Traditional Judeo-Spanish (18th-19th centuries) according to the Meam Loez series is a corpus-based project consisting of the description of the Sephardic language of the 18th century through a selection of texts from a part of the books (Genesis 1730, Leviticus 1753 and Deuteronomy 1772) which make up the series of Meam Loez, an extensive collection of commentaries on the Bible that follow the weekly order of the synagogue readings. Also taking into account other books of the series written and published in the 19th century, I intend to examine the development of Judeo-Spanish during a period of about 170 years in which it was the language of everyday communication in all areas of society in Sephardic communities, while the ML became the guiding authority on the daily life of those communities.
Directed by Prof. Aldina Quintana (Dept. of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), this project has as main goals (a) to provide a comprehensive description of eighteenth-century traditional JS and its development until the end of the nineteenth century based on the language of ML as well as its relation to everyday speech, issues that seem to be particularly neglected in the field of historical research on this language; (b) to explain the internally caused changes or universal tendencies in traditional JS, and other effects on observed language change, such as contact with the surrounding languages or the role of Hebrew as a cultural and religious adstratum; (c) to examine the strategies followed by the rabbis in the elaboration and codification of JS and the impact of the language of ML in the speech community. Furthermore, this is a based-corpus study, with the consequence that (d) the included texts–in Hebrew script and with their corresponding transcriptions into modern Judeo-Spanish–will be made accessible to all kinds of readers–from scholars to JS speakers and the five hundred million of Spanish speakers (See CoDiAJe - Ladino Corpus, items from the ID series lad400).
Traditional Judeo-Spanish (18th-19th centuries), according to the Meam Loez series is funded by grant 486/19 of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF).