Judeo-Spanish Proverbs As an Example of the Hybridity of Judezmo Language

Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis No 3377 Studia Linguistica XXX Wrocław 2011 AGNIESZKA AUGUST-ZARĘBSKA Wrocław, Poland Judeo-Spanish proverbs as an example of the hybridity of Judezmo language The Jews, who in 1492 were expelled from the Christian Spain, took as part of their Sephardic – meaning both Hispanic and Jewish – legacy the language they used to speak in their former motherland. This was a Jewish variety of medieval Cas- tilian, which in the following centuries evolved into a new dialect (Bornes-Varol 2003:113, Sephiha 1991:14–15) or language (Geller 1994:16, Gold 1987:69–80) called by the scholars Judeo-Spanish. This new language, along with other Jewish languages, is a fusion language (Bunis 2003:193). In its tissue there are inter- twined Ibero-Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic, Arabic and other (e.g. Turkish, Greek or Slavonic) elements. To some degree the same factors are entwined in the linguistic world view embedded in this language and in the texts written in it. The structure of the language refl ects both the co-existence of the components coming from different stock languages and the history of its speakers with the unique characteristics of their culture. In other words, it records the history of their rela- tionships with non-Jewish neighbours and reveals the fi elds of their life and culture open or closed to foreign infl uence. Diachronic study of Judeo-Spanish and its varieties also lets us get to know the dynamics of the transformations inside the Sephardic culture (e.g. intensity of acculturation processes). The aim of this paper is to present some selected features of Judeo-Spanish – particularly of its Turkish-Balkan (also called Ottoman) variety – that refl ect the hybrid condition of the language of the Sephardim.1 Its different components will be described with the help of Sephardic proverbs, treated as samples both of the popular culture and speech of the Jews in Diaspora. Proverbs as well as other texts forming part of the oral tradition of Sephardic Jews were amongst the fi rst items 1 In Polish I have presented the general description of the vernacular and calque variants of Judeo-Spanish as well as different approaches to the names of this language in August-Zarębska 2009:85–102. Studia Linguistica 30, 2011 © for this edition by CNS ssl30b.inddl30b.indd 7 22012-04-23012-04-23 009:29:499:29:49 8 AGNIESZKA AUGUST-ZARĘBSKA of their spoken language collected and recorded by the scholars, who in 1960s– 1970s realised that Judeo-Spanish was getting moribund. The term ‘hybridity’ is understood here as a linguistic property of being compound of the elements coming from various contact languages and cultures. All these components are equally important and all of them determine the specifi c character of the language; in con- sequence, they also determine the identity and the world view of its users.2 In case of Judeo-Spanish, hybridity concerns such aspects of the language as phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, orthographic systems and even the names of the language itself. In this paper Sephardic proverbs were chosen to present the elements derived from the main contact languages of Judeo-Spanish. There were several reasons to do so. To start with, these proverbs can be considered as samples of the speech being on the border of the colloquial and literary language. Although there happen some dialectal infl uences – refl ected in the co-existence of a few variants of the same saying – generally, the proverbs, in opposition to other texts, seem to be rep- resentative of the whole Ottoman Diaspora language. In addition, their usage was typical of all the social classes (Lévy 1969:88). Therefore, they permit to observe general regularities of the Turkish-Balkan variety.3 The sayings bare testimony to the hybridity of Sephardic culture not only with reference to their language. The Judeo-Spanish paremiological lore contains proverbial phrases originating in different traditions. Isaac Jack Lévy divides Sephardic proverbs into two groups: “proverbios” and “refranes”. Although in Castilian both terms are exchangeable, he calls proverbios maxims that occur in medieval Jewish writings. They are mainly items of Biblical and Talmudic wisdom, but also some of them are of ancient Greek and Roman origin. Lévy considers refranes as typical of the oral legacy, whose greatest part derives from the Hispanic root. He even compared the high frequency of using them in contem- porary everyday conversations amongst Judeo-Spanish native speakers to that of 2 The term ‘hybridity’ is very often used in the context of postcolonial studies with reference to the condition of “subaltern” cultures being dominated by Western conquerors. For just this reason, Rosman fi nds it diffi cult to apply hybridity theory to Jewish cultural history. He shows fl aws of treat- ing Jewish culture / cultures by analogy to the colonised cultures – due to the fact that the Jews have never been colonised by the Europeans, in modern times, in the sense the other (African, American, etc.) countries have (Rosman 2007:94–104). In this paper the term ‘hybrid’ is not used with its postcolonial connotations, implying superiority–inferiority and hegemony–subjection dichotomies. 