Udeo Ortuguese in Context: Syrwq S' Yz'#p Ys WMWQ Yd Wrbyl W'
Udeo Ortuguese in Context: Syrwq S' Yz'#p Ys WMWQ Yd Wrbyl W'
Udeo Ortuguese in Context: Syrwq S' Yz'#p Ys WMWQ Yd Wrbyl W'
CHAPTER THREE
THE JUDEO-PORTUGUESE CORPUS
1. JUDEO-PORTUGUESE IN CONTEXT
The corpus of Hebraicized Portuguese examined in chapters 4-6
comprises five manuscripts, which are briefly described below along with a
sample from each one:1
treatise on the techniques of manuscript illumination and recipes for inks and
dyes, composed at the earliest in 1262 (Sed-Rajna 1971). First published by
Blondheim (1929-30) based on a photograph of the manuscript, his edition
provided a Hebrew-letter transcription, Romanization, and English translation
(though no philological commentary). The edition I offer in this study updates
and expands on newly-edited excerpts first published in Strolovitch (2000c),
1
A facsimile from each of the manuscripts is presented in the appendix section.
79
and presents the entire text in critical edition (though without a full Hebrew-
letter transcription). The following excerpt presents a list of the ten "principal
colors":
(1) f.15r.
ydryw §wyylymryw y' wXnymyprw' lwz' Sy'pySnyrp Syrwq S' w''S ¶yd yq yb'S
lyS'rb ydlyywwl' §wqrz' w''rp's' lwS'X'q yy#pws §ymrq
Sabe ke deß sao as kores prinsipais azul oripimento e vermelyon verde
karmin sufi katasol açafrao azarkon alvayalde brasil
'Know that the principal colors are ten: blue, oripiment and red, green,
carmine, sufi, sunflower, saffron, zircon, white-lead, brazil-wood'.
• Chapter 5. Bodleian Library (Oxford, England), ms. Laud Or. 282: wrbyl w'
2
'qy&g'm yd O libro de ma‹gika, an early-fifteenth century copy of an astrological
treatise attributed by the scribe to Swgrwb yd ly&g §'w&g ‹guan ‹gil de burgos. At 800
pages (each containing between 29 and 31 lines), this manuscript constitutes
on its own more than half of the known Judeo-Portuguese corpus.
Nevertheless, a single transliterated folio is all that has been published
previously (Gonzalez Llubera 1953). In the excerpt below the twelve names of
the Zodiac are introduced:
(2) f.5v.
§w'yprwqSy' 'rbyl wgryw §w'yl rysn'q ynymy&g wrw''X Sryy' yS' §wr'ymwn y'
Sysyp wryy'q' w'ynrwqypq w'yrXyyg'S
a
e nomearon asi ayr s tauro ‹gemeni kançer leon virgo libra eskorpion
sageytario akayro piçes
'And [the sages] named them thus: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo,
Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces'.
2
Although no date appears in the manuscript itself, the copyist was probably the same as that
of Bodleian ms. Laud Or. 310, who gives the date of completion for that text as a late-summer
Friday in the year [51]71, i.e. 1411 (Levi 1995).
80
(3) f.240v.
§Ùn yE' &tesÙrox ÙnyE' 'flry√y¯lÙm yE' hosAp¯la' 'J‡d yE' hA'o'oS hacom 'fir¯XËyyÙ' 'fld 'flromÙX yE'
h&okflr¯b '&√gyJÊd
a a a a
e tom ra da oytra maßa saah e da alf ç h e moly ra eno ˛aroset e non
diga beraƒa
'And take from the other unbroken matza and from the lettuce and dip [them]
in the haroset and do not say a blessing'.
