Keeping the faith.

Avishai Cohen, an Isreali jazz bassist, performing a song sung in Ladino:

I came across his music recently and it grew on me very quickly. He manages to intermingle music from various culture in a very natural way and has a great since of song structure to boot. But what interests me most today is the language.

Ladino is the language that many Jews speak in Spain. It’s actually a Romance language. That might seem odd considering Hebrew is a Semitic language completely unrelated, but this sort of thing seems to happen with Jewish people outside of Israel. Yiddish is a Germanic language and Juhuri is a Persian language. Jews seem to be one ethnic group that excels at developing their own languages out of the dominant languages of the countries they live in. My hunch is this is due to being a minority everywhere–before Israel came into existence–and having a much stronger urge to maintain their cultural heritage due to it being tied up with a religion. (I mean c’mon, Hebrew? No other language revitalization has ever been so successful.)

Although I may simply be ignorant of how often this happens with other ethnic groups. Maybe Chicano English will end up becoming a language separate from English, for instance. But then this never happened with the English dialects spoken by Italians who immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th century. Most of the examples I can think of are from previous eras and the results are already obviously different from what has happened with Jewish ethnic groups. I’m sure there are many more, though, if anyone cares to share.

I’m also curious about the mutual intelligibility of Ladino for native Spanish speakers. (The lyrics for anyone who wants to check it out.) I feel I can understand much of what Avishai sings (some is actually Hebrew here) with my imperfect grasp of Spanish. I imagine there’s much more cross-over for native speakers. Interestingly, I found this response while looking it up on WordReference:

I a m a native spanish and catalan speaker from Spain, and I just wonder why in the world would someone want to understand some kind’a weird bad-written variation of spanish called ladino.

The commenter is native speaker of Catalan, which is looked at derisively by many native Spanish speakers. WordReference is usually a forum full of people who have a strong respect and understanding of language so it’s amazing to me that someone who speaks a minority language that’s so caught up in controversy would make this extremely hypocritical statement.