3 The hybridity of the language can be also observed in other Judeo-Spanish texts such as “coplas”, modern poetry, 19th- or 20th-century press texts and so on. Nevertheless, for my purpose I found them less appropriate than proverbs. Old Sephardic coplas, mostly based on the Biblical poetry model are, fi rst of all, a reliable sample of Hebrew-Aramaic infl uence. The 20th-century secular poetry constitutes a convenient fragment to study modern transformations of Judeo-Spanish, for instance the impact of French – its vocabulary and syntax – on the language of Jewish intellectuals. What is more, in its analysis the individual features of each author should be taken into consideration. As to the press texts, a strong French infl uence is also seen in them as well as much more dialectal differences within Judeo-Spanish in the post-Ottoman countries (especially after WWII). Studia Linguistica 30, 2011 © for this edition by CNS ssl30b.inddl30b.indd 8 22012-04-23012-04-23 009:29:499:29:49 Judeo-Spanish proverbs as an example of the hybridity of Judezmo language 9 the Spanish Golden Age. Moreover, certain number of refranes come from Jew- ish religious sources and one can fi nd translations of Greek or Turkish sayings as well. He adds to the list much less numerous 19th-century purely Sephardic proverbs and translations of the French or Italian ones, learned in travels or studies (Lévy 1969:88–99). The main features of the Turkish-Balkan variety of Judeo-Spanish,4 exemplifying its hybridity With reference to the phonetics Judezmo preserves the medieval Castilian pronunciation. To give an example, the letter <j>, which in Modern Spanish is pronounced as [x], (e.g. pájaro), in Judeo-Spanish is pronounced as [ʃ]; <s> before consonants in Modern Spanish is pronounced as [s] (e.g. casca), while in Judeo-Spanish it is also pronounced as [ʃ]; <j> and <g> at the beginning of the words (like in juntos or gente) in Modern Spanish are pronounced as [x], whereas in Judeo-Spanish as [͜ʤ]; <j> in mujer or hijo, which in Modern Spanish is pronounced as [x], in Judeo-Spanish is pronounced as [ʒ]; <s> between vowels (e.g. casa) in Mod- ern Spanish is pronounced as [s], while in Judeo-Spanish as [z]. Furthermore, Judeo-Spanish sometimes preserves the initial <f> coming from Latin which in Modern Spanish evolved into the silent <h> (e.g. fi lius → fi jo → hijo). In some Castilian pronouns such as nos, nosotros, nuestro in Judeo-Spanish the initial <n> turns into <m> (mos, mosotros, muestro). Moreover, the metathesis of the letters <rd> can be observed, for example the Spanish word verdad (truth) is pronounced by Sephardic Jews as vedrá, the verb acordarse (remember) – acodrarse. On the level of phonetics there are also traces of Arabic infl uence, for example Judezmo speakers tend to pronounce the sound [x] in a more guttural way, mainly in the words of Arabic origin. Sometimes they do pronounce the silent <h> of Modern Spanish, which may be observed in the word alhad / aljad (Sunday). The second orthographic variant emerged precisely as a result of this Arabised pronunciation. Although in the analysis of Judeo-Spanish proverbs I took into consideration only their written forms available in anthologies (Cantera Ortiz de Urbina 2004, Carrecedo / Romero 1981, Lévy 1969, Saporta y Beja 1978), many of the phonetic phenomena mentioned above are impressed in them, because the phonetics has an infl uence on the orthography. Before some examples will be quoted, a few remarks on the orthographic systems of Judezmo should be made. In the previous centuries Judeo-Spanish texts used to be written in Hebrew alphabet (so-called Rashi script), however, until now several books printed in Latin alphabet or even in Cyrillic (Bulgaria) have been preserved. Reading Hebrew letters was widespread, because until the second half of the 19th century almost all the Jewish boys were 4 This description is based mainly on Díaz-Mas 1986:104–112. Studia Linguistica 30, 2011 © for this edition by CNS ssl30b.inddl30b.indd 9 22012-04-23012-04-23 009:29:499:29:49 10 AGNIESZKA AUGUST-ZARĘBSKA subject to religious education based on the study of Bible and Talmud. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in the fi rst decades of the 20th century, secular schools were complementary to the traditional Talmud-Torah education. After WWII the knowledge of Hebrew alphabet in Diaspora became consider- ably less common and presumably its use in print would have limited its audi- ence.

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