(b) Brotherton Library (Leeds, England), Roth ms. 71: Passover rubrics from a
Hebrew ma˛zor, dated by Jewish historian (and former owner of the
manuscript) Cecil Roth to the late fourteenth century (Metzger 1977). Also
first published in Strolovitch (2000b), but since that edition omitted all niqqud,
which was not discernable in the facsimiles of Salomon (1980), it is reproduced
and elaborated in this study. The excerpt below explains the size of the
(4) f.5v.
yE' rE&tÙy 'O»l &tÙxa&p '»l 'ƒnÙX¯yy≈z‹' &hA'˚' y„Jd &hA'yiX¯nÙq 'AlyE' y„Jd SÙ&dÙX w'&'flryEmÙq yE'
ÙyyÃny«w y„Jd HÙH'Aww 'b HÙ' Ù''flry&gÃnyE'
e komerao todos de ela kon tiah de uah azey¥tona lo pa˛ot lo yoter e
¥
(5) f.20r.
w' §ybn'X y' ylyp Sy'm h'yb' §wn yq §y&p wrXw' ryXym y' ws'dyp §w' r'ryX y'
ws'rb wd wgwl wrgn'S
e tirar un pedaço e meter otro fin ke non abiah mais pele e tanben o
sangro logo do braço
'And [I] remove one piece and place another until there is no more skin, and I
also I bleed it over the coals'.
the manuscript (the first fourteen of its 400 folios are presented). The Passover
material in chapter 6 is distinctive for its non-contiguity, in that it comprises
individual sentences interspersed among Hebrew blessings. It is also the only
material that has been systematically vocalized with diacritics (although each
of the two larger texts contain isolated forms with niqqud), and the only texts
to feature words of Hebrew origin, usually in relation to the Passover rituals.3
In addition, the Brotherton Passover text is the only one in the corpus not
written in the cursive Rashi script, but rather in square characters. These
distinctions aside, the texts form a coherent corpus based on date (thirteenth to
fifteenth century) and on region of production (Portugal), as well as on the
similarities of their linguistic form, both genealogical (Western Ibero-
Romance) and graphical (Hebrew). The immediate question, then, is what
might one hope to gain from a linguistic study of this corpus.
3
The Cambridge medical text also contains one Hebrew word, hmhb behema 'animal', though
the context there is decidedly non-religious.
83
4
For example, among the over 225 entries in the Appendix Probi (ca. 300 CE), which correct
some of the lexical, phonological, and orthographic lapses in the Latin of the day, are the
following that attest to the merger of /b/ and /w/: BACULUS NON VACLUS 'staff', ALVEUM NON
ALBEUS 'trough', PLEBES NON PLEVIS 'plebeians', TABES NON TAVIS 'decay', VAPULO NON BAPLO 'be
beaten'
84
And yet this feature is all the more curious given that the ostensibly earlier
Brotherton manuscript contains no visible nasal consonant in its determiners
85
A spelling such as this more clearly suggests that scribe meant to indicate
nasalized word-final vowels. Adding ambiguity to the situation is the Parma
colours text, in which pairs such as w''qrz'/§wqrz' azarkon/azarkao 'zircon'
alternate throughout, showing both an innovated and conservative spelling
5
Although this verb is one of several imperative forms that occur in the text, most of the verbs
in fact appear as future-tense forms, which curiously enough is the one conjugation in the
86
approach, one might delve into this corpus for the insight it might yield into a
particular sociolinguistic situation, that of the Jewish population in Portugal.
Vernacular documents from this group are especially scarce, as are studies of
them: a book-length study of the Portuguese Jewish community by Tavares
(1992), for example, makes only passing reference to one of the texts discussed
here (As kores) as part of the community's "cultural production" (the remainder
consisting of Hebrew-language material). In the adaptation-of-scripts context
of this study, one might hope to show that the processes of adaptation that
yielded these texts constitute the beginnings of the tradition of Hebraicized
Ibero-Romance that flourished in the centuries following the Spanish and
modern writing system whose third-person plural /ãw/ is not spelled with <am> but rather
<ão>.
