© Copyright 2019 Mary K. FitzMorris Productivity, influence, and evolution: The complex language shift of Modern Ladino Mary K. FitzMorris A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2019 Reading Committee: Sharon Hargus, Chair Alicia Wassink Ellen Kaisse Devin E. Naar Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Linguistics University of Washington Abstract Productivity, influence, and evolution: The complex language shift of Modern Ladino Mary K. FitzMorris Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Sharon Hargus Department of Linguistics This dissertation uses data from interviews with Seattle Ladino speakers, an online forum in Ladino, and documents from the University of Washington Sephardic Studies Collection to investigate the language shift that Modern Ladino has undergone. Ladino is the language that developed when the Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492 fled to the Ottoman Empire and mixed Ottoman Turkish and other languages into their Spanish. Chapter 1 of this dissertation provides a short language shift literature review, a brief history of the Ladino speech community, and information about each of the aforementioned Ladino data sources. Chapter 2 explores the variation of the vowel raising pattern found in the Rhodesli dialect of Seattle Ladino and shows that this variation existed before Rhodesli speakers came into contact with non-raising speakers in Seattle. Chapter 3 explores the combinatory potential of the Turkish-origin suffix - dji and finds that, while the majority of the roots being combined with this suffix today are of Turkish origin, there appears to still be some productivity with respect to this suffix. Chapter 4 challenges the traditional three-generation language shift model, showing that this model is insufficient for Modern Ladino, as it fails to account for the multilingualism and constant language contact inherent to the Ladino speech community in the 20th century, but also throughout its history. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a snapshot of Modern Ladino in the 20th century, and highlights what are likely some of the last recordings of Seattle Ladino speech that will be made. i Table of Contents 1 Introduction and background 1 1.1 Language endangerment and language shift 4 1.2 Ladino in Sefarad, the Ottoman Empire, and Seattle 9 1.2.1 Ladino in Sefarad 9 1.2.2 Ladino in the Ottoman Empire 11 1.2.3 The Seattle Ladino speech community 14 1.3 Data collection 17 1.3.1 Interviews with Seattle Ladino speakers 17 1.3.2 Online corpus 21 1.3.3 Sephardic Studies Collection archive 25 2 Vowel raising in the Rhodesli dialect of Seattle Ladino 27 2.1 Ladino and Spanish phonology 31 2.2 Vowel raising literature 32 2.2.2 Vowel raising in Ladino dialect sketches 36 2.2.3 Clewlow (1990) 41 2.3 Vowel raising in Seattle Ladino 46 2.3.1 Basic principles of vowel raising 48 2.3.2 Vowel raising within verb paradigms 54 2.3.3 Variation in raising 57 2.3.4 Etymology and raising 63 2.4 Evidence of vowel raising in historical documents 65 2.4.1 Rachel Shemarya's borecas di patata recipe 65 2.4.2 The Barkey Letters 75 2.5 Conclusion 87 3 The Turkish suffix -dji 88 3.1 Literature 89 3.1.1 Turkish phonology and morphology 89 ii 3.1.2 Ladino morphology 93 3.1.3 Turkish -ci/-çi 94 3.2 Research questions and hypotheses 99 3.3 Methods 101 3.4 Findings 104 3.4.2 Non-agentive anomalies 106 3.4.2.1 Proper names 106 3.4.2.2 Hadji 107 3.4.3 Roots and combinatory potential 108 3.4.4 Vowel harmony 113 3.4.5 Voicing assimilation 115 3.4.6 Ladino inflection 120 3.5 Conclusion 123 4 The complex process of language shift in Modern Ladino 125 4.1 Italian, French, and Spanish: Evidence of language shift in the Barkey letters 126 4.1.1 Italian, French, and education in Rhodes 130 4.1.2 Haketia, Ladino, and re-Hispanicization in Tangier 134 4.1.2.1 A brief history of re-Hispanicization in Morocco 134 4.1.2.2 Re-Hispanicization in Argentinean Ladino 141 4.1.2.3 Claire’s letters and Rhodesli Ladino in Morocco 143 4.2 Influence or interference? The cases of Spanish, French, and English in Ladino today 148 4.2.1 Spanish and Modern Ladino 149 4.2.1.1 In Seattle 149 4.2.1.2 On Ladinokomunita 152 4.2.2 French and Modern Ladino 158 4.2.3 English and Modern Ladino 162 4.3 Conclusion 167 5 Conclusion 169 References 171 iii Appendix A 176 Appendix B 179 Appendix C 183 Appendix D 184 Appendix E 186 iv Acknowledgements Thank you to Alex St-Onge. Thank you to my committee: Sharon Hargus, Alicia Wassink, Ellen Kaisse, and Devin Naar. Thank you to Professor Bryan Kirschen of SUNY Binghamton for his extensive mentorship and feedback, to Rachel Bortnick for allowing me to use the Ladinokomunita data, and to Ty Alhadeff of the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program for his help with the documents of the Sephardic Studies