew up in a close knit Sephardic community in Los Angeles and assumed that Spanish was the language of the Jews. Not until I was in Junior High School did I learn that some Jews did not speak Spanish, they spoke a strange tongue called, Yiddish.

An even greater revelation was that our Spanish was different from that spoken in Spain and Latin America today. "Today we are going to learn some words in Spanish," said my fifth grade teacher. She continued, "The first thing that you must learn is that in Spanish the letter ‘j' is pronounced like an ‘h'". I thought she was crazy or at least uninformed, at home we pronounced the "j" as an English or French; "zh" or "dzh". Sometimes it was "sh" as in the word "dejar", we would say "deshar," in modern Spanish is it "dehar". And some of the words were different; we would say, "aninda(yet), trocar (change), chapeo (hat) and chapines (shoes)," for the modern Spanish words, "todavia, cambiar, sombrero and zapatos. " Years later I found that the first three words were Portuguese and the fourth was Catalan.

Another major difference between Ladino and modern Spanish is in the word for God. The Spanish say "Dios," derived from the Latin, "Deus." But to the Spanish Jews this was unacceptable because "Dios" ends in the letter "s" and that implies that "Dios" is plural. The foundation of the Jewish faith is that God is singular. This concept is reinforced every time we recite the "Shema;" "...the lord is One." We always referred to God as: "El Dio," always including the article "El."

Another difference is our word for Sunday. In modern Spanish it is "Domingo." But this comes from the Latin word for the "Lords Day." To the Jews Saturday is the Lords Day and we referred to Sunday as "Alhat." I found later that this was the Arabic word for "The First Day," it is related to the Hebrew word "Ehad" (one). When I heard about the Crypto Jews of New Mexico, I wondered if they had preserved any elements of the Ladino dialect. In my communications with Crypto Jews I found many who's grandparents said "El Dio" rather than "Dios" but none who called Sunday "Alhat."

Other possible Ladino elements were the including of an extra "n" in many words and of reversing the "r" with another letter. We say "muncho" (much) rather than "mucho" and "godro" (fat) rather than "gordo." I found that it is very common for rural New Mexicans to add the extra "n," but, few examples of the "r" shift. Does this indicate that the Crypto Jews of New Mexico are indeed descended from the conversos of Spain. The linguistic evidence is not absolute, but together with so much other evidence, it strengthens the argument. The strongest evidence is in the preservation of "El Dio." No Christian would use such words.