87
It is this last, perhaps most enticing prospect that leads to the least
conclusive areas of research. No modern-day lusophone population has
descended from the Portuguese-speaking Jewish community, which shifted to
co-territorial languages such as Spanish, Dutch, and English by the nineteenth
century. In fact many of the émigrés from Portugal were Spanish speakers
expelled from Castille-Aragon a few years prior to the Portuguese edicts of
1496-97. The Portuguese speakers who left the peninsula to settle in Italy, the
Balkans, and Turkey assimilated to the Spanish-speaking majority, thus
beginning the long-term language shift that eliminated Portuguese from the
Sephardic repertoire. With a relative shortage of material there have
consequently been very few linguistic studies of Jewish Portuguese, apart
from those focused on written records from specific cities where Jews settled,
such as Amsterdam (Teensma 1991) and Livorno (Tavani 1988).6
Judeo-Spanish, the only Judeo-Ibero-Romance language still spoken
today, certainly boasts a richer documentary history from both the Iberian
Peninsula and the resettled communities of the Ottoman Empire and North
Africa. Yet its existence prior to the expulsions remains a vexed question (cf.
Marcus 1962, Wexler 1982). The question of a distinct Judeo-Portuguese may
at first blush seem less "vexed" simply because, given the small extant corpus
and absence of a modern speech community, the field is less ploughed.
Moreover, the prospects for discovering the expression of a distinct (spoken)
dialect amidst the short ritual prescriptions and non-Judaic scientific discourse
in the Hebraicized Portuguese corpus may well be discouraging. The corpus
6
The only book-length study of Jewish Portuguese in general appears to be a Ph.D.
dissertation at the University of Lisbon by da Silva Germano (1968), which I have been unable
to access.
88
is above all a written artifact, and the use of Hebrew script is simply not a
sufficient condition for presuming it to represent the early rumblings of the
elusive pre-expulsion Judeo-Portuguese dialect.
The seemingly trivial issue of what to call the language can aggravate
this issue, particularly when there is no longer a community of native
speakers. Frakes (1989), for example, talks about the form and variety of
names devised – largely by non-natives – for the language of what he calls the
"Old Yiddish corpus" as an exercise in identifying the object of research in
the language beyond the only one apparent, namely its writing system. Short
of a direct declaration, of course, there is no way to know what the native
glottonym was. And although neither of these terms is a viable candidate, this
study is targeted at an audience for whom the term Judeo-Portuguese will be
7
Prominent native speakers with upwardly-mobile aspirations may be particularly unhelpful.
Baruch/Benedictus Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew born in Amsterdam, referred to his native
language simply as "Spanish," while Moses Mendelssohn, the principal figure of the
eighteenth-century European Jewish Enlightenment, spoke of his native Yiddish as the
"Jewish-German" dialect (Gilman 1986: 105).
89
writing system, by focusing on features broader than the patterns of usage for
individual letters. As will be argued below, these features constitute the
fusion of conventions that firmly positions Hebrew-letter Portuguese in the
annals of Hebraicization, while at the same time distinguishing it in the
adaptation-of-scripts framework.
90
8
In the broader context of vocalization in adaptations of Hebrew script, the only true
innovators are Germanic-language writers, who, as noted in the previous chapter, use the
non-mater v fi for /e/. This letter is never used to spell native words in Judeo-Romance
writing beyond isolated glosses, and its use in Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew-letter
Turkish is usually calqued on the behavior of the cognate Arabic consonant Ÿ fiayn.
