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Linguist Asks: Do You Speak Jewish?
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SI and find commonalities, which
is how historical linguists deter-
mine what family a language
belongs to,” Maiben said.

But what makes a language
other than Hebrew Jewish?
Maiben said Judaic languages
have several traits in common.

Most have a non-Jewish
base language that provides
grammatical structure while
also incorporating Hebrew or
Aramaic vocabulary. There are
usually influences from other
Jewish languages, a Hebrew or
Aramaic writing system, and
distinct vowel pronunciations.

Jewish languages consist not
only of grammar and vocabulary
but of discourse style. The practice
of overlapping speech, or multiple
people speaking at once, is a habit
that may seem familiar to anyone
who has sat around a Jewish
family dinner table, regardless
of nationality or language. This
discourse style is distinct from
interrupting, because it consists
of actively building on ideas
rather than going off on different
tangents. Maiben attributed
this practice to the discussion
and debate styles of ancient
Torah study, as well as chanting
patterns in synagogue prayer.

Jewish languages flour-
ished in the Diaspora, from
Judeo-Malayalam in India to
Judeo-Arabic in the Middle East.

Many words from non-Jewish
base languages made their way
into their Jewish variants and
later into English. In the Persian
Empire, where Jews spoke
variations of Persian like Judeo-
Shirazi and Judeo-Golpaygani,
the Old Persian word for garden,
pardis, became the base of the
Hebrew word for orchard and
the English word paradise.

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vocabulary, or use Yiddish and
Hebrew grammar structures
while speaking English, like
saying “make a party” rather
than “have a party.”
“Even people who are not in
the Orthodox community and
not in the camp world, but just
within the Jewish community as
a whole, use a ton of Hebrew and
Yiddish words in their vocabu-
laries,” she said. l
S EL
OD M
IF SOMEONE ASKED you
to name a Jewish language,
Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino
would likely be the first few
that came to mind. But what
about Ge’ez, Judeo-Greek or
Judeo-Golpaygani? These are just some of the
Judaic languages used by global
Jewish populations throughout
history, according to Dina
Maiben. The assistant director
of Gratz Advance and Hebrew
programs at Gratz College
discussed the evolution of these
languages for Gratz’s Jan. 19
continuing education webinar
“Do You Speak Jewish?”
During her talk, Maiben
refuted a common claim about
Hebrew. “There are people that will
tell you that Hebrew was a dead
language, that it died sometime
around the first or second
century of the Common Era. But
I don’t believe that at all, because
the definition of a dead language
is a language that doesn’t create
new words. And yet, in every
single period of its existence,
Hebrew was generating new
terminology,” she said.

This was because Jews were
scattered throughout the world,
and the only language they shared
was Hebrew. For much of the
Middle Ages, scholars wrote to
each other in Hebrew because it
was a common tongue they could
be sure other Jewish communities
would have access to.

Maiben explained that
Hebrew itself did not exist in a
vacuum and was created from
other languages that came before
it. Scholars call its main linguistic
ancestor Proto-Semitic, which is
the parent language of all Semitic
languages, including Hebrew,
Babylonian, Assyrian and Arabic.

“We don’t have anything
written in Proto-Semitic. We
have no idea what the language
was like, except we can sift
through all of its descendants
Medieval Judeo-
Persian manuscript
languages. Around the same
time, Judeo-German, or Yiddish,
grew into two distinct variants,
Eastern European Galicianer
and Western European Litvak.

Semitic and Hebrew words
comprise up to 25% of the lexicon.

Maiben argued that there is
also a version of Judeo-English
evolving primarily in Orthodox
communities and Jewish summer
camps in the United States today.

Speakers will often use English
grammar structures interspersed
with Yiddish and Hebrew
LE A
SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
In central Asia and parts
of China, Jews spoke another
Persian dialect, Judeo-Hamedani.

In Africa, Ethiopian Jews wrote
in the ancient Semitic language
Ge’ez. In Europe, Romaniote
Jews spoke Judeo-Greek from the
rise of the Byzantine Empire to
the 1940s, when the Holocaust
drove its speakers to the brink
of extinction.

Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino,
developed in the medieval era
with additional influences from
Arabic, Latin and Romance
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JANUARY 28, 2021
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