Collection. Thank you to the UW Center for Global Studies and Middle East Center for awarding me Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships in Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew, without which this dissertation would have been much less thorough. Thank you to the UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies for awarding me two Graduate Fellowships and an Opportunity Grant and for supporting my research in numerous other ways during my time at the University of Washington. Thank you also to Selim Kuru, Mika Ahuvia, David Bunis, Clarissa Surek-Clark, Emily Thompson, Rey Romero, Claire FitzMorris, Ümit Atlamaz, Ted Levin, Mike Furr, Sarala Puthuval, Leanne Rolston, David Inman, Brent Woo, Nathan Loggins, Wendy Kempsell Jacinto, Amie DeJong, and to everyone else in the UW Linguistics Department who has contributed to this project. And, of course, mersi muy muncho to the members of Ladinokomunita for their rich messages, and, lastly, to the Ladineros for giving so much of their time to teach me about their language. v To the Ladineros A los ke mos desharon la buena vida, en Gan Eden ke esten. vi Author’s Note Audio recordings of some of the Seattle Ladino speech examples included in this dissertation can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/mollyfitzmorris. 1 1 Introduction and background Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, is an Indo-European language that developed when many of the Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492 fled to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. These speakers, known as Sephardic Jews (from the Hebrew Sefarad ‘Spain’), presumably comprised a heterogeneous speech community in the Ottoman Empire, having come from diverse parts of the Iberian Peninsula speaking many different Ibero- Romance language varieties. Eventually, Castilian Spanish became the dominant language of this new speech community, but gradually, speakers began to mix elements from Turkish, Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, and other languages into their Ottoman Jewish variety of Spanish.1 Presently, Ladino is highly mutual intelligible with Modern Castilian Spanish, but the two differ not only due to retentions of Medieval Castilian forms by the Ladino speech community in the Ottoman Empire, but also due to innovations made by those same speakers. Ladino is currently very endangered, but 1 Much like with American Jewish English, there were also already elements of Hebrew (and Aramaic) present in the Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews before they left the Iberian Peninsula. 2 Seattle, Washington is home to one of the few remaining Ladino speech communities in the world, with most of the speakers in their early 80s or older. Bunis (2013b) separates this history of the Ladino language into three periods, defining Old Judezmo as the period before the 1492 expulsion from Spain, Middle Judezmo as the period between 1492 and approximately 1790, and the Modern Judezmo period as the period from 1790 onward. Bunis (2013b) further defines the Early Modern period as until World War I. Following this terminology, I use the term Modern Ladino in this dissertation to refer to the speech acquired to varying degrees and in different locations around the world by Ladino speakers in the 20th century. It is worthwhile to note that while Bunis prefers the term “Judezmo,” as he asserts that this was the most common term for the language in the Early Modern period (1982, p. 51), and many other scholars prefer the term “Judeo-Spanish,” I will refer to the language throughout this dissertation as “Ladino,” as this is by far the preferred term for Seattle speakers of the language. Like any speech community undergoing language shift, modern-day Seattle Ladino speakers show abundant evidence of language decay in their speech, and all have switched to speaking English as their dominant language. In fact, it appears that the 3 speech community underwent a complete language shift from Ladino to English within three generations, the second of which is the oldest generation of Sephardic Jews in Seattle today. In this dissertation, however, I showcase several features of Modern Ladino, using data from Seattle speakers, and from other speakers around the world, to show that the Modern Ladino language shift is far more complicated than it appears superficially. I examine the notions of productivity and decay and interference and influence to illustrate this process and discuss its connotations for speakers today as well as for the future of the speech community and the language. In this introductory chapter, I provide background information, not only on the history of the language and the Seattle Ladino speech community, but also on language endangerment and language shift.