91
vowel phonology than the five Roman letters. In an unpointed text, two of the
matres (y and w) only indicate the vocalic distinctions "non-low front," and "non-
low back" while ' 9 and final vocalic h may stand for /a/, /e/, or /o/ (see §
2.2.1 below). Yet the full system of niqqud is ultimately superfluous for
Portuguese vowel orthography because, if the diacritics are taken for their
historical Hebrew-specific values, it indicates phonological distinctions that
are redundant in Portuguese. When niqqud is fully deployed, as in the
Passover texts, it tends to be induced simply by other Hebrew-language
9
Minervini (1999: 420) claims that in the earliest period of Judeo-Romance, the vernacular was
written "in accordance with Hebrew graphic norms" and that ' could represent any vowel,
e.g. §'b ben 'come', ryl'd doler 'pain', hylybS' Isbilia 'Isabella'. She attributes this to its
"incomplete acceptance as a mater lectionis for /a/ in Hebrew orthography and its nature as a
tendentially graphic element, disconnected from pronunciation." Although she cites only
Judeo-Italian as another graphical tradition attesting to the "weakness" of ', it is certainly the
case in Judeo-Portuguese that no other vowel letter may be omitted as readily as '.
10
Note that while Modern Hebrew orthography may make use of both niqqud and the matres
lectionis, the two strategies usually overlap only in the spelling of initial vowels (which require
a diacritic and niqqud-bearing ') and word-final /a/ (see § 2.2.1 below).
92
segol and ßere that indicate /e/ in beveran and komençaran respectively each
underlies a consonant that is followed by y y, the letter that serves the same
role.
The redundant niqqud is most likely due to the delegation of lettering
and vowel-pointing to separate individuals in the production of Hebrew
manuscripts. The naqdan 'pointer' may have been less familiar with the vowel-
letter conventions of Hebraicized Portuguese than of Hebrew itself. As a result
it is not surprising to see that the diacritics, while not fundamentally wrong –
the naqdan was quite likely, after all, a Portuguese speaker – do not play a
crucial role in the writing system.
In a very few instances, however, niqqud is used in an unpointed text
with words that a given scribe may have considered "learned" or related to a
technical context perhaps unfamiliar to the reader. The words in (7) below all
occur in As kores, which is otherwise completely unpointed:
11
(9) SyDŽdy' ides 'that is'
ryEp¯la' alfer 'bishop'
yECX¯S˚#p fuste '(wooden) stick'
yilwbÕna'wqËr¬za' azarkoanboli 'zircon'
11
The three dots that appear above the d are used elsewhere in this text, most often at clause
boundaries, in the same horizontal space as the letters. This is probably the segolta of Tiberian
pointing, one of the stronger disjunctive accents indicating a pause (G. Rendsburg, p.c.). As a
symbol above a given letter, however, it appears to carry no orthographic meaning.
93
Hebrew are identical (usually because one of the historical values does not
exist in the vernacular phonology). In the case of Romance languages this
generally applies to three pairs of letters: q/Jk [k], X/t [t], and b/w [v]. In the
case of the first two sounds, it is the first member of each letter pair, the
historically emphatic (pharyngealized) Hebrew consonant, that is used almost
exclusively to spell the relevant sound in Hebraicized Portuguese;12 in the case
of [v] a semi-systematic division of orthographic labour is put into effect (see §
2.3.1 below). For each pair, the member that is disfavored for the writing of
12
Minervini (1999) notes that the same choice is made in both Hebrew and Arabic aljamía
(Hebraicized and Arabicized Spanish). With regard to Judeo-Spanish writing, she suggests
that the fricative pronunciation of the non-emphatic stops in weak position, i.e. the reflex of
Hebrew spirantization, may be the motivating factor. Recall, however, that in Yiddish, where
speakers have merged k x and x ˛ in their pronunciation of Hebrew, the writing system opts
for the non-emphatic "spirantized" first member in the spelling of non-Hebraic vocabulary
(neither k nor x is used to spell non-Hebrew vocabulary items in medieval Judeo-Romance,
though Modern Spanish /x/ is, as expected, rendered by k in modern Yiddish orthography).
13
As noted in the previous chapter, Yiddish in early Soviet Russia represents the only
concerted effort to re-spell the Semitic component "phonetically" in a Hebraicized writing
system, part of a state-sponsored strategy to purge the language of any religious character or
association (see Estraikh 1999).
