Istanbul Judeo-Spanish

Metathesis in Judeo-Spanish Consonant Clusters

Judeo-Spanish (JS) denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. Some descriptions of JS emphasize its conservative, archaic nature, highlighting its similarities to Old Spanish (OS), while other research points up the novel characteristics that d...

Constraints on the Metathesis of Sonorant Consonants in Judeo-Spanish

Judeo-Spanish denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. This paper examines three types of consonant metathesis in Judeo-Spanish: daldo < dadlo ‘give it’, terné ‘I will have’ < tener ‘to have’, and tadre < tarde ‘late, afternoon’. The first tw...

Prosodically-conditioned Sibilant Voicing in Balkan Judeo-Spanish

The Phonology-Morphology Interface in Judeo-Spanish Diminutive Formation: A Lexical Ordering and Subcategorization Approach

In this article we examine diminutive formation in Judeo-Spanish, which has not been treated before in the generative literature. The distribution of diminutive suffixes is shown to be predictable based on an interaction of morphological and phonological properties, which is a recognized hallmark of diminutive formation in Spanish more generally. Judeo-Spanish also presents some interesting twi...

Statistical Transliteration of Judeo-Arabic Texts

Judeo-Arabic is a group of Arabic-based languages used by Jews for many centuries, which like some other Jewish languages (for example,Yiddish), is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Many of the great Jewish literary works of the Middle Ages were written in Judeo-Arabic. A large quantity of additional Judeo-Arabic text has become available with the digitization of manuscripts found in the Cairo Ge...