94
14
Though some nouns do contain final /e/ in the lexicon, e.g. hdW /sade/ 'field', in unpointed
script final h may be grammatically ambiguous in adjectives and verbs, e.g. both the
masculine and feminine forms of 'lovely', /jafe/ and /jafa/, are spelled hpy, while hcwr 'want'
spells both the masc. sg. /rotse/ and fem. sg. /rotsa/ of the present tense. Final h also
appears in ancient inscriptions and vestigially in the Bible as a spelling for the 3rd masculine
singular possessive enclitic -o < *-ahu (replaced in later orthography by Ù-). It remains,
however, the normal spelling for the fem. sg. possessive enclitic -a.
95
This allography is not merely a luxury of the script:16 since in Hebrew the
"silent" vocalic h does not occur anywhere except in word-final position, the
plural markers S ¸ s and § n can only be preceded by the ' allograph of /a/.
This variation has no phonological basis in Portuguese, nor does it have an
analogue in the Roman-letter orthography of Portuguese nor any other
Romance language with similar morphology. Moreover, it is sufficiently
15
On the final s see § 2.3.2.
16
In the cursive script used by medieval Sephardic writers, h is actually the only grapheme
with its own final-position allograph beyond the canonical five (cf. chapter 2 § 2.1). In fact the
character presented in table 2-9 is the non-final form E , which, though it does resemble the
standard square h , occurs extremely rarely in the Judeo-Portuguese corpus (almost
exclusively in Hebrew words). The far more frequent allograph that occurs in final position
more closely resembles an inverted Greek V (which is, curiously enough, the final-position
form of sigma).
96
(11) 'yym h' hcm h' a maßa ah meia 'the half matza'
hAcAm 'AyyemA' ameya maßa 'the half matza'
17
C. Rosen (p.c.) points out that some instances of initial <au> in Gascon orthography reflect
an etymological unstressed /o/, e.g. auherir 'offer' < OFFERIRE, augan 'this year' < HOC ANNO.
Alba Salas (2000: 122) notes a similar case in thirteenth-century Catalan aucïea 'kills' < OCCIDET,
and calls the <au> "a clear case of hypercorrection." Yet it is not clear how fully the diphthong
represented by historical <au> had been levelled at this stage in (Gallo-)Romance, and thus
how conventional <au> could be construed as a spelling for /o/. Moreover, the putative
sound change involving initial unstressed /o/ > /aw/ is not well motivated. This raises the
possibility that Catalan and Gascon writers have imitated the convention adopted by Judeo-
Romance writers (whether or not as a direct influence), using <a> as a diacritic to indicate
"vocalic <u>." Thus the modern Gascon reading of these instances of <au> as a diphthong
would reflect a "spelling pronunciation" rather than historical sound change.
97
Additionally, there are some contexts in which the ' could almost be
viewed purely as a device to avoid a sequence of three identical letters (cf. the
Yiddish strategy for avoiding three w in ch.2 § 3.9.1):
In yet other instances, while the diacritic function of ' is not strictly
necessary for a correct reading of some matres sequences, there is a "visual"
convention (probably based on Hebrew writing as well) that compels the
Judeo-Portuguese writer to include it:
In such cases the ' serves as a kind of "syllabifier," not unlike its hiatus-
breaking role above (and similar to the dieresis in French and older English
orthography), indicating that the vowel letters belong to different syllables
rather than a diphthong.
Thus unlike Jews in some regions of what would become Spain, the Jews in
Portugal lived amidst a firmly Latin culture. But the Roman script was not
merely the "dominant" script of the literary milieu; it was a form of writing
that Jewish Portuguese writers were at the very least acquainted with, and at
best willing and able to exploit in adapting Hebrew script to write Portuguese.
Beyond the categorical adoption of vowel letters (cf. § 2.1.1), the clearest way
in which their adaptation was informed by Roman-letter writing is the use of
Hebrew letters to preserve distinctions, usually etymological but often
2.3.1. /v/
As discussed in § 2.1.2, when the phonetic realizations of two letters
have merged in the local pronunciation of Hebrew, normally only one of these
is used in the Hebraicized spelling of native vocabulary. However, in Judeo-
Portuguese (and to some degree in other Judeo-Romance as well), such pairs
may be deployed to spell similar sounds that have distinct etymologies and, in
18
Some instances of Latin /p/ also yield ModPg. /v/ e.g. povo < POPULU; a form based on this
word appears in O libro de ma‹gika as w''bwp pobao < *POPOLANU.
100
Brotherton Passover text presented in § 1, where vaso 'cup' occurs first spelled
wS'b baso and later in the text as wS'ww vaso. In fact, at one point on folio 5v. the
writer appears to have begun the word with 'b ba-, but stopped to begin anew
with 'ww va-, leaving his hesitation unemended:
behave as analogues to Roman <b> and <v> respectively. The spelling of /v/
elsewhere in the corpus also suggests that the writers were sensitive to its
etymology, and perhaps to the orthography of the Latin etyma. Unlike
contemporary Roman-letter Portuguese writers, they frequently spelled it
accordingly: where its source is Latin b (or p) it is spelled with b, while Pg. v <
Latin w is spelled with w (either doubled or as a singleton). The effect of this
"b = B / w = V " equivalence appears to be independent of the precise sound
ostensibly being indicated:
19
The stem of this third-person singular future subjunctive was formed analogically from the
preterite of haber, and as such does not in fact reflect any etymological b in the verb STARE
(Penny 1991: 185).
101
There are also several cases in which w is used to spell a /v/ that derives from
an etymological or borrowed b:
102
orthographic strategy for avoiding an internal w that stands for /v/ near a non-
low back vowel (i.e. /o/ or /u/), since the same letter is used to spell those
vowels. In fact, a form like w#bw' o‹bo may be seen as using a strategy to avoid
spelling the word with three identical letters in succession, i.e. www'*.21
Double-ww, for its part, is used almost invariably as a digraph for /v/,
and in the texts of chapters 4-6 it is never used to indicate a VC sequence [uv]
or [ov]. There are, however, rare occurrences in those texts in which it does
represent the CV sequence [vo] or [vu] (where Pg. /v/ may derive from Latin
/b/ or /w/), as in the following words:
20
This word, though it is the most recurrent verb in O libro de ma‹gika, is most often spelled
with b (see chapter 5 § 2.1 for a fuller discussion).
21
Though C. Rosen (p.c.) informs me of Romanian forms that do end in <–iii>, triple-letter
spellings are rare and avoided in both Roman- and Hebrew-letter orthographies (and
probably in other writing systems). As noted in the previous chapter, near-instances in
Yiddish require either niqqud or an intervening ', e.g. ˚ww/w'ww vu 'where'.
22
The first two words (from As kores) each occur only once, yet this spelling alternates in O
libro de ma‹gika with yd'Xnw'w&b ‹bountade, which features both an initial b b and a more expanded
spelling of the hiatus left by deleted /l/.
103
Similarly, though 'w may stand ambiguously for either a diphthong [oa]/[ua]
or the CV sequence [va], the reverse digraph w' nearly always represents a
fully-vocalic [u] or [o] (with diacritic '; see § 2.2.2 above), or else word-final
[ãw]. In the twenty folios of As kores, for example, there is only a single form
in which the digraph does in fact represent a VC sequence [av]:
The following example from the same text is even more striking, since it
combines these two breaches of convention23 – the initial w' is not strictly
vocalic and double-ww is not uniquely consonantal:
23
Although the form in (18) represents the only occurrence of this phenomenon in the texts
presented in the following chapters, it occurs on at least one occasion in the smaller Bodleian
astrological text, O libro enos ‹guizos das estrelas, in the verb §'rysyrww' avoreceran 'will abandon'
< ABHORRESCERE.
104
2.3.2. Sibilants
Overall, Judeo-Portuguese orthography favours S ¸s as the "default"
sibilant letter, i.e. for Portuguese /s/ that derives directly from Latin /s/,
while using s s for sibilants that, though they occur as [s] in the modern
language, derive from another source (and were probably pronounced [ts] in
the earliest attested Portuguese). This is illustrated in the orthographic near-
minimal pair in (19a) as well as the words in (19b), where s spells the sibilant
produced by the palatalization of Latin /k/:
the corpus s does on occasion infect the spelling of one extremely frequent
sibilant derived from plain Latin /s/, namely the plural marker, on nouns that
already contain this letter, e.g. s'snw' onçaç 'ounces', s'syb'q kabeçaç 'heads'
105
favours S as the spelling for the reflex of simple Latin /s/,25 although the non-
24
Galmes de Fuentes does point out more explicitly that a single medial <s> is often rendered
by à ¸ g ım in the sixteenth-century corpus. His transcription of this letter with <z>
(superscribed by a diacritic) recalls the only parallel case I have found in the Judeo-Portuguese
corpus, where some instances of the verb kerer 'want' in As kores occur with g g as the stem-
final consonant in subjunctive forms, i.e. Syry#gyq ki¸geres < QUAESIVERIS (see chapter 4 § 2.1)
25
Although the spelling of sibilants in early Judeo-Spanish also conforms to the Judeo-
Portuguese pattern, in later Judeo-Spanish writing s was generalized as the default spelling
for /s/ regardless of source.
106
Iberian languages tend to prefer c ß for other sibilants.26 The fact that Judeo-
Portuguese avoids this letter in native vocabulary (with sporadic exceptions in
As kores) suggests that the deaffrication of Portuguese sibilants, which Galmes
de Fuentes (1962: 103-113) considers to have begun as early as the thirteenth
century, was well underway.
Given the other sibilant-related changes occurring in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Portuguese, it is difficult – and indeed perhaps misleading –
to try to determine the precise phonetic character of the sounds "intended" by
26
Steiner (1982: 37) maintains that "if anything is known about the Hebrew sibilants in
Christian Spain and Portugal, it is that c and s were not distinguished."
27
In reference to the opposite process, i.e. the rendering of Hebrew c, s, and S in Roman-letter
Old Spanish, Steiner (1982: 39) claims that their distribution reflects "identities rather than
mere approximation" – that is, transliteration rather than transcription.
107
In a very few instances, this phenomenon appears to occur with words outside
the obvious sphere of classical influence. The first form in (20) might be better
considered a "pseudo-classicizing" form, since its cluster consonants reflect
only the unassimilated voicelessness of the etymon's segments:
In either case, these alternations attest to another level on which the Judeo-
Portuguese writer exploits his biliteracy. It is certainly possible that the
alternation also reflects a variation in the speech or perception of the scribe.
However, rather than a variation truly based in vernacular phonology, this
phenomenon is probably more akin to the variant pronunciations that a (more
or less) bilingual in a minority group would have for local terms (especially
geographical names) in the majority language.29
28
This particular nativization is addressed in chapter 7 § 2.3).
29
A Montreal anglophone, for instance, may refer to the vibrant Rue Saint-Denis in a
"classicizing" fashion as [sæ~nd¥ní] or as a "nativized" [seynd´' n i] (though, oddly enough,
108
Using different letters could, as always, suggest nothing more than the mere
fact of distinct pronunciations intended or perceived by the Jewish writer, who
may be more apt to do so with these Semitic loanwords than a non-Jew. What
should be noted above all, however, is that the transfer of spelling convention
is made especially feasible and perhaps even expected because the Hebrew
letters z and c are in a real and practical sense cognate with and historically
related to the Arabic letters “ z‹ay and ’ ß‹ad.
never […d´nπs], as though this fully-nativized "spelling pronunciation" would obscure the
word's identity in this case as the name of the street). Note, of course, that this alternation is
never reflected in the spelling, which simply follows the dominant orthography.
109
The Hebrew cognate of the Arabic source al-˛ass is hJAsax ˛as: (the dagesh
indicates the historical gemination of the middle radical /s/ in this form of the
root). In both Portuguese variants, the phonological adaptation of Semitic ˛ to
f is spelled as such – even in the second instance, where the word lacks any
vowel letters (apart from the initial article, in imitation of the spelling of the
Arabic definite article), as if based on a typical (though etymologically
inaccurate) triliteral Semitic root .h.s.&p. f.s.h. or even .h.s.p p.s.h.
Although alternants such as these are relatively rare in the parts of the
corpus I have examined, the vowel-less forms may still be considered a visual
sign of etymological or "learned" spelling. They are in practice akin to the use
111
more generally may exist in modern Yiddish, where the Yiddish Scientific
30
This may be particularly true for words of Greek or Latin origin, where knowledge of the
correct – that is, unadapted – spelling is often given (unduly) strong weight as a marker of
erudition and educatedness.
31
To wit: at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, English Aeneas appears next to
Welsh Eneas on the display case of a medieval manuscript of Virgil's poem.
32
The apostrophe continues to serve in Modern Hebrew writing to indicate phonemes not
found in the native inventory, e.g. hyn#cy#c <ß’yß’nyh> Chechnya, §wXgnySww #grw#g <g’wrg’> George
Washington. It is possible that the use of these diacritics in Hebrew writing itself was modeled
on the practice in Hebraicized vernacular writing, though the other modern tradition, Yiddish,
avoids such augmentations in favour of multigraphs, e.g. 'ynSXvSX <†¸sfi†¸sny√> Chechnya,
§A'XgnyS'ww SzdrA'Szd <dz¸s√rdz¸s> George Washington.
112
discussed below – not strictly from the point of view of each Hebrew letter,
however, as is normally the case, but from the perspective of the writing
system more holistically.
33
Although the following only applies in a strict sense to the Romanizations in this chapter
and in the critical editions of the succeeding chapters, the transliterations of non-Portuguese
Hebraicized material in the previous chapter largely conform to this system as well. I have on
occasion followed a mixed set of conventions; while these are too multifarious and tangential
to enumerate, they nonetheless serve the same goal described here, namely to provide a
maximally-informative but minimally-disruptive text to an anglo-literate audience.
113
3.1. Vowels
Wherever the Portuguese Jewish writer has made use of a mater lectionis
to serve as a vowel-letter, I have reproduced it in the transliterated form,
including "silent" final h as <-h>. When two ' occur in succession (e.g. in
hiatus from a deleted consonant), I normally transliterate both unless the
second serves as the diacritic for a following vocalic w or y (cf. § 2.2.2). The
Romanization of w and y themselves usually involves a choice between
<o>/<u> and <e>/<i> respectively, which I have based on a combination of
3.2. Semivowels
34
The Roman letter that could be seen as most faithfully rendering the graphemic form of
double-ww, namely <w>, produces the wrong effect for anglophone readers.
114
3.4. Sibilants
As noted in § 2.3.2, S ¸s is the default sibilant letter in Judeo-Portuguese
writing. For this reason, despite its historical and modern Hebrew value as
/¸s/, as well as the widespread occurrence of this sound in (modern)
35
For typographic reasons I avoid the apostrophe in transliteration, using a hacek instead.
Only a macron, however, is used with <b>, also for typographic reasons.
115
<c> or the digraph <qu>, and the letter <k> is generally avoided.36 Using this
character is the most efficient way to indicate the appropriate phoneme, while
preserving the single-grapheme choice of the Judeo-Portuguese writer.
36
Although not a factor per se in my rationale, it is striking that most systems of modern
(Romanized) Judeo-Spanish use <k> where modern Spanish orthography has <c> or <qu>,
probably for the very reason that it may be the only feature to distinguish some forms in
written Judeo-Spanish from those written as standard Castilian.
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